Mental Labour Gap

Remember I said 2025 was a shit year, and that I was praying for a reset with 2026? I’m very excited to report that the year has begun well, and I finally have some news to share …

My book is going to be published by Harper Collins.

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Recently, I was telling an elderly woman about writing a book. She said, “People nowadays don’t know how to let go. They make marriage so difficult by kicking up a fuss about everything.”

I tried to explain how gender roles are fluid today, and as a result, everything is up for negotiation. That this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

She replied, proudly, “I keep food on the table for my husband every single day, even though both of us work. That’s what keeps harmony in our marriage. But I look at my son and daughter-in-law, they are always arguing about who does what.”

She was acknowledging inequality, but also quietly celebrating the virtue of absorbing it in silence. But it’s not just her, an entire generation of women lived like this.

The result may have been harmony on the surface, but often, with deep resentment underneath.

I told her I relate to this, not because I want to tally accounts with my husband, but I don’t want to become resentful. I worry about the lessons my daughter and son absorb simply by watching us. Just as her granddaughter maybe watching her parents and grandparents, drawing her own conclusions about partnership.

This is a responsibility many mothers of my generation take seriously. We quietly watched our mothers work both inside and outside the home, never questioning the inequality or its long-term impact on their physical and mental health.

And the body keeps score.

That generation of women disproportionately suffers from chronic conditions like arthritis, obesity, heart disease and hyper-tension. Turns out, silence doesn’t dissolve stress, it stores it.

Today, we have come a long way.

Many men are learning to be more equal partners. A lot of households now share physical labour and childcare far more equitably than ever before. But where the gap remains glaring is in what I call the mental labour gap in partnerships.

What do I mean by that?

In one line - husbands are like AI, and wives are like prompt engineers.

Men can do many things, sometimes better than women, but only when prompted. And prompting is no mean feat.

Most women do the invisible on-going work of thinking, planning, anticipating and decision-making that keeps a household running. Men wait for instructions and execute (and hence, called a man-child). The execution is visible, but the thinking isn’t.

The mental labour gap isn’t about who does the work, it’s about who owns the responsibility for it.

Let me give you a simple example…

We have a cook, but deciding what she cooks every single day is entirely on me. My husband’s contribution is usually, “I am okay with anything”.

But there are two parts to this decision:

First, I have to account for everyone’s preferences and constraints, and optimise meals around them. I can do this daily, weekly, monthly or once for all, but I’m still the one doing it.

Second, when what I choose turns out to not be okay with everyone (because “anything” rarely means anything), food gets left over. That then becomes a constraint for the next day’s planning.

I am very good at operations planning (even used to make a living out of it). Still, I can tell you that this isn’t trivial thinking. It’s repetitive cognitive labour of planning, optimisation, and risk management done daily.

Now, multiply this by every other invisible task in a household, whether or not it’s outsourced. Deciding when or whether to have children, how to raise them, how to manage the family dynamics, hiring and training house-help, tracking who needs new clothes, repairs, appointments and organising. The list is endless.

And even today, this cognitive load is disproportionately borne by women.

Why?

It’s not for lack of intent among men; often, they genuinely don’t know this load exists. Because we don’t talk about it. Not enough. And even when it’s pointed out, learning to carry it mid-life, untrained can be overwhelming.

Were women trained for this?

Not explicitly, no.

But we watched our mothers absorb this without naming it. We absorb it too from deep conditioning, but we’re far less willing to accept it quietly. Because it’s exhausting.

Covid, in a strange way, was a great-leveller (relatively speaking). There was a drastic reduction in mental load in a marriage - no help to manage, no social obligations to fulfil, nowhere to go. What remained was physical labour, and that was easier to see, share and divide.

Back in real life now, the invisible load has crept up again. And we still don’t quite know how to name it, let alone fix it.

I don’t have elegant solutions. All I can say is if we want healthy and sustainable partnerships, everything must be open to discussion and renegotiation without shame.

We cannot rewrite the rules of romantic collaboration without engaging with the hard messy parts.

Will some marriages become collateral damage in the process?

Maybe.

But so be it.

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Now, how many of you are carrying more than your share of the mental load in your marriage, and what are you doing about it?

I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

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P.S. This has been a gendered pattern in most conversations I’ve had so far, though I’m certain there are exceptions. If you’ve experienced this differently, on either side of the partnership, I’d love to hear about that too.