I told my husband ‘we’re over’ after carrying the mental load alone

‘I want a separation,’ I told my husband.

He was stunned into silence. ‘I’ve rented a flat down the road for three months, so we can “bird-nest”, you know?’ I added.

My husband didn’t know what ‘bird-nesting’ was – where the kids stay in the family house and the parents take turns living between that house and another – and he didn’t care. He was too shocked by the fact that I wanted to end things in the first place.  

He was blindsided by this turn of events. I, however, had been resigned to the fact that our marriage was over for months. The constant rage inside me had made it inevitable. 

To him, things were fine. How could two people in the same relationship feel so differently about it? Why was he blissfully unaware while I was miserable? 

He didn’t know, but I was consumed by resentment. 

This is a feeling that most, if not all, women are familiar with. According to an article published by Bath University, women handle 71% of the mental work for household tasks, versus men who manage just 45%. 

We carry the couple’s mental load alone – the invisible yet exhausting labour that goes into managing the logistical and emotional requirements of running a family and a home.  

The list of things to do is on an endless loop in our brains. It’s what we’re thinking about when we come across a sock that’s been discarded, a toilet seat left up, or when we’re asked where something is, what’s for dinner or if we bought loo roll. 

These seemingly tiny infractions upon our brainpower build to create a heavy load – one that women often feel we are shouldering alone. 

It was that ‘alone-ness’ that hit me the hardest and made me want a separation. 

With two kids aged 11 and 8, a dog, a mortgage, full-time jobs and elderly family to look after, living in a house with a man who didn’t help with the tedious but essential minutiae of family life was infuriating. 

It wasn’t that he was lazy or didn’t care. He just didn’t get it. As a boy growing up in the 80s and 90s, he hadn’t been ‘trained’ to recognise and manage the mental load in the same way his female counterparts had. 

I’d find a discarded pair of boxer shorts on the floor, near but not in the laundry bin and I’d explode. He’d be baffled and accuse me of over-reacting.

To him it was just a pair of boxer shorts; to me it was representative of a million other low-level offences that had left me feeling resentful.

I hated the person I had become, and every time I speak to women, they tell me they’re feeling the same. 

The mental load is a gift from our mothers. It has been handed down to women through the generations, stemming from traditional setups where men went out to work and women stayed at home.  

Except that most women no longer stay at home.  

When the patriarchy patted us on the head and allowed women out to work, they said, ‘go forth and have it all’. What they meant was ‘do it all’ because even though 60% of families rely on two salaries, women carry out, on average, 60% more unpaid domestic work than men.

When my husband asked, I reluctantly agreed to try couples therapy, but I wasn’t hopeful. Physically, I was still in the marriage, but emotionally, I’d exited long before then.

It had been so long since I’d felt part of a team with my husband. Instead, it had begun to feel like a marital version of the hunger games – a fight to the death – and in between, I’d have to do a mountain of laundry.

I believed my husband was 100% of the problem, but it was during couples therapy that I had to accept that maybe that wasn’t entirely true.

Despite my cynicism, I gave therapy my all. It gave us a space to communicate helpfully, versus the screaming match we’d have after I’d come across the dirty plate that broke the domestic camel’s back. 

I learned that I’d been relying on telepathy as an effective form of communication, that my expectations of perfection made it impossible for anyone to help me, that I didn’t express my wants and needs regularly and calmly, and that asking for help felt like a vulnerability I didn’t want to expose.  

For my husband’s part, he acknowledged that he’d undervalued the work I was doing in the background, that he had ‘let me get on with it’, that he didn’t respond well to being told what to do and that he hadn’t really heard my point of view because he was too busy being defensive. 

As we rebuilt our marriage, we faked normality in front of the kids, but when they weren’t there, we repelled from each other like magnets. 

We couldn’t trust ourselves to communicate without the therapist there to moderate. It was a slow and painful recovery that we both had to commit to every day, even when we hated each other.  

I finally understood that no matter how much I lost my temper and slammed doors, it wouldn’t make my husband do what I needed him to do. I had to adjust how I communicated what I needed and have faith that my husband would meet me halfway. 

I accepted that his ‘uselessness’ wasn’t indicative of a lack of love but the inevitable consequence of a society where women are groomed, from the moment they splash down earthside, to manage the mental load, and men aren’t.   

It’s not women’s fault that we struggle to manage the mental load, and it isn’t men’s fault that they struggle to understand it, but it is our responsibility to be the cycle breakers and change that.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk. 

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