>When people form a couple there’s many things like this where one part of the couple has the bar set in a completely different location. Which I think is ok. It’s ok for one half of the couple to not do as much card writing. The workload of a relationship should be split evenly overall but if one places waaaay more importance on a particular aspect than the other it’s ok for that one to bear more of the load in that case.

Yes, but there still needs to be a recognition of where the bars are and the work needed to reach them. If not, it can easily become a problem when one person doesn't value that work at all and therefore doesn't see that work being done as being part of the even split. If one partner doesn't care about the Christmas cards, they should still recognize that the other partner's work on sending out the Christmas cards is in fact work that needs to be done. That is part of what the article is about, recognizing that this emotional labor/kin work is "not dispensable" despite there being a notion it is due to historic and systemic issues.

A common issue with this in my view is that in many cases the incentives are all wrong. A man might care a lot about a traditional thanksgiving meal but by consciously or unconsciously presenting a lower bar he can offload responsibility. He might not care about the cards, but he does like getting invited hunting with his BIL which only happens through the maintenance of those relationships. Avoiding acknowledging that those two things are connected allows for pushing off responsibility while reaping the benefits.

There are obviously ways to balance this (she does the cards, I organize the July 4th BBQ) but it definitely requires honesty with each other and ourselves to make that work and avoid falling back on (often gendered) patterns.

> I’ll say it again: kin work definitely does not need to be carried out by any particular gender. It is just work

The author addresses that and it fits into her desire to move away from 'emotional labor', as 'emotional' is seen as a feminine domain. 'kin work' can also be expectations to manage all home, car, and lawn maintenance tasks. Someone being able to walk in, say 'the sprinkler's broken', and walk off again is a prime example of kin work.

This is true to an extent, but I think there are two important things to caution against.

One is that it is super easy for a lazy person to say "you just care about this more than me" when in fact they care about it a lot and will complain if it doesn't happen. This is extremely common, particularly among men, even if I assume in good faith you are not one of these people.

The other is that when you enter into a relationship with someone it is just not possible to completely ignore the things they like and are emotionally invested in. If you marry someone who is a super-christmas-enjoyer then guess what, you are a super-christmas-enjoyer now too (or, to be fair, you are now both somewhere in the middle). Ignoring that you have very different expectations will just cause friction. (so if you really really don't want to care, you are going to have to consciously discuss this and agree to it, and even then I don't actually believe it will work)

Yep. I imagine that in the culture described, the women care a lot more about Christmas being organised just so than the men do.

I came here to say precisely the same thing. It's all down to personality. For example, in a relationship between a person high in orderliness and a person low in orderliness, the resultant complaint usually is "I do all the cleaning up around here!" But the complaint could easily run in the other direction: "If your need for orderliness wasn't so high, we wouldn't have to do so much cleaning up around here!"

The same thing is often the case in a relationship where people set the bar around "maintenance of social ties" very differently. The typical couple (in my totally subjective field of experience) is one where the husband is like: "Hey honey, how about we just order pizza for all of our guests for the Thanksgiving party we're hosting this year?" and the wife is like: "Over my dead body!"

Interestingly, those roles are reversed in my own marriage: We recently got married at the courthouse with a vague plan to throw a wedding party at some unspecified future date. It's increasingly looking like my wife just can't be bothered. Meanwhile, I love to cook, and when my wife suggests using stock cubes when we cook for guests, I throw her out of the kitchen and finish the job myself.

> The workload of a relationship should be split evenly overall but if one places waaaay more importance on a particular aspect than the other it’s ok for that one to bear more of the load in that case.

A different take-- imagine the love your spouse would feel if-- even a single year out of your entire life-- you were enthusiastically engaged in a task she almost certainly already knows you have no interest in. A task, btw, she almost certainly sees as being somewhat of a burden-- no human ever finds it 100% fun to do tasks like writing a bunch of cards.

I mean, you've publicly declared how little you value that task. So it would be clear you're helping because you know that your spouse values that task, and because you know she would consequently value and enjoy doing it even more with the person she loves.

Either that, or you end up pentesting your own position here, she ends up not wanting the help, and you prove yourself right. Everybody wins!

If anyone ends up trying this out and proving me right, please track me down and pay me $10,000 as a small token of gratitude for the priceless joy I will have added to your life and marriage.

It's apples and oranges. Subjective Theory of Value is the only reliable economic model here.

It's all about FOMO.