Who carries the mental load and emotional labor of sex?

Hello, I'm Sheila Ray Gregor from Bear Marriage.com, where we like to talk about healthy,

evidence-based, biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage. And I am joined today by my husband Keith.

Hey, everybody. And I want to answer that question. Yeah. Because there is a lot of mental,

load, and emotional labor when it comes to sex. And I think sometimes we put a lot of it on women

and not enough on men. And that has tremendous repercussions on how we see

sex. So I want to work through all this today. Before we do that, a big thank you to a certain

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about, there's a lot of debates about housework all the time and people think of it solely in terms of who does what. Right. So they think the debate is that he should do exp proportion of the housework. But we often omit all the planning and the background stuff that goes into it. So for instance, I might say to you, hey, give me a grocery list, and I'll go pick up the groceries.

So you give me this list and I go pick up the groceries. And I feel like I'm a hero and I did all the work today. Yeah, you did the grocery shopping. You did the grocery shopping. But I didn't look through all the cupboards, figure what we need, plan the meals for the week, and then use all that information to create a list. Yeah. All right. So I guess so, and then I basically thought that I'm doing everything, but I'm really kind of doing the smallest and easiest part of the task because all that other stuff is what we call mental load. It's like having to keep track of it. Like, you know, if you're the one who knows when it's so-and-so's birthday or keeping track

of the family plan, like what we're doing at different times, all that kind of stuff. That's all meant to load. Yeah, the fact that Susie has allergies to, you know, this particular thing. So if she's invited to a birthday party, you've got to make sure there's none of that. Yeah, the family knows that. You know, who has dental appointments,

who's scared of the dentist and so they have to bring their would be or whatever it is, right?

Like, yeah, yeah. So there's things that go behind the actual thing you're doing that often are

overlooked. Yes, right? And often it disproportionately falls to women. Yeah. So the planning part.

Then there's also emotional labor.

And we haven't, we've touched on that.

I think we've used the term a lot, but we haven't defined it quite as much.

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