The Weight Women Were Never Meant to Carry (Part 1)
Most women are carrying more than they were ever designed to. One of the often cited reasons why? Mental load.
Culture has been circling the mental load conversation for years.
The discussion, centering on marriage, goes something like this…
Women are quietly juggling countless invisible weights, things that men don’t see and aren’t aware of. While men are single-tasking their way through life, their workday ending when they arrive home, women’s minds are constantly flipping through the rolodex of what needs doing, and figuring out how to get it done. It’s exhausting.
And it is. Women are burning out at record pace.
At the same time, men are also frustrated; longing to be respected and appreciated for their part. There’s an ache coming from both sides.
While often pinned on mental load, this isn’t the primary driver of the pain, but rather a symptom of a deeper imbalance.
One that prevents women from softening, though they long to, and hinders them from releasing control, despite feeling the heaviness of it.
And one that stunts the health of our marriages, the strength of our families, and the development of our communities.
In this 2-part essay, we’ll dig beneath the surface of the mental load discussion. In Part 1, we’ll address the wounds and uncover what I believe is at the root of this struggle. In Part 2, we’ll chat about what healing looks like for our marriages.
This is a sensitive topic to discuss. My goal is not to place blame, but to help get to the heart of our struggles, add clarity, and consider how we can heal.
May God meet us in His love as we seek understanding and wholeness together.
First, let’s take a quick look at the origins of this conversation.
The Mental Load Conversation
Originating in feminist circles around 2017, mental load gave language to the ongoing cognitive effort required to manage domestic and emotional responsibilities such as planning, remembering, and coordinating tasks.
Things that tend to fall disproportionately on women.
The discussion quickly permeated mainstream culture, women finding validation as the stress, exhaustion, and resentment they felt found a name.
“Solutions” mostly consisted of systems-based approaches of ownership and delegation, like his and hers tasks.
I can imagine the checklists forming in minds, mostly women’s, trying to ensure a precisely equitable distribution of the emotional load. If you want to add resentment to your marriage, this is a quick way to do it!
The church picked up on the conversation, with varying responses. Some validated the concerns and urged men to help out more, others responded strongly against the scorekeeping focus, and some wagged the finger against feminism and instructed women to let men lead and release control.1
All valid points, but mostly logistical.
When I hear groanings about mental load, more than looking at superficial fixes, I am drawn to what’s going on beneath it all. Because, when these kinds of conversations surface, I believe it is a little warning light that something deeper needs tending.
So what’s really going on?
Let’s take a look at the struggle, first from the perspective of women.
The Struggle Many Women Face
My dad, like many fathers, worked very hard to provide for our family. By all definitions he was a workaholic. At the office, he was the go-to guy, but when he came home, he crashed.
Being a good father, at that time, was seen largely as providing for the physical needs of the family. He did that very well. But at home, he was passive. He wasn’t an initiator, or present emotionally for my mom or us kids. A very nice guy, he went with the flow of whatever my mom wanted. Just as he saw demonstrated from his own father.
My mom, like many mothers, shouldered the brunt of the household tasks and caring for my brother and I. She worked for some of that time too, as a teacher at a Jewish Day School. She made sure we always had healthy food and lots of activities and brought us to sports practices and made birthdays extra special, and just generally took care of all the little details of well… mostly everything.
The tension in the atmosphere was palpable, as my mom grew stressed and bitter, the weight of the household on her. You could say, I suppose, that the “mental load” was crushing her.
In some ways, I think it got worse when she became a Christian.
Growing up, our family was nominally Catholic, but it didn’t really impact our life much. Other than going to church to stay out of hell! And Catholic guilt—we had a lot of that.
But when I was in high school, a family friend told my mom that she could have a relationship with God, and she thought this was the most amazing thing. In the depth of deep struggles with depression and anxiety, and hungry for change, she jumped in with both feet.
She started attending a non-denominational church, my dad and brother and me reluctantly tagging along, even though all the upbeat songs and hand raising were, at the time…a lot.
And of course my mom wanted to start talking about faith. She initiated conversations with my dad and us. She was the one saying “hey I think some things need to change here,” or “we should pray about that.”
My dad amicably listened and went along with it, mostly trying to pacify her in a path of least resistance kind of way.
On the positive side, my mom had Jesus. But on the negative side, she was now juggling all the household duties, and an additional, major responsibility…
She was taking on the spiritual leadership of our home.
It wasn’t just the weight of the tasks, it was the burden of leadership that my mom was drowning under.
An issue of far deeper significance than the surface skimming around mental load.
And this, I believe, is the core issue too often missed in our conversations on mental load, marriage dynamics, and burnout.
Control
Now you could say, well my mom just needed to release control, let my dad lead. And this is true. But at the same time, when a woman is married to a passive man, telling her to “stop being so controlling” flattens the dynamic in a way that feels profoundly invalidating and misreads the fear beneath the behavior.
A woman who loves God wants nothing more than a man who will take the spiritual lead. When he does this, she is able to release control and enjoy the safety of his covering.
But when he isn’t able to step into his leadership role, fear rises in her heart—she doesn’t feel safe. And fear is the breeding ground for control.2 There are things that need doing and she will make sure they get done.
And thus the fear–control–stress–resentment spiral begins.
When a man steps into his role as a leader, the home finds its footing. When he isn’t able to—often because he was never shown how—the strain doesn’t disappear; it simply shifts, and others begin carrying what was never meant to be theirs.
This is not a call to blame, but an invitation to clarity, about how deeply our design matters, and how costly it is when we’re left to figure it out alone.
The Call of Men
God has created a divine order for our homes. Not a domineering, oppressive power dynamic, but an intentionally harmonious design. When we align with His design, peace and health flow into our marriages and homes.
Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body. Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself.
-Ephesians 5:22-28
the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.
-1 Cor. 11:3
Men have been given a powerful responsibility by God, a call to lead the home in love, from a posture of submission to Christ. In doing so, he provides safety and the covering his wife and children need to flourish.
In that atmosphere, a woman’s heart can rest. She naturally softens, blossoming in femininity and nurture.
Where loving leadership is missing, however, confusion and fear can creep in–not because someone has failed, but because disorder leaves space for it. This is where the enemy takes advantage, exploiting wounds that were never healed.
While God meets women who are in these difficult situations, a thriving home life becomes much more challenging.
The Roots of the Struggles
This is a sensitive issue for both women and men alike. The sensitivity points to wounds beneath the surface— places where loving relationship and God’s design for the home were not modeled for us.
Where, after being raised by an abusive father, a woman marries a man who is his polar opposite—docile, easygoing, and nice.
Where men, in fear of poverty, throw all their efforts into work, with nothing left when they get home, the latest in a long line of ancestors just trying to survive.
Where women, raised by domineering mothers, repeat the pattern, even if they hate how it feels, because they don’t know how to do things differently.
Where men, lacking the physical and emotional presence of a father, never learned what it means to be a stable, loving, leading presence in the home.
And then there’s the cultural assault on “toxic masculinity,” which turns into demonizing all masculinity and emasculates men further. And men take another step back.
We are in a cultural epidemic of lack of proper masculinity and leadership, and at its root is a lack of fathering.
This is why surface-level responses to the mental load discussion miss the bigger picture.
Mental load is downstream from spiritual leadership. When a man is tuned into His role as a leader, He is aware of what’s going on in his home, including what his wife is dealing with.
We need our men. We need fathers, both natural and spiritual, strong and guiding.
And we need our women. We need mothers, nurturing and soft, the embodiment of beauty.
Most men want to lead, they simply don’t know how. And women want to release control, but they need to feel safe. Healing becomes most complete when both are supported in stepping into what they were designed for.
And that is what we’ll discuss in Part 2….
what it looks like to heal and grow and fall short and figure it out together, from two imperfect people who weren’t dealt a winning hand (at least in the natural)—my husband and I.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
Beijos,
Lyn