#Blessed
What gratitude can tell us about gendered expectations
Gratitude is having a moment. In a very immediate sense, it’s almost that time of year when everyone present must publicly name their blessings before you can start the big meal. More enduringly, it seems every other person I meet these days has a “gratitude practice” of some kind—likely because their therapist or self-help guru or favorite influencer told them they should start one.
(I, too, have succumbed to Big Gratitude: most nights before bed I jot down a handful of things I’m thankful for. It hasn’t quite cured me of cynicism or resolved my existential dread, but it does feel, well, nice to spend one moment a day deliberately thinking about the good stuff in my life.)
But gratitude has been on my mind of late for academic reasons. Scholars have been thinking about gifts, and the feelings they inspire, for at least a century, though my own entry point was through the more recent work of sociologist Arlie Hochschild. In her book The Second Shift, Hochschild describes gratitude as a currency that—if all is going well—circulates freely between members of a couple. “When couples struggle,” she writes, “it is seldom simply over who does what. Far more often, it is over the giving and receiving of gratitude.” Who is, or more to the point, isn’t grateful for what?
In later work expanding on these themes1, Hochschild argues that gratitude is not just an emotion but also a clue. The things we’re grateful for are generally the things we don’t take for granted. (Or, perhaps, the things we are trying not to take for granted, because an insistent therapist/guru/influencer reminded us that our health or paycheck or secure housing is far from a given.) When I write in my nightly journal that I’m grateful for a supportive text from a friend, or a reassuring result from a medical test, it’s often because I’ve been pleasantly surprised.
This holds true in the context of a marriage/romantic partnership, too: the acts or qualities for which we’re grateful to our partner are typically the acts/qualities that exceed our expectations of him/her/them in some way.
Let’s say my husband comes home around 6pm, tells me he’d like to cook dinner tonight, and proceeds to whip up a tasty stir-fry. If I’m filled with a surge of gratitude—and Eric, if you’re reading this, I totally would be—I probably expected on some level to be responsible for dinner. By stepping up to the dinner-making plate, he’s really solidified his A+ husband status.
Perhaps on another night, or in another universe, that same husband comes home and tells me he doesn’t have time to cook tonight, and could I take over instead? If resentment (roughly the opposite of gratitude) courses through my veins, I probably expected him to cook and am frustrated that I now have to stop doing whatever I’m doing and head to the kitchen.
Many other cases lie somewhere in between, in more emotionally neutral ground: my partner is doing more or less what I expect of him, neither going above and beyond nor failing to deliver. No gratitude, no resentment, just…taken-for-grantedness?
In any single moment, my emotional temperature isn’t all that informative, at least from a scholarly perspective. But if we zoom out and look at the kinds of household behaviors I feel generally grateful to—or resentful of—my spouse for, we can get a pretty good sense of how I think about his role in our partnership compared to mine.
If I’m grateful my spouse cheerfully “helps” with whatever housework or childcare tasks I ask him to complete, odds are that on some level I consider that work my responsibility. Anything he contributes is a bonus.
Alternatively, if I’m resentful of the fact that said spouse only cleans or helps our kid with homework when I ask him to, well, I probably understand that work as a shared responsibility. By waiting for my instruction, my partner is failing to meet that bar.
This is interesting data in its own right. But I have a hunch (and am working on getting the data to test it) that understanding these kinds of gratitude and resentment patterns might also be able to tell us more about a person’s gender role preferences than traditional measures of ideology (see more about the problems and limitations of those traditional approaches here).
Hochschild herself argued that when you ask someone what they want, you’re likely to get their “shallow” response. The kind of thing they want to believe is true of themselves, or want you to believe about them. Perhaps some people are introspective and honest enough to clearly articulate their deep preferences when directly asked. In my experience, though, it’s far more likely they haven’t clearly articulated those preferences to themselves, let alone an interviewer or survey-taker.
If, instead, you ask them what they’re grateful for, you just may get closer to their “deep” preferences and assumptions about what gender means for how an individual should behave.
That’s fodder for a future research study. In the meantime, I invite you to ponder your own household labor-related gratitudes (and resentments) in this season of giving thanks. Are you grateful to your partner for simply doing more housework than your dad did in the 1960s? Consider bumping up your baseline expectations just a tad.
Are you resentful when your partner asks you to pick up a sick kid from school in the middle of your work day? Reflect on what that implies about your expectations for the “default parent” role in your partnership.
To be clear, I am not anti-gratitude by any means. Plenty of research suggests that cultivating gratitude can enhance mental health and improve relationships – hence the current cultural obsession with gratitude journals. When we feel grateful to our partners, we’re often inspired to invest more in our relationship, which in turn makes that relationship better. But if your gratitude bar is set too low, it may prevent you from seeing and calling out real inequalities in your partnership.
Food for thought as you count your blessings this holiday season! If you do decide to recalibrate your expectations, maybe don’t bring that up at the Thanksgiving table. Unless of course you’d welcome Grandma’s input on how, back in her day…
Quick programming note: I’m taking next week off to sun myself in Arizona and spend time with family (and without screens). I’m preemptively sending gratitude to all of you and hoping your holiday meets—or even exceeds!—your expectations.
See Ch. 7, “The Economy of Gratitude”