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Comment by DanHulton | Hacker News Reader

I mean - I'm always looking for ways to please my partner, and to a lesser degree, my friends, family and co-workers. Little trinkets I think she might like, a surprise dinner, doing some dishes that we've been letting slide, making tea, refilling water, whatever. And she does the same for me. And my friends, family, and co-workers tend to do the same as well.

It's not silly. It's called kindness, and it's part of emotional labour.

Which seems to bring us back around to the first point again.

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Is she having to do a disproportionate amount of pleasing her partner though? We don't get that perspective, only that she's putting more effort than him into the parts she cares about - which might go both ways.

Yes, but that’s not because she’s a woman (as she appears to claim), it’s because she hasn’t come to some sort of agreement about how to run the house. She’s talking past her husband to millions of people.

Had the gender roles been swapped, it would have been a very hard to stomach article for a lot of people.

Which is why it's sexist. The implication is that if her husband were a better feminist he would be perfectly able to anticipate and provide everything she wanted in a friction-free and effortless way.

The fact that he doesn't proves he's still mired in patriarchy, which of course he needs to be educated out of.

Assuming your partner is sort of okay, I guess, but essentially ideologically defective is not a particularly healthy basis for a relationship.

Aside from chores, it's not as it men - feminist or not - never provide emotional support to women. I would be astonished if the husband never listened to problems, provided cuddles and backrubs, and all the other emotional maintenance that men give their partners.

I sometimes think this culture has a very poor record of educating people how adult relationships are supposed to work. Unfortunately this article seems to be an example of that.

That's right. Whenever I start to feel this way (and it does happen from time to time), before I complain I remind myself that I don't ever even think about routine car maintenance or yard work, the taxes and their due dates and payments. I never have to get rid of (or cause!) dead rodents or unplug the toilets or remember to dig out the hairball accumulating in the drain. Everyone's got an emotional or practical mental load; it's just easier to recognize your own.

> It's not silly. It's called kindness [...]

Yes, but it needs conscious effort, which means that you need to realize you need or want to do it. It's very difficult to do something if you never even thought you could think of doing.

You can look all you want for ways to please people, but there's no guarantee that you'll magically come across the very thing that will do the trick.

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