Against Toxic Femininity & Masculinity
An introduction to a more radically balanced idea of our relationships.
A quick update before we begin- I’m in the final stages of editing The Stoic Manual: Meditations on the Art of Living, a collection of 150 Stoic meditations on living well. It’ll be released soon and included free for all Annual and Lifetime members. Meanwhile, access my other books here.
Welcome! This piece examines how toxic femininity and masculinity can turn relationships into contests over sacrifice, work, ambition, and who gives more. Stoic philosophy offers a better standard- duty, fairness, gratitude, discipline, and respect for the different roles two people may carry. The aim is to understand how resentment grows and how couples can build a relationship where both lives are taken seriously for maximum joy and fulfillment. Prior editions on this Relationship Series include- Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person & On Sexless Romantic Relationships. Let’s get into today’s lesson.
Against Toxic Femininity & Masculinity
It’s certain as water is wet that difficult arguments develop and fester long enough into the relationship.
A disagreement may suppurate with unprepared dinner. You’ve worked all day, come home tired, walked into the kitchen and there’s nothing good to eat. Before you’ve had time to think, you remember the emails, the traffic, the difficult conversation with your boss, the hefty bill you paid that morning, the high-stakes call you took during lunch. You look at the kitchen and think, Do I have to deal with this too?
Your partner sees your face and… knows immediately what you’re thinking. What you don’t know is that they spent the afternoon with a sick child, called the plumber twice, bought groceries, dealt with a problem involving your mother, finished their own work late, and washed the dishes. Within five minutes, two people who have each spent the day doing useful things for the same household are angry with each other.
The food barely matters anymore. Each person feels unseen, and when that feeling persists, people start counting everything they do.
You remember the Saturday you gave up, the holiday you paid for, the mornings you got up first, the opportunity you passed on, the dinners you made, the family functions you attended because they mattered to your partner.
And this is what makes resentment a sticky situation. You’re doing things your partner has stopped noticing. Your partner is probably doing things you’ve stopped noticing too. Arguments about fairness become vicious because each person comes with facts and then mistakes those facts for the whole story.
The Trouble With 50/50
Few ideas have improved intimate life more than the belief that men and women deserve equal standing within a relationship. For most of history, marriage gave women far less control over property, work, money and the direction of their own lives. Domestic roles were largely settled by law and custom. The movement toward equality was therefore set on a positive direction.
But along the way, another idea emerged- fairness should mean equal division. Half the bills, half the cooking, half the cleaning, half the childcare, half the sacrifices. The appeal is easy to understand- a clear split seems to protect both people from being and feeling unfairly used.
Until two people actually try to live that way.
One person earns three times what the other earns. One has flexible hours and the other works twelve-hour days. One loves cooking. One is better with money. One has more patience with small children. One can deal with contractors without ruining their afternoon. Then circumstances change, as they always do, and an arrangement that made sense a year ago starts putting too much pressure on one person.
There is also a basic problem with measurement. How much is getting up in the middle of the night to feed the baby worth? What should we compare it with- working late, paying most of the rent, taking care of an elderly parent, giving up a promotion because the family can’t move? How should we quantify the person who notices that the child needs new shoes?
It’s not so simple. All of these burdens are real. And they come in forms that defy exact comparison.
Research shows that perceived fairness in the division of work is closely tied to relationship satisfaction and conflict. What a couple’s arrangement means to each person is correlated to their longevity. They may tolerate a very uneven division when they understand why it exists, took part in choosing it, and believe their contribution is respected. A mathematically even arrangement can still leave one person angry when they feel trapped inside it.
Epictetus sometimes mocked people who expected circumstances to provide what simply wasn’t available. He cautioned us against looking for figs in winter.
Perfect 50/50 often belongs in the same category. A relationship can be fair, generous and stable through periods when one person is carrying much more. The useful question is whether both people still believe the arrangement makes sense.
The Work Nobody Sees
Our arguments about fairness are also arguments about status. Paid work has become one of the main ways adults explain who they are, while much of the work that keeps a household functioning receives almost no public recognition.
Ask someone what they do and they usually tell you their profession. Doctor. Lawyer. Writer. Engineer. Founder. Few people answer by explaining that they keep four human beings fed, manage medical appointments, deal with school forms, remember both families’ birthdays and make sure the household has everything it needs.
Domestic work has an odd feature- when it’s done well, much of it disappears from view. The food is there. The electricity stays on. The passport hasn’t expired. The child goes to see the dentist. Someone notices that there is no toothpaste and buys more. People usually notice a gap when these things stop happening.
The Stoic philosopher Cleanthes knew something about work people don’t see. Before succeeding Zeno as head of the Stoic school in Athens, he supported himself through hard physical labor. He drew water for gardeners at night and studied philosophy during the day. Diogenes Laertius tells us that the Athenians became suspicious of how a man who seemed to have no income was supporting himself, and Cleanthes eventually produced the people who employed him as witnesses.
History remembers the philosopher. His philosophy still depended on a man doing exhausting work after dark.
Most impressive lives have something like this underneath them. Someone handles the tasks that allow the public work to continue. Sometimes the same person does both. Sometimes a husband or wife carries more at home because the other person is in a demanding season professionally. Sometimes grandparents are doing far more than anyone recognizes. Sometimes cleaners, nannies, assistants and drivers make two ambitious careers possible.
Somebody always does the work.
Once one kind of contribution gains status and another becomes expected, resentment has a fertile field to grow. The person doing more of the home work can begin feeling taken for granted. The person carrying more financial responsibility may feel equally misunderstood when their working life is described as though leaving the house every morning is a privilege rather than something filled with deadlines, bosses, customers, office politics and the pressure of knowing that several people depend on what they earn.
Musonius Rufus approached the status of men and women from a surprisingly radical starting point for the first century. Women, he argued, had received the same gift of reason as men and possessed the same basic capacity for virtue. That was why he thought women should study philosophy too. He lived in a world far removed from ours and didn’t sketch out a modern household, though his premise still endures- you can’t treat one adult’s mind, character or aspirations as inherently less serious simply because that person is a woman.
A good relationship begins with equal human worth. The responsibilities inside it can then be arranged around the people themselves and their strengths.
Whose Life Gets Priority?
Gustav Mahler understood the importance of his work extremely well.
In December 1901, shortly before marrying Alma Schindler, he wrote her a letter setting out what he expected from their marriage. Alma composed music herself. She was young, gifted and ambitious. Mahler made it clear that there would be room for one composer in their household, and that composer would be him. Her life would have to accommodate the demands of his.
She agreed.
People sometimes agree freely to arrangements they later discover they cannot live with. A sacrifice that feels manageable in the first years of love can become something very different after a decade.
By 1910 the marriage was in serious trouble. Alma had begun an affair with the architect Walter Gropius. Mahler became desperate enough to consult Freud in Leiden. Around the same period, he returned to Alma’s music, helped edit several of her songs and encouraged their publication.
The story gets interesting when you move beyond its most obvious lesson. Mahler was working extraordinarily hard himself. He was directing the Vienna Court Opera, conducting, composing and carrying enormous professional demands. The problem in the marriage was never that his work didn’t matter.
Alma’s mattered too.
That’s where couples can lose each other. One person’s ambitions slowly become the default around which everything else is arranged. Their meetings are protected. Their deadlines are urgent. Their travel determines the family schedule. Their exhaustion gets the most sympathy. The other person’s ambitions are expected to fit into whatever space remains.
You can learn a great deal about a relationship by asking whose time carries more significance inside it. Who leaves work when the school calls? Whose career determines where the family lives? Who can spend Saturday working without negotiating for the time? Who repeatedly turns down opportunities because somebody has to keep everything else running?
An unequal division of work can serve two people extremely well. But an unequal valuation of their lives is harder to survive.
Divide Life According to the People Living It
Ernest Shackleton learned a different lesson about division of labor in circumstances where getting it wrong could kill everyone.
When Endurance was crushed by pack ice in 1915, Shackleton and twenty-seven men were stranded in the Weddell Sea. Months later, six men attempted the journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia in the James Caird, a small open boat crossing roughly 800 miles of dangerous water.
Their survival depended on specialization. Frank Worsley navigated. Harry McNish, the carpenter, modified the boat and helped prepare it for the crossing. Tom Crean supplied the physical endurance for which he had already become famous. Basically, the person best equipped for an essential task performed it.
Shackleton still expected his men to share ordinary and unpleasant work. Scientists did basic chores. Rank did not grant immunity from everything tedious. The expedition combined specialization with shared responsibility.
A household can do the same.
Panaetius, one of the major Stoic philosophers of the second century BC, gives the principle a philosophical foundation. Cicero enunciates his idea in On Duties- when deciding how to live, we have to consider our common human nature, our individual temperament and abilities, the circumstances we have been given, and the roles we deliberately choose.
Cicero continues to say that actors choose parts suited to their abilities. And human beings should show at least as much judgment when deciding how to live.
Apply this to two people sharing a home and many arguments become easier to solve. Perhaps one person earns much more. Perhaps the other is excellent with money. Perhaps one loves cooking. Perhaps one has the patience for bedtime with small children. Perhaps both have demanding careers and buying help is the most sensible use of money they can make.
The aim is to use the people and the resources you actually have.
There will always be jobs nobody wants. A sick child at three in the morning doesn’t care which parent has the better temperament for childcare. Taxes still need filing. Bathrooms still need cleaning. Those tasks require some reasonable arrangement of their own.
Panaetius also adds something more important than efficiency. The roles that fit two people today may stop being congruent later on. A person who happily carried more domestic work while their partner built a business may eventually want their own turn at ambition. The right response is to look again at the life you’re actually living.
Work like a team and you’ll traverse the storm unscathed.
On Generosity
Seneca spent an extraordinary amount of time thinking about giving, receiving and gratitude. In On Benefits, he argues that the giver should be ready to forget what they have given while the receiver should remember what they have received.
That’s sometimes difficult advice for marriage.
You drove six hours because your partner needed you. You paid when money was tight. You looked after them when they were sick. You dealt with their family. You relocated cities. You gave up an opportunity. Years later, an argument begins and suddenly every generous thing you have ever done comes in as evidence.
Seneca understood what repeated reminders do to generosity. Once you keep telling someone what you did for them, the gift starts to feel like an awkward debt.
Some sacrifices obviously matter when a couple is deciding what should happen next. If one person stepped back from their career for several years, that fact may be crucial when the next major opportunity comes. But this becomes destructive when its purpose is to keep the other person permanently indebted.
Marcus Aurelius tackles the same problem from another direction. He describes people who help and immediately expect recognition, others who say nothing while privately remembering what they’re owed, and a third kind who simply does what is useful and continues with life. Marcus wanted to become the third type of person.
Marriage benefits from combining that discipline with another habit- remember more of what your partner does.
William Blake married Catherine Boucher in 1782. She couldn’t write her own name and signed the marriage register with an X. Blake taught her to read and write. She later learned the technical work involved in producing his books, helped print and colour the illuminated pages for which he became famous, and helped keep their household going through years of financial difficulty.
His name went on the work. But her hands were part of making it.
One remark attributed to Catherine has survived because it contains the truth about marriage in a sentence- “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise1.”
Anyone absorbed in demanding work should understand the complaint. Other people see the finished book, successful company, promotion or celebrated career. The person at home experiences the process that produced it.
And that’s why recognition and appreciation usually works better when it’s specific. Thank you for taking her to the doctor. I know it wrecked your afternoon. I saw that you changed your meeting so I could make mine. I know you’ve been handling more payments more while things are difficult.
The Right Handle
Once resentment has settled into a relationship, people often want more than changed behavior. They want the other person to understand exactly how badly they’ve been wronged, admit it in the right way, apologize with the proper degree of remorse, and finally appreciate everything they’ve been enduring.
Epictetus was once approached by a man who wanted to know how he could persuade his brother to stop being angry with him. Epictetus brought him back to the only part he could control- his conduct. Philosophy could teach him how to behave toward his brother. It couldn’t guarantee the brother’s response.
That’s why you can explain what has become unfair. You can listen carefully. You can apologize for what you’ve done wrong. You can make a specific request. You can decide what you’ll do if the pattern continues.
But you can’t force another adult to feel the exact emotion you think the situation requires.
This is where many arguments persist long after the practical problem could have been solved. Your partner agrees to change something and you remain furious because they didn’t sound sorry enough. They apologize and you keep pushing because they still don’t understand the experience exactly as you lived it.
Eventually the conversation has to return to what can actually change.
“I need you to handle bedtime three nights a week” gives another person something they can act on. “I can’t keep carrying this level of financial responsibility” gives you a problem to solve together. “Your career has come first for three years and I want us to make room for mine now” may lead to a difficult conversation, though at least everyone knows what the conversation is about.
“You’re selfish,” “You do nothing,” and “You have it easy” usually creates a rather trite trial. And the defensiveness that comes from there doesn’t help anything.
Specific requests give the relationship somewhere to go.
Sometimes those conversations reveal an injustice. One person is contributing far less. Money is being used as power. One career has consumed the household. One partner has become responsible for almost every unpleasant task. A useful idea of fairness has to be capable of clarifying these things without hiding them behind talk of compromise.
The point is to describe reality well enough that two adults can decide what needs to change.
Love Makes Your Life Somebody Else’s Business
Seneca gives us one of the more tender correctives to the popular image of Stoicism as complete independence.
In Letter 104, he writes about illness and his wife Paulina’s concern for him. He admits that her love changes the way he thinks about his own health. Because his life matters so much to her, preserving himself matters differently to him. She has made him, in his words, “more valuable to myself.”
There is something important here about what happens when you build your life with another person.
Your habits no longer affect only you. Months of refusing to sleep properly eventually reach the people who have to live with your exhaustion. Reckless spending affects the person whose financial future is tied to yours. An uncontrolled temper changes the atmosphere of the home. Neglected health eventually becomes somebody else’s worry and, sometimes, somebody else’s work.
Love creates obligations that solitude doesn’t.
This is another form of contribution that couples often overlook. Taking responsibility for yourself is part of taking responsibility for the relationship. You owe the people who depend on you some reasonable effort to remain someone they can depend on.
Cicero, writing about friendship, says that one of its great gifts is that prosperity becomes better when shared and adversity becomes easier to bear when divided between people.
That gets closer to the purpose of a relationship than any simplistic formula about equal chores.
A serious relationship gives two people somewhere to bring the parts of life that would otherwise be theirs alone. Ambition becomes something another person can help make possible. Illness becomes something someone sits beside you through. Money, children, grief, family trouble and ordinary exhaustion become responsibilities you can move between you as circumstances require.
The next ten years of a relationship will ask things from you that neither of you can predict now. Your capacities will change. Your ambitions will change. The people who depend on you will change. Some seasons will demand much more from one person than the other.
The work is to keep noticing those changes early enough to respond to them. You make room when your partner needs more of it. You say when you’re overwhelmed. You take their ambitions seriously enough to let them influence your plans. You learn which responsibilities belong to you because you’re good at them and which ones you ought to do simply because somebody has to do them.
And as the years pass, fairness becomes less about proving that each person contributed the same amount and more about something sublime- whether both people can look at the life they’ve built and still recognize the beauty they’ve created as themselves inside it.
“Paradise” is Catherine’s affectionate way of describing Blake’s inner world. He could be physically at home while his attention was somewhere else entirely- thinking, writing, drawing, or caught up in the visions that shaped his work.
I recognize this kind of dynamic all too well, having seen and read a lot about other couples regarding this and how they truly feel: coming home exhausted from work only to start all over again that is, taking care of house hold chores, or as you defined it, "the invisible work." It's a daily buildup of stress and mental fatigue that, if ignored, turns the home into a battlefield and causes even the strongest relationships to explode.
Unfortunately, we still live in a society with a cultural mindset where the woman is almost always expected to shoulder the entire burden of household management and mental load, even after an exhausting workday of her own. And it's a devastating logic, because domestic work and caregiving especially when a child is involved has the worst characteristic: it never truly ends, has no breaks, and never guarantees a real day off.
(It is also mind-boggling to think about how the role of women has regressed over the course of history. As far back as 5,000 years ago, in Sumerian civilization, women could run businesses, lead temples, and exercise real political and economic power; roles that were later eroded with the rise of cultural models, like that of the Assyrian Empire, based strictly on the cult of physical strength and militaristic domination.)
But the subtlest modern trap is the illusion of the "perfect 50/50." When a couple decides to split everything mathematically in half (from expenses to chores) they stop acting like a couple in love and start drafting a contract between mere roommates (at least, that's how I see it). A relationship is not a business. Demanding accounting-style equality means ignoring the real circumstances of the person beside you. True fairness isn't doing exactly 50% of everything, but making sure neither partner feels alone, drained, or taken for granted.