Man Feelings

A new term caught my ear as I listened to a podcast recently: hermeneutic labour. Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. It derives from the scholarly analysis of texts, initially biblical, and involves considering the layered meanings of a communication, including taking into account historical or literary context—and our own biases. In 2023, philosopher and Overthink podcast host Ellie Anderson lifted this dry academic concept to the surface of everyday life. You’re likely familiar with the concept of emotional labour and how it disproportionately burdens women in cis-hetero relationships (and also, fascinatingly, in the gig economy). Anderson outlined a distinct form of this care in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia:

Hermeneutic labor is the burdensome activity of: understanding and coherently expressing one’s own feelings, desires, intentions, and motivations; discerning those of others; and inventing solutions for relational issues arising from interpersonal tension.

Anderson recounted in interviews how she and her women friends would parse interactions with men they were dating. ‘We’d try to guess at what a guy wanted and how to avoid “freaking him out.”’ This casual quote in HuffPo and her academic writing dovetail deliciously. Like the intimacy of reading together a writer’s fiction and ­memoir drawn from similar source material—observing the ‘process of fictionalising’—it was so interesting to see how her ideas materialised into practical application. Frankly, I’m obsessed with the relatable origin story of this academic theory.

When I was twenty, I struggled to extricate myself from a tiring relationship. The break-up discussions were emotionally exhausting and protracted.

‘But who could I talk to about this, except you?’ my ex had asked me. We’d sat at right angles to each other around a beaten-up Laminex kitchen table with chrome scalloped edges. He’d tilted his head, genuinely asking, his dark eyes reflecting the stove range light.

I’m obsessed with the relatable origin story of this academic theory.

I could see the wickedness of the problem. He felt as though the only person who could support him through heartbreak was the one doing the breaking. I had already spent so much energy and time while we were together trying to cheer him up, trying to make him love me. I’d felt an obligation to continue interpreting his thoughts and feelings. I’d asked his friends to check in on him. Made sure his sister was on call.

Though we were of a similar age, he didn’t seem to have the resources to do so himself. This lack was alien to me, who had been taught from the cradle the language of emotions. I could think of many other equally fluent people, mostly women, from whom I could seek support.

Standing on the train platform with my headphones on and listening to Anderson, my mind immediately skittered back across the years to that conversation at the terrace house’s kitchen table. Was that hermeneutic labour? It took me a moment to grasp the distinction of this new term. Anderson clarifies:

Hermeneutic labor primarily involves patient, deliberative reflection, and is generally undertaken in solitary rumination and/or in conversations outside of the situations where [the labourer] reflects on social encounters after they occur, and prepares plans for future encounters.

It was not so much the conversation in the moment but the cognitive and emotional work I did before and long after it to make sure my ex would be okay.

Other practical applications of modern-day hermeneutic labour would be instantly recognisable to many people. Things like planning how to initiate a conversation about emotions or domestic tasks and navigate the response, seeking therapy, reading books about love languages or attachment styles. Drafting essays in your Notes app to clearly articulate your thoughts and feelings before sending a text. Sharing a screenshot of the reply to the group chat in despair: ‘Am I being unreasonable here?’

People of all genders do this work, but my personal experience aligns with Anderson’s argument that it’s expected in a pervasive pattern from those of us socialised as women, especially in relationships with those socialised as men.

We’ve seen hermeneutic labour in pop culture too. The entirety of Sex and the City is a treatise on this interpersonal work. Issa and Molly in the TV show Insecure discuss their relationships together and with their therapists. Sally Rooney’s oeuvre explores the tangled dynamics of modern dating; the gaps between what is said and unsaid.

This lack was alien to me, who had been taught from the cradle the language of emotions.

Anderson’s notion that women are generally expected to be ‘relationship-maintenance experts […] both as informal therapists for men and as informal couples’ therapists for the relationship’ hit me hard. So many of my earlier romantic relationships required this of me, long before I had the emotional wherewithal to do any of that well in the first place.

Gendered expectations when it comes to hermeneutic labour align with statistics on professional mental health support. Women in Australia access mental health services at a significantly higher rate than men do. Four out of five registered psychologists in Australia are female. Self-reported ‘identification with traditional masculinity’ and whether therapy made participants feel ‘emasculated’ correlates with Australian men dropping out of mental health services.

Every interactive online space for mothers I’ve encountered features well-intentioned crowdsourcing of this labour. They’re filled with posts from women asking other women, often total strangers, to workshop ways forward with—and for—their male partners and ex-partners. There are requests for advice, articles, couples counsellors, co-parenting apps, suggestions to smooth the path for these men—who probably aren’t going to read those links anyway. The answers are often generous in both practical content and emotional support.

My late thirties through early forties have been an interesting time. There’s been the implosion in my wider social circles of many relationships either post-kids or after a decade or so together. Despite a failure over the years to actively take on emotional or hermeneutic labour, most of the men in these situations have been shell-shocked when their partner eventually left. A number of these women are now single by choice or in queer relationships. More broadly, societal statistics bear out this pattern. Women initiate sixty-nine percent of divorces. Marriage rates are on the decline. Single women are happiest.

To a lesser extent, I also experienced this break-up dynamic with someone I dated briefly not that long after I became a single parent. Younger than me, he was living in a mildly chaotic manner that would be less noticeable in your twenties than in your mid-thirties. He let me down in some fairly banal practical ways, and I ended things. He felt blindsided.

I expressed my feelings of guilt to my therapist: I should have broken up with him more carefully, with more preparation, more explaining. Maybe it wasn’t obvious enough that children need reliable adults in their lives and that this would be a dealbreaker for entry into my personal life.

‘Is it blindsiding or the consequences of his actions?’ my therapist asked me.

Our conversations helped me move on—and they were also hermeneutic labour.

Apart from this example—and I feel an urge to note that he was a lovely person fundamentally, in case he reads this, still wanting to manage the emotional experience—the older I’ve got and the more compatible my partners become over time, the less hermeneutic labour I have been doing, even though I didn’t realise this was something I was striving towards. My kid’s dad and I communicate well; my current partner and I don’t seem to have to try hard to be understood. We’re both actively involved in tending to the relationship and each other.

I expressed my feelings of guilt to my therapist: I should have broken up with him more carefully.

But like everything under patriarchy, cis men don’t have to actively hate women to leave relationship maintenance to us. Anderson uses Down Girl by philosopher Kate Manne as a reference point, noting how it accounts for ‘misogyny as a property of social environments rather than as a worldview to which an individual must deliberately assent’.

Tim Winton has observed (in the surf, but here the surf is also the world) the consequences of men in particular not taking an active role in understanding and articulating their emotions, as well as navigating and supporting the emotional needs of others. When boys might look to them for guidance in shaping ‘their experimental versions of [masculinity]’, Winton says it ‘can be heartbreaking to witness, to tell you the truth. Because the feedback they get is so damn unhelpful. If it’s well-meant it’s often feeble and half-hearted. Because good men don’t always stick their necks out and make an effort’.

What can these men do when our society fails to equitably socialise many boys into relational fluency and empathy, leaving a vacuum increasingly filled by overtly vicious misogyny? Andrew Tate-style violent ideology relies on cunningly seductive and twisted emotional validation—behaviour that has escalated into a crisis in Australian schools and the ultimate, horrifying, results of which are the fictional focus of Netflix’s latest phenomenon Adolescence. The series, which will be shown in UK schools to combat the harms of misogynistic credos proliferating online, highlights the importance of emotionally engaged fathers and male authority figures who do ‘stick their necks out’ and offer a softer place for boys and young men to land.

The term hermeneutics carries the whiff of dust and authority—an intellectual club to wield. Anderson is labouring on our behalf to get this taken seriously, by insisting that this common experience of women is worthy of rigour and respect.

And it is. Hermeneutic labour is hard—but worthwhile. Deciphering and communicating our own emotions and motivations, and actively seeking to do this for others, is a deeply human practice. It requires—and develops—the ability to see things from someone else’s perspective. We have learned the unequal gendered division of this responsibility. It’s something we can learn to do differently. The problem is not that this work needs to be done, but from whom it’s overwhelmingly expected.