Many of us have probably heard the following pieces of advice when navigating conflicts in an interpersonal relationship. Pick your battles: don’t make an issue out of every problem; let some minor grievances go. Don’t expect your partner (friend, colleague) to be a mind-reader; instead, explicitly articulate your desires and needs before assuming the other is deliberately disregarding them. These suggestions are meant to encourage healthy communication while remaining realistic about the imperfect nature of humans and their relationships. 

On the surface, both pieces of advice seem reasonable. In our significant relationships, we are often wise to let some issues fall by the wayside, and we should be able to articulate our needs and desires rather than assuming others know them as well as we do. However, like so many of our interpersonal practices, this advice is built on—and thus serves to reinforce—oppressive, heteropatriarchal norms and stereotypes. In turn, the deployment of this advice is distorted along gendered lines, so that what seems neutral advice becomes a mechanism to reinforce those very stereotypes and norms. As a result, women end up doing even more of the work of relationship maintenance while the stereotypes of women as naturally more intuitive and emotionally intelligent, and of men as clueless and inept, are reinforced—all under the guise of healthy relationship practices. While these pieces of advice can apply to any interpersonal relationship (romantic, platonic, between colleagues, etc.) among people of any gender, I will focus on the advice as it is directed to women in heterosexual romantic relationships. I do this, first, because this advice generally is already so directed—as will be discussed, women are socialized to be lay relationship therapists for themselves and others—and because doing so will isolate how this advice is actually a mechanism to enforce heteropatriarchal stereotypes and norms. However, this analysis will also offer lessons for relationships other than the heterosexual and romantic. 

What seem to be mild and neutral prescriptions—who hasn’t picked a fight over nothing or gotten unreasonably angry when a partner didn’t predict their desires perfectly?—obscures the underlying gender stereotypes and oppressive norms upon which this advice is built. Consider the advice to “pick your battles.” This advice is intended to foster healthy communication by guiding individuals to determine which complaints are important enough to address with their partner and which are insignificant enough that they are better left unsaid. It does not advise letting every problem go. Rather, the suggestion is to be more intentional in directing one’s time and energy and to engage in active problem-solving with one’s partner about the issues determined to be significant. 

So far, so good. But consider how gendered stereotypes and expectations, particularly concerning the labor involved in maintaining interpersonal relationships, can warp the execution of this advice in ways that exacerbate labor for women. First, this advice supports what Ellie Anderson calls hermeneutical labor that disproportionately falls on women: the work of analyzing one’s own and one’s partner’s feelings, motivations, and behaviors, and troubleshooting resolutions to maintain the relationship. This labor emerges from the social expectation that women are intuitive experts about relationships (hence why relationship advice is generally directed towards them). So, the implicit suggestion that a healthy relationship should involve the emotional and cognitive task of analyzing which grievances are worth raising further burdens women’s time and energy. After all, determining which “battles” to pick takes work: it includes the interpretive work of trying to suss out a partner’s other’s intentions and feelings, figuring out how bothersome an issue really is, predicting the likely outcomes of raising the complaint or letting it go, and projecting problem solving strategies for each option—and all of this is likely rehearsed over and over, alone and with other “relationship experts” (i.e. women friends). This is part of the hermeneutical labor that women are already expected to undertake (and men are generally exempt from doing), yet it is presented as a healthy and productive practice.  

A second worry about this advice is that women are already at a disadvantage in the enterprise of battle-picking: all else equal, men and women do not have the same permission and power to raise grievances, complain, and become angry with each other. This is because the costs of doing so are asymmetric. Women risk inviting the stereotypes of being bitchy, bitter, shrill, or a nag if they raise complaints—even reasonable complaints expressed in controlled ways—and the dismissal of their complaint, thereby. For the same reason that women (and other marginalized people) may be reticent to express the reactive attitudes of blame and resentment towards those with more power—namely, it is not always safe to do so—women in relationships with men may be disempowered to raise complaints in the first place. The advice to judiciously sort through complaints obscures this reality. 

These concerns lead to a third worry. Instead of encouraging communication, this advice may actually discourage women from airing grievances to their partners. This is a consequence of these first two problems: encouraged to analyze the relationship and sort through grievances, yet disempowered to articulate them, the advice to pick your battles may provide a ready justification for swallowing annoyances and digesting unmet needs. Coupled with the fact that women are socialized to keep the relational peace, they may decide to defer a potential conflict until there is some bigger, future issue to address, thereby diminishing the importance of their present complaints. The congratulatory praise of “letting it go,” “being the bigger person,” “sacrificing for the relationship,” and ultimately, keeping the peace may encourage one to withhold their complaints. But when one’s needs are already disproportionately forsaken within a relationship, the suggestion that some complaints should be silenced risks exacerbating this asymmetry. Thus, this advice is especially pernicious because it encourages women to be agents of their own oppression—denying their needs, silencing their complaints, and performing extra labor—under the veneer of being a healthy and well-adjusted partner.  

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that women misunderstand or are duped by this advice. Rather, when we are trying to determine how to behave in a relationship, we may reach for the available scripts to weigh out our options and guide our choices. As Anderson notes, women are taught to become de facto relationship therapists, and they have likely encountered the ubiquitous advice described above. It is an available resource for assessing our interpersonal conflicts. But framed in terms of promoting a healthy relationship (that is presumed to lack any gendered power asymmetries), the advice provides a salutary reason to do what is already comfortably advised by gendered expectations and thus obscures this oppressive mechanism. Indeed, this advice takes the genuinely valuable capacity of emotional intelligence and exploits it to make women do even more hermeneutical and affective labor. 

A second piece of relationship advice, “don’t expect your partner to be a mind-reader,” may, at first, seem to encourage the self-expression that the advice to pick your battles implicitly discourages. Treating your partner as a “mind-reader” means expecting them to meet needs, anticipate desires, and react compassionately to feelings, and believing that they should know what one needs, wants, and feels without being told what these are. This expectation often triggers anger and disappointment when the partner inevitably fails to meet a standard they did not know they were held to. The advice suggests that we recognize when we are responding to our partners with unarticulated expectations and, instead, be explicit about what we need in a relationship. In other words, tell your partner how you feel and what you need and want from them. 

Again, because women are expected to do the bulk of the relationship maintenance in heterosexual partnerships, this advice is presumably directed at them. This advice may seem to promote a recognition of women’s unmet needs since it is encouraging self-expression rather than becoming angry that your partner cannot “read your mind.” However, consider the set of assumptions this advice rests on. While it is of course true that no one has direct access to another’s thoughts, it is false that the only way to know what another needs and desires is to be explicitly told by that person. Part of the hermeneutical and emotional labor that women perform in relationships is the discernment of internal states based on analyzing the other’s behavior. These are the persistent tasks of behavioral inference and extrinsic emotional regulation: noting what conditions tend to lead to what behaviors (e.g., don’t bring up a contentious issue before morning coffee), remembering what tends to cause joy and disappointment (e.g. completing a chore a partner hates to make them happy), knowing what is important to the other person and acting accordingly (e.g., asking about the promotion, sympathizing when they are reminded of an estranged family member). In short, many women have learned expertise in reading cues and responding accordingly to their partners’ desires and needs, all without being explicitly told as much. 

The advice to stop assuming your partner is a mind-reader disregards this labor by reinforcing the stereotype that women are inscrutable and mysterious, as if their emotional lives are completely opaque unless verbally expressed. In tandem, this advice reinforces the stereotype that men are inattentive and imperceptive, and indeed, gives them permission to be this way. Because they are not expected to behave in ways that meet women’s needs unless explicitly told what to do (“I have no idea what she wants from me!”), men are let off the hook from doing the basic hermeneutical and emotional labor of attending to and “reading” a partner, while women are given even more work, namely, communicating their needs while also discerning his. Together with the previous piece of advice, women may face the choice of either not bringing up issues or performing the labor of telling their partner what they need, even when their partner should be able to figure it out with a little effort. (Though again, this will not be every case—sometimes we do have to be explicit about our expectations since not every desire or need can be read off of past behavioral cues.)

I suggest that these pieces of advice, and other similar norms of intimate relationships, are particularly concerning because their successful implementation keeps the peace and thus distracts from their oppressive function. Following these suggestions functions to reinforce asymmetrical gendered norms because it looks like it is working—it keeps a superficial peace by reducing conflict, and where there is less interpersonal conflict, it may seem that there is a healthy connection. But all of this comes at the expense of women’s continued labor. It thus insidiously reinforces these norms while evading scrutiny—because why should we complain that everything appears copacetic? 

This is not to say that this advice is never appropriate or helpful, nor to suggest that all relationship advice is oppressive. Rather, it is to serve as a reminder that the industry of relationship maintenance (everything from blogs, podcasts, self-help books, and relationship counseling) is built upon the existing dynamics of heterosexual romantic relationships, which are themselves shaped by oppressive norms. Accordingly, the advice that emerges about how to repair, maintain, or improve relationships often serves to fortify those norms. Feminists have long recognized that the institution of heteropatriarchy shows up in our relationships—the personal is political, after all. But the additional task is to identify how ostensibly neutral practices in our personal (and interpersonal) lives can hide mechanisms that reinforce these oppressive norms. It is curious (though not mysterious) that the norms and advice surrounding the intimate relationships between individual women and men make little to no mention of gender oppression, as if the people and practices assessed never encounter power asymmetries. While it’s not the case that interpersonal relationships are wholly shaped by oppression, theorizing that forgets oppression exists at all risks retrenching it. 

As we’ve seen, relationship advice tends to be framed in individualistic and therapeutic terms. But to avoid the problems like the ones discussed above, this advice should be socially contextualized to recognize how potentially oppressive asymmetries in power may play out in individual relationships. This does not only apply to heterosexual romantic relationships, but also to any relationships in which power imbalances may exist (such as between partners with class, earning, race, or ability differences). Again, it’s not the case that every aspect of our interpersonal relationships is shaped by oppressive dynamics—relationships are not reducible to their members’ gender, race, abilities, sexual orientation, and their intersections. Yet it is undeniable that these dynamics can work their way into our relationships. A first step to correcting for these harmful norms is to modulate existing advice to recognize the social dimension of relationships. For instance, as discussed above, we should take into account the differing social expectations on men and women in attending to their partners’ emotions and needs when advising on conflict resolution. And this means the advice will be at least partly informed by this power dynamic—men may need to attend more, while women should reasonably expect more of that attention. The promise of keeping the peace is seductive, but we must consider what is kept hidden by doing so. 

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Elisabeth Paquette or the Associate Editor Shadi “Soph” Heidarifar.

The post The Cost of Keeping the Peace: Relationship Advice and Oppressive Norms first appeared on Blog of the APA.