In her new book Drop The Ball, a manifesto for women juggling jobs and an unequal share of the burden at home, Tiffany Dufu describes a phenomenon I’d never previously seen given a name: “imaginary delegation”. This is the all-too-familiar relationship pattern whereby you see (or just think of) some household task that needs doing, mentally assign it to your partner, fail to inform them you’ve done so, then feel sincere outrage when they disregard the instructions you never gave them.
The problem here is that both sides have an excellent case for feeling aggrieved. The person on the (non-)receiving end naturally protests that he can’t be expected to read minds. But the other person is also justified in saying she shouldn’t need to spell it out: for a cohabiting couple, teamwork demands that both partners keep an eye out for what needs doing, without being told by the other. So the stage is set for the worst variety of domestic row: the kind where both parties are right.
I’ve been on both sides of imaginary delegation, but of course Dufu is correct that it’s largely a gendered affair: women do the imaginary delegating, while men fail to do the mind-reading. (She mordantly describes the time she decided not to prepare a slab of raw beef for freezing, as usual, but to leave it to her husband. Days later, with rancid beef stinking up the fridge, she threw it out.) This, she shows, is the inevitable consequence of a situation where even among couples who share housework and parenting, subtler inequities persist: men get credit for “helping out”, so long as they do a bit more than the average man, while women still shoulder what sociologists call the “worry work”, keeping track of what needs doing in the first place. As the columnist Judith Shulevitz has written: “Studies of heterosexual couples from all strata of society confirm that, by and large, mothers draft the to-do lists while fathers pick and choose among the items.” The trouble with imaginary delegation isn’t only that it’s imaginary, but that it’s delegation. If one partner is dispensing the instructions, it’s hard not to conclude that they’re ultimately responsible for the outcome.
Which brings us to the trickiest of Dufu’s prescriptions: to stop feeling crushed by responsibility for every little thing at home, you will need to give up the sole right to define what counts as “getting it done”. If your partner’s standards of, say, tidiness are lower than yours – while still within the bounds of the reasonable – it probably won’t work to insist that responsibility be shared, while the standard observed remains yours alone. (This isn’t to be confused with the scenario where the other person secretly does share your standards, but takes no action, banking on your eventually doing it yourself.)
And while most of Dufu’s advice is about handing things off to your partner or others, surely some balls deserve to be dropped entirely? If you ask me, it’s not just that you shouldn’t feel pressured to keep hardwood floors perfectly shiny or cupboards decluttered to a Kondo-compliant degree, etcetera. It’s that these don’t need doing at all.
