Partially inspired by one of your videos I saw recently, I wanted to talk about some of the invisible labor my fiancee took on by default when we were house hunting the past ~2 years. -I don't have a lot of strong preferences. I previously thought this would make things easier on a partner but in practice this means she has to make all the decisions. So she had to look at things like "Garage or no?", "What color paint?", "How many bedrooms?", etc, and rather than make a decision I was like "What ever you like most!" -She would often see open houses in our neighborhood and coordinate our plans to go to them, even if it was just for comparison/learning what we DIDNT want -She set up an automated search with our realtor so new houses were sent to her nearly daily and she exhausted herself looking at all these "not quite what we're looking for" houses -She bore the load of thinking of future concerns like School District and proximity to her friends/activities So even though I came along to all these visits, gave some mild inputs/feedback, and ultimately put up the down payment when we found one, she had shouldered tons of daily mental load that outweighed those one time tasks.

Today wasn't a good day from a mental load standpoint. We had a potluck picnic to go to today and I had told my fiancee on Thursday that I would take care of preparing something for us to take to the picnic. I made that declaration knowing that 99% of the time this is not invisible labor that I carry, and I wanted to take it off her plate. However, despite having all day to myself yesterday and doing plenty of tasks for our household, this was not one of them. She asked me about it last night and I admitted that I didn't prepare anything yet but would make a salad from vegetables we had on hand and chop up a bunch of apples we had too many of. So this morning I set about my task but fumbled the execution in a couple ways which caused her to be frustrated and we had a bit of an argument. I felt upset that she wouldn't let me do things my way and make my own mistakes, and I was also upset at myself for not executing on a well planned attempt to take mental load off her plate. She was frustrated that she has to either teach me to do things (a mental load she carries for a lot of topics) or watch me make mistakes that will look poorly on us both when we show up to the picnic with something not right. After some heightened feelings we were able to talk it through a bit and I did finish making our food and the picnic was fine, but it still put a damper on the day, drained us both, and showed her another example of a way she can't trust me. On the bright side, I understand more and I am resolved to do better, but need to stop learning lessons at the expense of her feelings. (I know this is a lot more emotional burden than we're looking for for this but had to share)

As mentioned previously, we are beekeepers. It has been a passion for my fiancee for many years, she did a lot of research prior to us making the plunge and getting a couple hives a few years ago. In order to keep our hives healthy there are a few tasks that need to be done on a regular basis and recently I've been doing that physical labor more often than not. However since this started as my fiancee's project, she has retained a lot of the planning tasks such as -scheduling more adhoc tasks like using pest treatments or coordinating honey harvesting (a big one I might detail later) -planning for growth by keeping inventory of what equipment we have/need, and coordinating the purchase of that from our supplier -ensuring we are doing the right thing for the bees: this was the reason she wanted to get into this hobby so she often has to think about whether we are taking good enough care of them, taking care of the environment by using the right tools and practices, etc.

Some random examples where I do the execution of a task but my fiancee does the conception and planning, typically carrying that mental load for a while and then worrying whether I will execute properly: -We paid for a farm share program where every week during the summer we pick up a package of berries/fruits. I typically pick up the package after work most weeks but my fiancee gets the emails from the farm, sets the choices of fruits for the week and reminds me to take back the previous week's boxes (punch card that gets us bonus fruit if we turn in 10 weeks of boxes) -We are beekeepers (that'll be a future post in itself) and we typically enter our honey into our state fair's honey competition. My fiancee owns the mental load of tracking the deadline for entering our application, figuring out what division our honey belongs in that year, and making sure we have the equipment we need to make our entries.

My family lives in another state so we don't get to see them too often. When we do make the ~5 hour drive to see them, I often times devolve into planning to visiting them the way I did before my fiancee came into the picture. This meant I would assume I was staying at my parents house in my old room, I'd find stuff to do with my friends once I got there (no pre-planning) and the activities would largely be based around talking about the past and watching tv. None of this works well with my fiancee, who is allergic to my parents' cats, wants to go out and see and do things, and has a harder time socializing with my friends from home because she wasnt there for all the in-jokes and stories of the past. So she ends up having to worry about where we can stay, what she can plan so she isn't bored, how we can socialize with my family outside of their house, and what she's going to talk about with my friends. I have done better with this more recently but until I show the consistency of thinking about all those things, she still has a bit of dread about these trips.