The Mental Load: Women Have Been Carrying It For Decades. It’s Time For Us To Finally Put It Down.

There’s a concept doing the rounds on social media recently that has young mothers nodding so vigorously they risk giving themselves whiplash. It’s called the mental load, and if you’re a woman of a certain age (hello, fellow fifty- and sixty-somethings), your reaction to hearing about it is probably somewhere between finally, someone said it out loud and we just called that Tuesday.

So what exactly is it? And more to the point — now that we finally have a name for it, what are we going to do about it?

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What Is the Mental Load?

The mental load is the invisible, relentless, unpaid cognitive work of running a household and a family. It’s not just doing the things. It’s knowing all the things, remembering all the things, planning all the things, and making sure all the things get done by someone. And being the person to blame when things get missed or don’t go according to plan.

It’s knowing that the dentist appointment needs booking, that you’re running low on washing powder, that your mother-in-law’s birthday is in two weeks and nobody has ordered a card, that the car needs its MOT, that someone needs to defrost something for dinner, and that the boiler hasn’t been serviced since the last government. All simultaneously. All the time. In the background of whatever else you happen to be doing.

Your partner, meanwhile, is watching television without a single one of those thoughts crossing his mind. Blissfully, serenely, infuriatingly untroubled.

The French illustrator Emma captured it perfectly in a comic strip called You Should’ve Asked, which went viral in 2017 and caused millions of women worldwide to show their partners a cartoon and say, through slightly gritted teeth, “THIS. THIS IS WHAT I MEAN.” Suddenly there was a name for that particular exhaustion that had nothing to do with physical tiredness. It wasn’t just that we were doing more. It was that we were holding more.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s here: https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked

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Why We Never Talked About It

Young mothers today are having these conversations openly, demanding a fairer distribution of the cognitive load, and good for them! We, on the other hand — the women in our fifties and sixties — largely did not have that conversation. Not because we didn’t feel it, but because we genuinely didn’t realise it wasn’t just… normal.

We were the generation told we could have it all. What they neglected to mention was that having it all mostly meant doing it all while smiling pleasantly and pretending we weren’t exhausted. We organised the school runs and the Christmas dinners and the birthday parties and the thank-you notes and the dentist and the doctor and the vet and the plumber and the insurance renewals. We remembered everyone’s sizes, everyone’s allergies, everyone’s preferences, everyone’s friends’ names.

We did all of this while also, increasingly, holding down jobs. We just thought it was normal. We thought it was what being a woman meant.

It wasn’t a mental load. It was just life.

Except, of course, it was absolutely a mental load, and we absorbed it so completely that many of our partners genuinely have no idea it exists. They’re not (always) being deliberately unhelpful. They just never had to develop the mental muscle because we were already doing it. We trained them, in a way, to not notice. And now here we are.

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The Retirement Trap

Here’s the thing that nobody warns you about. When the children leave, when careers wind down, when life gets quieter — the mental load doesn’t pack up and go with them. It just quietly reshapes itself.

Now it’s the household admin. The finances. The social calendar. The family relationships — because someone has to remember to ring his sister on her birthday, and we all know who that someone is. The medical appointments. The holiday planning. The home maintenance schedule. The endless, invisible orchestration of a shared life that somehow remains, stubbornly, one person’s job.

And increasingly, as we move into the years where partners retire or slow down, there can be a new and particularly maddening dimension: more of him at home, with just as little awareness of everything it takes to run it.

Retirement is supposed to be the reward. It should not mean becoming a full-time household manager for two.

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So What Do We Actually Do?

This is the part where I could gently suggest communication and empathy and seeing things from his perspective. And yes, fine, all of that. But let’s be practical, because we are practical women and we have been patient for a very long time.

Name it. Literally. Show him the Emma comic strip. Have the conversation with the actual words “mental load” in it. Many partners, when they genuinely understand what it is — not just the tasks, but the constant background hum of knowing and tracking and planning — are genuinely surprised. Not all of them. But some. And that’s a start.

Make the invisible visible. For one week, write down every single thing you think about, track, plan, or action in relation to your shared household. Every phone call you make, every renewal you notice, every appointment you book, every social obligation you manage. Show him the list. Let the list do the talking.

Stop managing his responsibilities for him. This is the hard one. If something is agreed to be his job — genuinely let him do it, in his own time, in his own way. Do not remind him fourteen times. Do not do it yourself when it doesn’t get done fast enough. This feels deeply uncomfortable, because we are used to things getting done, and done properly, and done now. But rescuing him from every dropped ball means the balls never actually become his to carry.

Assign ownership, not tasks. There’s a crucial difference between “can you vacuum the living room?” and “you’re in charge of the living room.” Tasks are one-off. Ownership means he notices when it needs doing, he plans when to do it, and he thinks about it without being asked. That cognitive piece — the noticing — is the whole point.

Have the boring, specific conversation. Not a general complaint about fairness (though that has its place), but a practical division: who owns which domains. Finances. Garden. Cars. Social diary. Medical appointments. Home maintenance. Family relationships. These are all things that someone has to hold in their head. There is no reason that someone always has to be you.

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But Will It Actually Work?

Honestly? It depends on the man, and it depends on the relationship, and it depends on how entrenched forty years of habit have become. Some conversations will go better than others. Some partners will surprise you. Some will need the conversation more than once. A few will require what I can only describe as sustained, cheerful, immovable refusal to keep picking things up.

What I’d say is this: we are at a point in our lives where we have, arguably, earned the right to stop quietly absorbing everything. The children are grown. The years of keeping all the plates spinning simultaneously are behind us. This is, if anything, the ideal moment to redistribute the load – when there’s time to have the conversations, when habits can be renegotiated, and when there is less at stake if a ball is occasionally dropped.

We spent decades carrying more than our share without complaint, without recognition, and often without even realising there was another option.

There is another option.

It involves a frank conversation, a possibly startled husband, and the radical act of handing him the mental equivalent of half the shopping bags and walking away.

Your shoulders will thank you.

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Does any of this ring a bell? Have you managed to redistribute the mental load — or are you still working on it? I’d love to hear how you’re getting on in the comments.