March 18, 2025
Explaining Mental Load to a Partner: Podcast Episode #282
Kristin Revere and Zach Watson discuss invisible labor and partner communication in the latest episode of Ask the Doulas. Zach is a Certified Fair Play Facilitator and invisible labor coach with Zach Think Share Creative.
Hello, hello! This is Kristin with Ask the Doulas, and I am so excited to chat about the partner role and the invisible labor at home with Zach Watson. Zach is the coach, content creator, and owner of Zach Think Share Creative. He’s also a fair play facilitator. Welcome, Zach!
Thanks for having me, Kristin. I appreciate it.
There’s so much to this role, and we’ve had a few of our clients’ partners on the podcast and some male guests, but to specifically focus on this niche of invisible labor coaching and teaching men to understand the invisible labor at home is so different than the other fair play facilitator guest I had, who was more focused on the female role and how to have conversations to create equity, whether this is preparing for baby one, or this is the fourth baby, for example.
So I’m curious to hear how this all began. How did you become an invisible labor coach?
If you really want to go all the way back, I’d say it started with my mom being a feminist, despite calling herself a humanist. It’s like, come on, Mom, you’re definitely a feminist. But she’s been teaching me about my male privilege, I think, all my life, or as long as I can remember.
When our child was coming, we did not use a doula. And in those months of knowing the baby was coming, thinking about things coming up, there were moments when I know my wife was making sacrifices. And I remember my mom asking me back when my wife was first pregnant – she said, are you going to be pregnant with her? Most people might not know what that means, but contextually, I knew what she was asking was, are you going to also not take Tylenol or ibuprofen? Are you going to also not drink? Are you going to also cut back on caffeine with her? Are you going to be making sacrifices along with her? We don’t drink a ton, but we drank enough that it was impactful for her; it felt like missing something. So I cut that out with her. I shared a little bit on social media about a couple of things after the fact because Alyssa called me on it. She said, are you just doing this for social media? There was a moment where I wore a weighted vest to school – I was a teacher – I wore it underneath my hoodie so that the kids didn’t necessarily notice. They probably just thought I looked a little chunky that day. What I didn’t have the words for then, but I do now, is that I was trying to do some of the emotional labor along with her of the new reality of her body. So I know that I can’t replicate, really, any of it, and I can attempt to put some obstacles and challenges in my way, such that I’m feeling some of those physical symptoms of what she was dealing with. I tried out a handful of those things, and I think it was to develop some body awareness of my own privilege. That’s kind of where it started.
Once our baby was born, I started sharing on TikTok about the four months of paternity leave that I took.
Four months; that is amazing. That should be standard.
I had no idea that it was that crazy an idea. I had no idea how that would be looked at, like holy crap, he’s doing something different. So that in itself was something. Along the way, one of the first really viral videos that came up was I shared a moment. My wife was really committed to breastfeeding, and it was probably 1:00 a.m. or something. There was a lot of newborn crying that night, and I turned my phone on and started recording. I was just trying to calm our baby down. We had worked out fair play language of a minimum standard of care, that if I couldn’t get her calmed down in about ten minutes, I was expected to go wake up Alyssa. And in that video – it was about a 50-second video – I just shared some gratitude for moms and the sacrifices that they make, and I said in every 90 minutes or so, Alyssa ends up getting woken up because our newborn is hungry. I’m doing my best – the hard part is not listening to our newborn cry; it’s knowing that Alyssa expects me to go wake her up, and she’ll be mad if I don’t and let her sleep. That was where my initial following came from. I had another video that month talking about the sixth S. I know we talked about the five Ss of soothing, and I said that there was one missing from the key playbook, which is smell. I had done all five of them, and it wasn’t working, and then I put my wife’s shirt over my shoulder, and that got our newborn to be comforted. So that was the beginning of it.
When Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was really quiet on the internet, and I was trying to just give the space to women and sit back and observe, struggling as a content creator because I wasn’t growing, and at the same time, it was because I didn’t feel like I was an appropriate voice for what was going on in the world. And I made a video. Three of my content creator friends recommended I read Fair Play, so I read Fair Play and I started doing live reactions to the chapters as I was reading them and started talking a little bit about mental load. I made the first couple of videos saying, hey, I think I just added mental load for my wife. I asked her this question – we were putting our infant down for a nap, and I said, hey, should we give her water or milk? And I did this self-reflection of, I probably could have just said, let’s do milk; here’s why I’m thinking that. Or here’s water; here’s why I’m thinking that. I kicked off the video saying mental load, part infinity – an example of where I give my wife mental load, part infinity. That had 6.4 million views, and so as any good content creator would do, I kept talking about that same thing. I’m on part 297 this week of that mental load series.
About three or four months into talking about it, I got the fair play facilitator training, and I got countless messages and DMs saying can you please put together some modules, some things to teach my husband. I started offering my first calls. To the disagreement with my coach – I hired a coach to help me grow on TikTok – and I put a 101 call for $40. I was like, dude, no one’s going to book time on my calendar for $40 to talk about mental load. And I was very wrong about that.
Was it a female audience or men?
So I decided when I hired my coach that I wanted to work with men because there’s nothing I really could teach women besides vocabulary, I think. Awareness and vocabulary is about what I often teach women online. But for the most part, it’s the 31-year-old Zach – I’m 34 now – I call myself sometimes a recovering man child because it felt like there were so many moments when I was so unaware of the invisible labor going on around me, even in 2020, before Alyssa was pregnant. She had brought an article to me, I guess – who knows, maybe it was the original fair play list – but she was really scared to share that with me, and she remembered a colleague who was talking about it, and she wanted to share it with me. She had a lot of concern about bringing that to my attention. I think looking back on how defensive I must have been to not be open and willing to hear that conversation – it’s really disappointing. I want to deliver that message to the men who are getting ripe for hearing that message, and ideally, a lot of my clients are in the early years of being fathers. Most of the guys I work with probably have zero-year-old to about 10-year-olds.
That’s the time to reach them versus getting into the teenage years, for example.
Yeah. So that’s kind of my story. It was a crowdsourced idea. People appreciated the way that I was talking about it, so I started one on one coaching, and then a couple of videos did really well last year, and Kristen Bell reached out to me, and I got to collaborate with her last January. I made the jump, and now I do this full time.
Amazing. I love that you can work with anyone, anywhere. I will certainly be sending our clients’ partners to you because we talk about fair play and the book and hiring coaches. The fact that you have a target clientele, and you can relate. It’s like some of those bootcamp classes focused on labor and how those can be so beneficial rather than hearing from a female instructor and having it just be geared to the dads and be fun, honestly. There are male doulas, and I attend conferences with them. It’s really fun to hear about how they serve their clientele and have a different slant on education.
So you said most of your content is on Instagram, Zach?
I did, yeah. That’s probably the majority of it. I know there’s some people who kind of binge my content, and they watch a handful of videos. If people are looking for some slightly more linear resources, you can go through some of my coaching for free at the Mental Load Basics Community, for people with a low budget who are looking for some support and a place there can be in a community. I think it’s scary for men to be in my comment section. They’re afraid to ask, well, why is my wife upset when I come home and ask what I can do to help? That community exists for them to ask those questions and to have that kind of back and forth.
Versus publicly; that makes so much sense. And I find in my own social network, women tend to spend more time on Instagram, but you’re finding men on that platform. Is that because women are telling their partners?
1000%.
I wondered; okay.
Yeah, I have a 91% women audience. I think that I speak women. I speak mom, and I’m translating for the guys who just are not getting it. The language barrier is patriarchy.
Well, I am so thankful that you are doing this work. It’s very important, and I feel like even – my kids are now in middle school, and even in paperwork and navigating school meetings and keeping on top of things, there is a lot to do as far as invisible labor and mental load. My kids will naturally come to me to sign a permission slip, and it’s like, well, Dad’s right over there. Why don’t you go have him fill it out? But yeah, trying to be intentional about that.
In terms of the mental load that you own at home that is arguably the most painful that you wish your partner would own more of – what is that for you?
Well, part of it isn’t gender based, Zach. I am a planner by nature. My background is working in ad sales and political fundraising. I’ve done some event planning when I worked in public relations. My mind is geared to making lists. My husband is more creative and is not one to plan or to love to check things off a list. So naturally, and oftentimes I feel like couples tend to be opposite of each other –
Can I push back for a second?
Of course.
When I ask that question – I asked, what is some of the mental load that you own that you wish your partner would own more of. And you responded with, “Not necessarily gender.” I didn’t bring gender into this. You did.
Yeah. You’re right.
What is some of it that maybe defaults to you? Maybe not because you’re a mom, not because you’re a woman, but just defaults to you as Kristin.
Not gender based or personality; got it.
And within the things that default to you, what would you love for your partner to either step up on or own a little bit better such that it wasn’t defaulting to you?
So maybe some of the scheduling. I do travel for speaking engagements and so on. Everything from the vet appointment to dentist appointments – certainly, if I end up traveling during an appointment I’ve made, he will take the kids, based on my schedule and not his, but I have taken on that mental load of all of the scheduling, and some of the kid activity drop-off and pick-up. So, yeah.
Let me make a guess here. Given that you said you’re a planner and that’s how you roll – I would say my wife is pretty similar. We recently moved and we’re in the process of finding a new daycare set up for us. Our close date was December 16th, and naturally, within the following two weeks – probably even before that – Alyssa was already neck deep into what the daycare options were in the town that we moved to.
Of course.
And I had this moment as she was talking about it, saying, yeah, we got to get some tours on the schedule – and I coach this, and I’ve been doing this now for about two and a half years. I said, how many hours do you think you’ve researched this so far? She said eight to twelve. I’m almost mad that she’s ahead of me. Because I’m able to acknowledge within myself that anger, I’m realizing it’s actually fear and shame that, one, she’s going to resent me for not getting ahead of it on her. This is not inherently urgent and important to me, such that I had the ball on this. Which is what I coach a lot of my clients to do and what I would imagine – like, if your husband were looking to make strides for improving the mental load with you – I encourage the men that I work with to run a weekly meeting with their partner. What that looked like for me is it was a backstop opportunity for me to catch up with her on some level on the researching. If I just say, hey, Alyssa, I’m going to do more research and catch up to you, with no time to talk about it, with no calendar date, what’s going to end up happening is I’m not going to prioritize it and it’s going to fall to the wayside. But we had our meeting on January 1st to talk about it, and that gave me a time – almost like preparing for a sales meeting or a business meeting. You come prepared with your notes.
I think all of us, especially men who are successful in whatever career we’re in – we’ve learned all these skills, and we know that we’re competent in them in our careers, and we’ve been taught by our culture, by patriarchy, by a lot of other larger forces than us – that our wives have got it, and they don’t really need our help. Then at some point, along with wanting that, I think we have this moment of, if I have a happy wife, I’ll have a happy life. We learn that probably on our wedding day. The uncle who is in probably a sexless, probably on the brink of divorce marriage, he tells us that is the way to live life. And we buy it because they’re old and they’ve been together for 25 years. The problem with that, I think, is it starts when we’re kidless and we’re young, and it’s like happy life – hey, what do you want to get for dinner tonight? Let’s get tacos, and she says, no, I don’t want to tacos. You know what, happy wife; happy life; we’ll eat whatever she wants. Go ahead; you choose, honey. And over time, that turns into a learned helplessness where she has to make the choices instead of wanting to. And so we get lulled into this boiling pot like a frog, that she is expected to make those choices.
Then when kids come and we haven’t made a shift, when we haven’t made a change in our home, that’s when it starts to become a real issue because you have exponentially more things to schedule and think about and care about. That’s when we really need to make those shifts around how we think about it.
So coming back to the solution that I offer for people, just like when I was in sales and I had a client meeting, I know that I’m going to do my research. I’m going to block time to do it. I want to get ahead of those things and I want to talk about minimum standards of care. I want to talk about, when we’re looking at daycare, what do we care about? What are the things that we want to ask when we’re on the tour? It forced me to care about something that I know is not going to culturally fall on me.
Certainly, childcare does tend to fall on the woman during pregnancy, and now we’re in a childcare crisis. With your move, of course you would both want to get on that as soon as possible.
Coming back to where you would love to see an adjustment in the mental load – again, if your partner was looking to improve the way that he’s going about it, I’m sure he has some level of thinking, especially self-identified, like, I’m good at planning; that’s what I do. You’re already planning six months in advance and he’s maybe thinking a couple less months in advance. Having that weekly meeting – and I coach the guys that I work with to run that meeting – it’s saying hey, this wedding coming up in a couple weeks – I don’t know if you’ve already done the Airbnb or if you’ve already done the hotel or the planning of it. Let’s talk about that real quick. It gives him the opportunity to identify what exists on the family plate and what we can put onto our own plates, and I think the way it currently exists in a ton of homes, it’s what’s on the wife’s plate, and it’s putting what’s on the wife’s plate over to the husband’s plate.
Yes, I did gender that a little bit, but that’s what I think happens a lot. I hear, “I’ll help with this,” or “Yeah, let me take something off your plate,” rather than, “I want to contribute to our home in a way that’s much more equitable, and a lot of things keep falling onto your plate, honey, and I need more of those things to be on my plate.” Rather than looking at it as two plates, I encourage people to look at it as three. There’s a general set of needs in the home. What can be put on the two, rather than it starts on her plate and then it’s things getting pushed over to his.
Thank you for the idea! I’m going to start with the meetings. I feel like we are really great at dividing tasks. And my husband loves to cook, so he does the majority of the cooking when he’s not traveling for work. But the mental load is something that’s not talked about enough, and the invisible labor and the fact that women like myself often don’t speak up; we just do it, and then we’re drained. And our partner wonders why we’re exhausted.
Women who are listening right now who are in the stage where they’re probably getting close to quiet quitting – I talk to a lot of guys in the community that I run with them. I think there’s a lot of them who have a lot of fear around losing the most important relationship of their life, and one of the things I always am pointing out at them is the fact that she’s mad at you right now is good, because she wants change and she’s not quiet quitting. I can’t tell you how many people I see talk about how divorce papers get served, and they think it’s out of nowhere. They thought everything was okay. We weren’t arguing. It’s because she quiet quit. I’m sure many of these podcasts are going to get sent over to the husbands hopefully to learn about this, but know that if you’re still in a stage where she’s sending you the Instagram reels, sending you the podcasts, sending you the audiobooks, she’s in the time where she still wants to fight for the marriage, and she hasn’t gotten resigned that there’s no change that can happen.
Right, and adding a baby, whether it’s the first or the fourth, another child can just impact the marriage even more. So again, I appreciate the work you’re doing! Any final tips for our listeners, Zach?
I would say, knowing that the majority of your listeners are women, I would say that the most common DM question I get is from women, asking how do I explain to the partner in my life. I don’t make reels on Instagram about this anymore because I get attacked with people saying, Zach, stop giving us more emotional labor to do. I thought the goal was for him to do it. But I’ll share it on a podcast because I think you can hear the whole, a little bit more than 90 seconds, with context. That’s the most common question I get.
Yes, this does take emotional labor. There are two ways that I go about it with folks. I kind of did it a little bit with you. I look to see, what is your current situation, and how can I talk about that with you? I point out to the men where they’re doing invisible labor in their jobs, which this society has told them is their most important role, bringing money home. If I were talking with a salesperson, I might say, you actually do emotional labor for your clients. When they have a question, you answer that real quick, especially if there’s a big deal on the line. When you’re going to schedule an appointment with someone who’s a potential client, maybe you talk to them for the first time. I was in sales for two years, and I was taught, one, you assume the close. You say, hey, let’s start a conversation next week on how we can do this. Does Tuesday at 11:30 work for you? Versus, when’s a good time on your calendar – because that’s decision fatigue. So we’re inherently doing these things in our careers, and if we can be labeling that for the men in their careers, in their lives, where they’re doing it, they’re going to be much more willing in my opinion to see where it shows up in their homes.
So if you’re saying, hey, honey, it sounds like you do a lot of emotional labor for your client, and they’re like, yeah, I am doing emotional labor – how about that? And then a month later, when you’re saying, hey, it’s a lot of emotional labor working with our kids. I would really appreciate if you could do some of that emotional labor with our kids when it comes to fighting them on bedtime. Then they can hear it a little bit better because they know that they do it. I think where I was a couple years ago, and I think where a lot of men are, they think that what culture has told them to do, which is to bring home a paycheck – and a lot of them are doing that – they feel like that’s supposed to be enough based on what they’ve been taught. And when they’re not doing that, they feel really invalidated, I think. So if we can help them see where they’re doing that specific kind of labor and using those specific labels of mental load, invisible labor, emotional labor – even domestic labor of filling up the coffee pot at work. When we can label it for them in a place where they feel confident, I think they have a lot more empathy for seeing and appreciating where it shows up in their home.
Yes. That makes sense. Well, thank you! So how can our listeners connect with you, Zach?
The number one place to find me, if you want slightly educational, sometimes entertaining, videos is probably Instagram in 90-second bits. If you’re looking for a little bit more support, if you’re looking for a safe space for your husband to ask questions and learn a little bit for free, my Mental Load Basics Community. We have monthly challenges. In September, we had cash prizes for the guy who could name the most mental load for his wife. October was the cash prize for the guy that could name the most mental load that he owned for himself. In November, I stopped gendering it. We did who could name the most emotional labor that their partner did. In December, we did mental load again. In January, we’ve been doing the Core Emotional Wheel from Connection Codes and improving our emotional literacy.
And for our listeners who want to learn more, what resources do you suggest as far as fair play goes?
I would say first getting the book. I’m a big fan – I know a lot of people get the cards that go with it. I’m also a fan of the Persist app. If you search Timeforpersist.com, it’s a digital resource. It’s like the digital version of the fair play cards. We use that at home as a diagnostic for seeing where the domestic labor lies within your home and seeing the heaviness of it in a graphical format rather than it being completely invisible. Those are the first resources that I would point you to.
Thank you so much! We will have to chat again soon, Zach!
IMPORTANT LINKS
Birth and postpartum support from Gold Coast Doulas