Enough with the emotional labour – I’m going on strike
Recently I have been trying something. It is totally counter-intuitive in many ways, not least because I am a woman, but also because of the job I do. My professional role as a broadcaster is underpinned by my capabilities to talk and keep the conversation flowing. I need to disrupt the normal rules of engagement at times and poke through the clichés too, while – yes – keeping that conversation flowing.
In fact, I often say that I am in the business of conversation, where all of the boring bits, the filler, are produced out, in the hope of a dazzling radio or television programme emerging. That’s the ultimate goal.
And yet in my personal life, far from the mic, I have been experimenting with not making conversation with someone if they are not reciprocating. I am not talking about shy people or people who are a bit reticent.
Those are some of my favourite types to try to unlock; it happens slowly but often produces great and unexpected insights. Working harder to connect with someone others may not flock towards is one of my favourite pastimes. No, I am talking about those who are expecting me to do all of the work and giving deliberately short or vague answers. They might not be doing it with mal-intent, but exactly who are they expecting to pick up the slack and make the moment OK? Or less awkward? Me? No ta.
I have been downing tools on this particular form of emotional labour for some time. Like with the man who said to me recently: “I work in PE.” Suspecting that he meant private equity, I feigned ignorance and replied: “Physical education?”
Despite probably having loved the idea of being PE teacher at school (he was also a keen cyclist – full Lycra squad job), he looked at me like I had just crawled out of a rock and had no understanding of the world. He then corrected me and offered little else. So I did and said nothing. I drank my drink and looked at him. And just waited. Can I tell you something else I am good at beyond facilitating and guiding people though any sort of conversional quagmire? Silence. Sitting in it. Standing in it. Holding eye contact in it. I am exquisite at it and almost revel in the stinky awkwardness of it.
I have had years of training, both professionally and personally, and like most people, I used to struggle with it, over-compensating and talking too much. But now I am fully at one with zero chat.
My personal best: I once sat in 12 seconds of silence on air as a would-be MP laboured over what their answer should be to a question. I looked at them, they at me, and the seconds rolled by. Twelve might not sound like a lot but try it now and you will realise that on a radio show it is an age.
As my producer frantically looked at me, beseeching me to break it for fear that our listeners might have thought we had dropped off the network or worse, I had keeled over and was no more, I waited. And waited. An answer eventually came and the social order was restored; my producer’s breathing resumed. I don’t know how many seconds passed with PE man, but he was then forced to make the next remark, while I had time to eat some more of my food at the formal dinner where we were thrust together. The work was on him.
Over the past six months or so, since returning to working life from my second maternity leave, I have been on a social strike of sorts when I am not at work. It began during my stint full-time caring for both of our children.
This is often a period when women feel their most invisible and bloody knackered, like they have nothing to say or offer conversationally beyond the minutiae of our caring work.
But while I may not have had the range of a more varied work day to pull upon for vignettes or stories, I had a stronger need for adult conversation than ever before.
And yet with little energy in the tank, I couldn’t do all of the heavy lifting with an unwilling or lazier conversational partner, so I simply stopped compensating for them.
I was reminded of this slightly unwitting new strategy of mine this week on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s
Hour, when I had the pleasure of interviewing the journalist and author Rose Hackman (inset left), who wrote the book Emotional Labour. She argues brilliantly that there is no such thing as “female intuition”, that nebulous thing
I used to struggle with silence… but now I am fully at one with zero chat
If I were an England supporter, I would be more concerned with the spiralling cost of the new shirts rather than the colour of the cross. An ordinary adult shirt will cost you £84.99. A ‘match’ shirt would set you back £124.99 for an adult.
What a rip off!
JAMES LEWIS SOMPTING,
WEST SUSSEX