All That Time You’re Spending Deciphering Men’s Texts Finally Has A Name

New research looks at how much time — emotional labor, even — women spend decoding men's texts and communication.

As Ellie Anderson approached 30, she started thinking about all the time she and her friends had wasted poring over conversations and texts they’d received from men they’d dated: Was that stray “K” over text cause for alarm? How long should you wait to say you had a great time on a date and want to do it again soon without coming on too strong?

“These conversations generally happened when one of us started dating a new guy. A lot of the time, we’d try to guess at what a guy wanted and how to avoid ‘freaking him out,’” said Anderson, an assistant professor of philosophy at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Of course, the early days of a relationship are often a period of uncertainty, but it seemed to Anderson that the uncertainty usually worked in men’s favor. Meanwhile, it forced women to spend a lot of time trying to guess at men’s feelings because the men themselves were unwilling or unable to fully express themselves, Anderson said.

That kind of unspoken work deserved a definition, Anderson thought. On her popular philosophy podcast, “Overthink” ― and now in a recently published academic paper ― Anderson coined the phrase “hermeneutic labor” to describe the emotional work that goes into trying to decipher men’s often muddy communication. (It sounds highfalutin but hermeneutics is basically just the interpretation of language, whether written or spoken ― it’s a word that’s often used in philosophy and religious studies.)

“Hermeneutic labor imbalances are produced by men’s inability to name and interpret their feelings and by the societal expectation that women manage their own emotions and those of their male partners simultaneously,” Anderson wrote.