Leah Faustin describes her relationship with her wife, Yanica Faustin, as “symbiotic.”
“We get each other, and we get to share those responsibilities, and that feels really beautiful and supportive to me,” she says. But she assures that it wasn’t always this way.
Leah, a physical therapist, and Yanica, an assistant professor with a master’s in public health and PhD in maternal and child health, have been together since 2009 and have been married for nearly 11 years. They currently live in North Carolina with their three children.
When they first became parents, Yanica felt that more of the mental load fell on her. At the time, Leah was working a second-shift job at the hospital while Yanica was getting her PhD and tending to most of the responsibilities of their firstborn.
“I was the main person with him all the time,” she says. “I remember being like, ‘I cannot do this.’ Being the person who did pickups and dropoffs, and communicating with the teachers, and knowing when this was happening at the school, and knowing when that was happening, and taking him to swim—I feel like I was all over the place.”
What Yanica describes is an example of the mental load, which Speshál Walker Gautier, PhD, a licensed clinical psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, defines as the operating system or the cognitive process that keeps things going. The phrase, which first gained traction in 2017, has become a popular buzzword and the subject of a number of studies that have generally found that in heterosexual relationships, women manage the bulk of a family’s mental load. A 2024 study conducted in the U.S. by the University of Bath and the University of Melbourne found that moms manage approximately 71% of the mental load.
“People are often familiar with talking about division of labor as who does what in the house,” Dr. Gautier says. “The mental load, that cognitive load, is thinking about how all those things get done. The tracking, the managing schedules, family appointments, inventory in the home, planning, anticipating what’s next, and anticipating the needs of your children and your partner. It’s kind of that long mental to-do list that can sometimes feel invisible.”
For a while, the daily tasks that Yanica took on did feel invisible. Her being the primary parent continued when they went on to have their second and third child.
“It’d be like I have everything figured out and then she [Leah] just didn’t feel like it was as big of a deal, but it’s because she wasn’t in the thick of it,” Yanica says. “That part of our lives was really imbalanced.”
Things shifted when their roles reversed and Leah became the primary parent, tending to the household and children.
“She thought she was going to get this big break from her intense hospital acute care job. She’s like, ‘This is harder than the emergency room,’” Yanica shares of her wife. “When you’re not in it, you just can’t understand the magnitude of what it takes to take care of kids full time.”
Parenting is just one branch of the mental load. Other areas can include household tasks, meal planning, scheduling, and even emotional labor.
Same-sex couples still struggle to balance cognitive labor.
Before Ariana and Ashley Aghassi, who live in Texas with their 10-month-old son Archer, became parents, Ashley felt like she took on more of the physical labor.
“My wife felt like she’d done a lot more than I did,” Ariana says. “But you see what you’re doing rather than what the other person is doing the majority of the time.”
After their son was born, Ariana paused being in school full time in order to be home with their son more. “There [have] been some arguments or tension dividing up the housework in the past, and even now,” she says. “She [Ashley] works so much, and I’m with him [Archer] so much, and we’re both doing different things and working on our strengths, but she’s always tired from work, and I’m more mentally tired because I’ve had a crying baby all day.”
Dr. Gautier says the mental imbalance is inevitable, especially as responsibilities and day-to-day lives change for couples.
“People are very complex. At any given moment, they have different capacities and bandwidths to carry and hold onto things,” she says. “It doesn’t mean that things have to be inequitable. You can have people doing or deciding to do different amounts of carrying of the mental load in a way that’s very intentional, or you can have people who just kind of fall into those roles within the family in a way that can breed resentment because it didn’t feel like something that was discussed or mutually agreed upon.”
The mental load within LGBTQIA+ couples isn’t non-existent, but the idea that it is could derive from misconceptions, according to Dr. Gautier. “A common misconception is that because we live in such a heteronormative society, people default to that lens for looking at relationships, so they can have a really hard time thinking outside the box,” she says, adding that it’s also a misconception that people in same-sex relationships take on a particular role associated with either a more masculine or feminine personality. “It can be really hard for people to think about relationships outside of a heteronormative context.”
In heterosexual relationships, the distribution of cognitive labor is typically determined based on gender, with studies showing that women tend to take on more of the cognitive labor. But same-sex couples are not exempt from also falling into these traditional roles.
“My wife has always taken on the more—and I hate to even say this—masculine role from the beginning,” Ariana says. “I’m definitely more of the motherly, nurturing type. She does more of the physical stuff, and I’m a planner, so I keep up with things and remember all our appointments and stuff. From the beginning, it kind of was like we just had those roles set, and it just continued on.”
Ariana believes that this has caused a strain. “More so on my wife than on me,” she says. “I do think she [Ashley] gets tired or stressed because she feels like she’s doing a lot more — and it might look like that, but I also take on more of the mental load. Staying home with a baby all day is not doing nothing, but I do think she views it as she works all the time, and that I’m not necessarily working. I think she feels there are expectations sometimes for her to provide and for me to be more of the caretaker, and that’s my strength, so I’m ok with it, but I do think it’s a lot of stress on her to do things around the house and then work a lot.”
Same-sex couples navigate the mental load with more flexibility.
When asked if she believed there were any differences between how same-sex couples navigate the emotional and physical labor of day-to-day life as opposed to heterosexual couples, Dr. Gautier shared what she’s seen within her clinical experience.
“There are all sorts of ways that people have already redefined what society has told them and are kind of not confined by societal expectations, and with the being said, the heteronormal model that people think about in terms of masculine versus feminine roles in relationships and people falling into that just based on gender scripts, I think there’s just more freedom and flexibility to create what people want things to look like or need things to look like in their relationships. If there’s no script, then we kind of get to figure out how we can do that together.”
She says that same-sex couples tend to approach the division of labor in a more equitable fashion, and they often communicate more. “There’s a lot for us to learn in terms of that willingness to be very communicative and to have flexibility. When there’s less rigidity, there’s room to create what you need.”
Davon Bagley and LeVon Fickling, who live in Atlanta, Georgia, with their 18-month-old daughter Isley, tend to meet once a month to check in with each other about their needs and areas they can improve in.
“For us, it just takes a lot of communication, like overly communicating because our schedules can be ever-changing,” LeVon, who’s a flight attendant, says. “We’re two different people, so one of us may think that we’re doing enough, and it may not be enough for the other person, but you wouldn’t know that if you don’t communicate.”
Overall, the two have a structured understanding despite their busy schedules, with Davon, who works in TV production, describing their strategy as tag-teaming. Since he’s a morning person, he tends to take over the daytime tasks, and then LeVon will step in once he’s awake. They also have a nanny Tuesday through Friday for extra help with childcare and household tasks.
“I think we also know our strong points and our weak points,” LeVon says, with Davon adding, “We jump in when we see what needs to be done. No real formula, no real schedule. We just know what works for us.”
But even still, LeVon says he feels like he often carries more of the mental load. “I just know what’s going on more in the house,” he says. And to add onto the cognitive labor as far as the household and childcare, LeVon also expressed another factor of the mental load that may appear for same-sex couples — navigating external components. They often have to worry about things like people questioning their family dynamic or taking their daughter to the bathroom in public because most men’s restrooms don’t have changing tables, and family bathrooms aren’t always available.
The mental load isn’t just heavy at home.
“One of the biggest things that stands out to me is the vulnerability to more stress from societal factors,” Dr. Gautier confirmed when speaking on the differences in the mental load between heterosexual and same-sex couples.
Yanica and Leah expressed experiencing this, too, particularly as an interracial same-sex couple. “The emotional and mental toll of having to make sure that you are securing your family’s right is something different from heterosexual couples who can conceive a child without the financial and legal considerations,” Yanica says, adding that they have to worry about securing their parental rights, saving up money to have kids, and staying up to date on laws that could affect their family.
“Heterosexual couples aren’t nervous right now about the legality of their marriage going up to be debated or the legality of their parentage. It’s an emotional, mental toll I would say a lot of same-sex parents think about in a way that heterosexual parents don’t.”
Navigating imbalances of cognitive labor can be a challenge for any couple. What seems to help each of the families interviewed is keeping an intentional line of communication in order to relay their needs and make shifts as necessary.
“Finding points of connection, increasing our time to connect outside of the financial and household, and childcare responsibilities helped us navigate things,” Yanica says. “Oftentimes when your life gets consumed with just those things, you kind of feel like business partners in the endeavor that is life rather than two people who love each other and decided to make children together, decided to get married, decided to buy a house together, and build up a family and home.”
