Why Acts of Service Might Never be My Love Language

by Soumya Singhal

I truly believe that actions speak louder than words, which is why this article I’m writing is so ironic. For, I would choose words of affirmation as my favourite love language over acts of service anyday.

“Acts of service” are actions, small and big, that make the receiver—in particular one’s partner—feel appreciated and their life easier. Interestingly, these very acts of service often account for a woman's daily routine within the household under care work. Acts of service and care work find common ground in cooking, cleaning, child or elderly care, and even emotional labour.

Care work is any work performed in service of others, especially the sick, children, and the elderly. It supports the growth and well-being of others. Women spend a disproportionately higher number of hours on unpaid care work than their male counterparts. Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) hints that this gap can be between twice to ten times the care work men put in.

The onset of the industrial era, and the subsequent bifurcation of the workplace and place of residence, shifted the burden of care work from the family primarily to women. Moreover, domestic work became an essential part of caring for and keeping a steady workforce. After all, a productive worker needed to be well-fed and well-rested, which meant that he had to be cared for by a non-working family member. Further, care work is as generational as it is gendered. The division between the private and public and the seclusion of women in the former influenced the transfer of knowledge from one generation to another among women. This information asymmetry is often seen in how a mother teaches her daughter to cook as a domestic, nay marital, duty. The daughter passes the same knowledge to her progeny, often with less scope for generational disruption.

Identification of care work as “work” in itself begets the question of its recognition as labour worthy of remuneration. Unpaid care work is time and energy-intensive. It restricts women's access to the labour market, relegating them to low-wage, insecure work. According to the OECD, women in countries where they spend twice as much time as men caring for their children earn just 65% of what their male counterparts earn for the same profession. When women spend five times as much time on unpaid care duties, the percentage lowers to 40%.

The willingness of women to accept care work as their primary work also rests in the idea of what Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum call “adaptive preferences.” Adaptive preferences, they believe, are the internalisation of external restrictions on an individual's well-being, such that a woman accepts and even values her deprivation because she cannot imagine a better life for herself. The limitation of her economic purpose as a caregiver, thus, restricts her overall growth. The idea of adaptive preferences reinstates the argument that the gendered division of labour, where women are obligated to perform care work, turns acts of service from an expression of love to fulfilment of duty.

My feminist interpretation of acts of service forbid me from looking at them as a love language simply because of the asymmetry in expectations from genders in performing said acts. Moreover, the absence of remuneration should ideally bring out a voluntary aspect to undertaking care work. Unfortunately, gender roles dictate otherwise. When we look at care work as a performance of gender characteristics, we reinforce the disproportionate burden on women to offer the same. This might numb the receiver to the labour involved in regularly performing acts of service. When evidence shows forced or expected unpaid care work as a symbol of patriarchy, I find identifying genuine love somewhere between the lines of performativity hard.

I believe that disgendering care work can be a starting point to salvage acts of service as a love language. While opening car doors and buying flowers are as chivalrous an act as can be, it would be great to see men split the chores as well as the bills.