Imagine an entire city. Its buildings, monuments, bridges, parks, streets, avenues, stadiums, event centers, neighborhoods. Now imagine that same city without an electrical grid, running water, sewage systems, underground cables, and without any of the continuous maintenance that no one ever sees.

How do you think it would be to live in such city? It wouldn’t take much imagination to see that it would resemble life in the medieval era, marked by the constant presence of war, disease, and scarcity.

This city’s invisible infrastructure represents the work women do in the world we live in. It is the kind of labor that does not appear in contracts, is not counted in GDP, does not generate bonuses, and certainly does not confer status. And yet, without it, nothing functions. Or it might function – but so precariously that we would slip back into the deprivation of the past.

We call the work done primarily by women to keep bodies alive, homes liveable, relationships minimally humane, and societies emotionally stable “love,” “instinct,” “vocation,” or even a “feminine trait.” 

This rational, productive, meritocratic world is built on the unspoken expectation that someone—usually a woman – will always be there to sustain everything that goes beyond what is obvious, functional, and predictable.

This work goes far beyond caring for other people; it is the labor of organizing human experience itself – anticipating needs, regulating emotional climates, translating feelings, preventing conflicts, repairing ruptures, keeping bonds alive, and remembering celebratory dates to keep meaning alive.

A form of labor with no vacations and no pay, carried out preventively, without applause and without pause. All in the name of love and maternal instinct.

The problem is that, in this world, love cannot be remunerated without being disqualified as such. To name it as work would, paradoxically, be taken as acknowledging its own nonexistence.

Men also pay a high price. They are socialized not to feel, not to ask, and not to depend. This produces loneliness, psychological distress, and a profound emotional poverty. But there is an undeniable structural difference that this cost does not keep other people functioning. It keeps the individual himself operating within the system, alone.

By contrast, women’s invisible labor sustains others. It sustains children, partners, families, environments, and institutions. It is continuous maintenance work. When women reach exhaustion, everything collapses.

In heterosexual relationships, for example, even when both partners work outside the home, the woman often becomes the invisible manager of the relationship. She thinks for the relationship. She feels for the relationship. She initiates difficult conversations, suggests therapy, manages crises, adjusts expectations, and makes silent concessions that often – if not most of the time – border on self-abandonment.

Men, in turn, tend to enter the relationship in moments of crisis, at critical points, when something is already on the verge of breaking apart – episodically and reactively… when the city’s power grid fails, and sometimes not even then...

It’s not that men don’t love. It’s that male love has historically been dissociated from everyday responsibility. For many men, loving still does not require learning emotional language, taking care of the home, sustaining relationships, or revisiting privileges. For many women, loving requires all of that – and the renunciation of themselves.

I write about this because I see how tired, resentful, empty, and diminished women are – even when they seemingly “have it all.” They mistake exhaustion for personal inadequacy.

This arrangement is not only emotionally unequal but, many times, also financially risky – and that risk falls almost entirely on women. By taking on unpaid caregiving, household maintenance, and the emotional sustenance of the family, many women give up productive time, career advancement, financial stability, and economic autonomy. What is sold as a “choice” or an “emotional priority” is, in practice, a contract without signatures.

Illustrations by John Holcroft

For this reason, caring for a family without remuneration is not a neutral act. It is an extremely high-risk investment in a system that offers no safety net. When a relationship deteriorates, grows cold, or becomes emotionally sterile and mechanical, women often find themselves caged by dependency. The lack of independent income, financial reserves, or a continuous professional trajectory turns emotional exhaustion into material confinement.

Many women remain in emotionally dead relationships not because they fail to recognize the absence of affection, appreciation, intimacy, or reciprocity, but because leaving would mean facing a real, concrete, and immediate financial instability. The cost of leaving is not abstract. It involves housing, livelihood, children, health, aging, and survival.

There is a second factor that cages women – and one that is deeply uncomfortable to admit which is time.

Beyond all of this, women are conditioned to believe that they have passed their “expiration date,” because female value is concentrated in appearance, youth, and desirability. This creates the sense that, after a certain point, true love ceases to be a real possibility and becomes a lost privilege.

By tying value, love, and the future to female youth, the system produces a quiet resignation and a discreet form of despair. Many women internalize the idea that aging means becoming less lovable, less chosen, less worthy of desire and care. Slowly and subtly, the hope for a reciprocal, fair, and living love fades from the inside out.

Caught between the fear of material instability and the fear of emotional irrelevance, many women begin to interpret emptiness as destiny. Remaining in a relationship without intimacy comes to feel safer than facing the possibility – socially constructed as unlikely – of starting over.

Convincing women that their value expires in order to drastically reduce their options is a highly sophisticated mechanism of control. 

Staying is not an affective choice; it is a strategy of symbolic survival. The relationship is sustained by financial stability and by the belief that there is no longer any love possible outside it.

The paradox in all of this is that the very work meant to generate security – caring for the home, the family, the relationship – is precisely what economically and emotionally weakens the person who does it. By devoting years, even decades, to the invisible sustenance of another person and of the bond itself, a woman becomes economically and socially disposable, because the system treats this sacrifice as virtue.

As the writer and psychoanalyst Lucas Lujan puts it:

“Because of the unpredictability, the precariousness, and recurring frustrations, loving is always an act of courage.”

Thus, for many women, loving means placing their own financial future in the background in the name of a relational stability that, ironically, is never guaranteed. And when that stability proves to be illusory, the price to pay is already too high to be ignored.

The therapist and writer Terrence Real observes that many women feel deeply unhappy in their marriages not because they demand too much, but because they long for an emotional presence that most men were simply not socialized to provide. At the same time, men feel unhappy precisely because they live with increasingly frustrated women within these relationships – creating a cycle of mutual resentment that feeds on itself.

To sustain the bond, many women learn to repress their own needs. But, as Real points out, when needs are repressed, so too is the sense of pleasure. Love ceases to be a space of vitality and becomes an exercise of restraint. Desire does not disappear – it is simply and systematically ignored.

I do not write this to attack men. This is about challenging the idea that life sustains itself on its own. It is about beginning to question the notion that love can exist detached from recognition and affective reciprocity – a narrative we grow up hearing and seeing everywhere, one that conditions our subconscious to accept a failed collective arrangement as natural.

Yes, love can be care. But care without choice, without reciprocity, and without recognition is not love... it is pure extraction.

If you have ever wondered about the purpose of feminism, about women’s apparent exhaustion, or why more and more women choose not to be in relationships in order to prioritize their careers, not to have children, or simply to start over... this is the reason.

After all, a city without infrastructure is ruin.

Till the next sip,