Mental Load Is A Thing

Travis Kelce Calls Out His Brother In The Best Possible Way

The Kelces have a real bond — and ability to call each other out in a productive way.

by Devan McGuinness
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Originally Published: 
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA - MAY 11: (L-R) Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs and Jason Kelce of...
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They may be brothers, but that doesn’t mean Travis Kelce won’t gently call out Jason Kelce when he needs it. The duo had a TikTok video go viral after Jason tried to place blame on his wife, Kylie, where it didn’t belong. In a playful but serious way, Travis pointed out what Jason was unintentionally doing — and the whole interaction is a masterclass for men in calling out other men. One TikToker who focuses specifically on the sharing of household labor, in fact, stitched the video — giving it a second life and a whole new analysis.

Travis and Jason host a podcast together called New Heights, and in a September 13 episode, the two talked about the premiere of the family documentary KELCE that closely follows Jason Kelce and his family. Specifically, the two brothers discussed the premiere of their documentary and Jason's red (well, green) carpet look.

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“We had a picture of you on the green carpet, not the red carpet,” Travis said in a TikTok clip of the podcast recording. “You really got dressed up.” The dressed-up line is a gentle rib — Jason was very dressed down in shorts and flip-flops while his wife, Kylie, wore a gold satin skirt, fresh white tank, and heels.

“I was gonna have jeans on, but Kylie ...” Jason said before Travis jumped right in, asking, “Kylie, what?”

Jason said that his wife was going to bring him a change of clothes since he was heading to the premiere right after football, but that she was running late. And Travis had another perfect follow-up: "Why didn't Jason bring jeans for Jason?"

A brutal question: and one that squarely puts the blame on the person responsible for his own clothing. Jason tried to explain it all away by saying that he couldn’t possibly bring jeans to his football practice earlier that day, but gave it up. "I'm realizing now I probably can't blame Kylie for this,” he said, laughing.

But Travis didn't let it end there. "She was too busy putting jeans on the three girls," he noted, speaking of the three kids Jason and Kylie have.

"Yeah, she was too busy getting the entire family situated with the babysitter and then getting herself ready and making sure her parents were with her," Jason admitted.

What Jason and Travis are pointing to here — whether or not they realize it — is the sharing of the “mental load” in partnerships. The mental load is the intersection of “preparing, organizing and anticipating everything, emotional and practical, that needs to get done to make life flow,” per BBC, and it is often a task that falls on one person in the relationship. Often, too, these tasks are invisible, meaning people don’t realize how much one person is pulling on their end.

For example, while Jason had to worry about making sure he made it to his premiere on time, Kylie was worried about the same thing, and also that her kids made it to the premiere, and also that they were all dressed, and also that she had a babysitter so they could go... and the list goes on.

The clip did big numbers in September on TikTok, but was just given a new life when TikToker Laura Danger (@thatdarnchat), a popular voice who often speaks of mental load and invisible labor in relationships, found the clip. In a stitch of the video, she agreed with a commenter calling it the “future of accountability,” because of how Travis called out Jason, how they talked about why this wasn’t fair to place on Kylie, and that it all happened on their large platform.

“The trope for so long has been that dads are incapable of caring for themselves or others well,” she says. “And then we tell women to pick up the slack for them because that’s just how men are. What the two do in this clip is they take a very common, normal debacle, something that could happen to anybody, and they use it as an opportunity to challenge the social norm... [Jason’s] not necessarily rude to his wife about being late, but what [Travis] does is pushes back on that. Why didn’t you do it, dude?”

It’s a quietly awesome moment between two ultra-popular men — family-man-Jason and Taylor-Swift-boyfriend-Travis.

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