Women are growing tired of ‘mankeeping’, but it appears to be getting worse

Justin Lioi is a licensed clinical social worker in New York City who specialises in therapy for men. When he sees a new client, one of the first things he asks is: “Who can you talk to about what’s going on in your life?”

Much of the time, Lioi says, his straight male clients tell him that they rarely open up to anyone but their girlfriends or wives. Their partners have become their unofficial therapists, he says, “doing all the emotional labour”.

That particular role now has a name: mankeeping. The term, coined by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, has taken off online. It describes the work women do to meet the social and emotional needs of the men in their lives, from supporting their partners through daily challenges and inner turmoil, to encouraging them to meet up with their friends.

Many men look to their wives as unofficial therapists and social directors. Not all women relish the role.Credit: Getty Images

“What I have been seeing in my research is how women have been asked or expected to take on more work to be a central – if not the central – piece of a man’s social support system,” Ferrara said, taking care to note that the dynamic isn’t experienced by all couples.

The concept has taken on a bit of a life of its own, with some articles going so far as to claim that mankeeping has ruined dating and driven women to celibacy. We talked to Ferrara and other experts about what mankeeping is and isn’t, and how to tell if it has seeped into your relationship.

Mankeeping isn’t just emotional intimacy

Ferrara, who researches male friendship at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and Dylan Vergara, a research assistant, published a paper on mankeeping in 2024, after investigating why some men struggle to form close bonds – a growing and well-documented issue.

In a 2021 survey, 15 per cent of men said they didn’t have any close friends, up from 3 per cent in 1990. The same report showed that in 1990, nearly half of young men said they would reach out to friends when facing a personal issue; two decades later, just more than 20 per cent said the same.

Ferrara found that “women tended to have all of these nodes of support they were going to for problems, whereas men were more likely to be going to just them”. She sees mankeeping as an important extension of the concept of “kinkeeping” – the work of keeping families together that researchers have found tends to fall disproportionately on women.

Eve Tilley-Colson, 37, was relieved to stumble upon the concept of mankeeping on social media.

Tilley-Colson, who lives in Los Angeles, is happy in her relationship with her boyfriend of nearly seven months, and describes him as emotionally mature, funny and caring. They make a good team, but Tilley-Colson finds herself offering him a fair amount of social and emotional scaffolding, she says.

They’re both busy attorneys, but she tends to take charge of their social plans. Tilley-Colson has hung out with her boyfriend’s close friends a handful of times; he hangs out with hers several times a week.

Her role as the de facto social director of the relationship includes more serious concerns, too. “When are we going to meet each other’s parents? When are we going to go on our first vacation together?” she says. “And if all of that onus is on me to kind of plan, then I also feel all of the responsibility if something goes wrong.”

Mankeeping put a word to her feelings of imbalance. “I feel responsible for bringing the light to the relationship,” she says.

Her partner, Glenn, 37, who agreed to speak to The New York Times but asked to use his first name only, says his gut reaction when his girlfriend first described mankeeping to him was that it seemed consistent with what he had seen play out in many heterosexual relationships. He wondered, “OK, but is that bad?”

Justin Pere, who runs a therapy practice in Seattle that focuses on relationships and men’s issues, says: “We’re in a moment where more women are speaking up about how drained they are by this dynamic.”

Tilley-Colson, who is also a content creator, even made a post on TikTok about it.

Male social disconnection is a larger problem

Rather than viewing mankeeping as an internet-approved bit of therapy-speak used to dump on straight men, experts say they see it as a term that can help sound the alarm about the need for men to invest emotionally in friendships.

“The reality is, no one person can meet all of another’s emotional needs,” says Tracy Dalgleish, a psychologist and couples therapist based in Ottawa, Ontario. “Men need those outlets as well. Men need social connection. Men need to be vulnerable with other men.”

Pere says finding additional sources for emotional support does not require going from “zero to 60”, and adds that deepening friendships “can happen in these smaller steps that are more manageable”. He might encourage a client to share something new about himself with a friend he already has, for instance. Or invite a friend he normally sees in only one context to do something new (a friendship-building concept sometimes referred to as “repotting”).

If his male clients are reluctant to put themselves out there in that way, he tells them that developing relationships is not about replacing their romantic relationship, but strengthening it by “widening the emotional foundation underneath your life by investing in friendships”.

For Tilley-Colson and Glenn, talking about mankeeping explicitly has helped ease her burden.

Glenn admits that partly he thought his girlfriend just liked taking the reins socially. But when she explained how it felt to act as the default emotional manager in the relationship, he began to see how things could feel lopsided, he says.

“I’ve put more effort in to try and even things out,” he says.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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