The meaning — and myths — behind 'mankeeping'

Yahoo

2 days ago

The Stanford researcher who helped coin the hot-button term says "mankeeping" is about more than bad partners.
Since the term "mankeeping' was introduced in a 2024 research paper by Stanford University sociologist Angelica Ferrara, it has landed squarely in the 2025 zeitgeist. Referring to the emotional labor that women often do for their male partners, the concept has since polarized the sexes, sparked TikTok debates and inspired comment-section screeds. Think: wives who are their husbands' best friends, romantic partners and therapists. After learning about mankeeping from social media or buzzy articles, many women have felt seen, vindicated — finally, a word to describe the hard-to-quantify exhaustion of being in a heterosexual relationship!
Many men, on the other hand, felt that they were being unfairly accused of over-burdening their female counterparts — or that normal relationship behavior was being vilified (comments sections offer evidence). For academics like Ferrara and her research assistant, Dylan Vergara, it's a big deal for their study to become part of the cultural conversation. But alongside the hype come myths and misunderstandings. We examined the comments from men (and women) and spoke to Vergara, a 21-year-old (male) Stanford student getting his bachelor's in political science and his master's in sociology, simultaneously, about the meaning of mankeeping.
The meaning
Mankeeping, as Vergara and his mentor defined it, is an outgrowth of a much older term in sociology: kinkeeping. That term was coined in 1985 by Carolyn Rosenthal, whose research showed that women were far more likely to do the largely 'invisible' labor of household chores, child care and simply keeping the family together and in touch with one another. It's a familiar phenomenon that hasn't gone away and, some research suggests, only intensified with COVID and remote work.
Mankeeping is the work of the same nature that women do, but in support specifically of their husbands or male partners, rather than the whole family. Specifically, it's about the way that men '[rely] on women as their predominant source of emotional support, creating undue labor on the part of women,' Vergara tells Yahoo.
He and Ferrara have interviewed nearly 100 men from around the world, 'and we see that men far and wide, when naming their top five sources of social and emotional support, label their wives, girlfriends or partners as their number one,' he says. And perhaps more importantly, 'a lot of times men don't even have a top five,' he adds. So instead of having that one friend you call about your romantic woes, that other you text whenever your boss is being difficult and a sibling you vent about your parents to, for many straight men, those people are all the same person: their female partner. 'There often comes an inflection point when I'm interviewing a man when they realize, 'Oh, wait, this is a lot'' that they're asking their female partners to do, says Vergara.
Myth #1: Mankeeping is just describing a normal relationship
It's a sentiment Vergara reports that he hears repeated frequently. 'We are not saying you shouldn't go to your partner for emotional support. Of course you should,' he says. Instead, the problem of mankeeping arises when men only talk vulnerably with their female partners. 'Because men just tend not to have as many people they can go to for support, it's creating a burden on the women in their lives, specifically,' says Vergara. 'Obviously, communication is key to a healthy relationship. But it's also important to ensure that you're not creating some extra labor on the part of the woman.'
And it's not just the mankeeping paper that indicates it's good to have multiple people you can talk to — or that men tend to go to their partner for support first. The Survey Center on American Life found that 85% of married men go to their spouse for personal support before talking to any friends or relatives, compared to 72% of married women. And while emotional connection and sharing are part of good relationships, research suggests that at a certain point emotional labor can exhaust people and put them at greater risk of mental and physical health problems. Conversely, people with more close friends are less at risk for depression, multiple diseases and death, from any cause. In other words, there's evidence to suggest that more friends would be good for men, and distributing the emotional support would be good for their female counterparts.
Myth #2: Mankeeping is the result of personal failings
It's easy to blame the individual men for leaning too heavily on their female partners, but the researchers think the root cause of mankeeping lies beyond their control. 'We too often view isolation as something that's an individual's fault,' says Vergara. 'But it's more of a structural issue.'
Mankeeping, he and Ferrara argue, is a result of the much-talked-about male loneliness epidemic. Vergara points out that there used to be many men-only social spaces: barbershops, men's clubs, pubs, fraternities. 'Although we don't endorse patriarchal structures that exclude women, the degradation of those places has had a key detrimental effect on men's ability to seek out friendships with other men,' he says. What was once a bustling social infrastructure for men's friendships has all but disappeared. 'That's led to this female curation of male social and emotional well-being,' says Vergara.
The point then is that men's loneliness isn't simply an isolated failing of each guy, nor even of the male species as a whole. Ferrara and Vergara's research — which started by tracing male friendship and social habits throughout history — suggests that it 'affects women and the entire infrastructure of men and women together,' says Vergara. And, other scholars have argued, while women certainly can (and arguably should) care about men's loneliness problem, that doesn't mean they are responsible for fixing it.
Myth #3: Men who respect women never mankeep
Vergara is a student of feminist literature (among other things), and describes himself as 'very fortunate' to have grown up with parents who each have their own close social circles. Though he did feel lonely when he first arrived at Stanford, Vergara considers himself highly social and has a robust circle of friends.
But after he and his mentor published their paper, one of Vergara's male friends called him out: 'He said, 'You also do mankeeping!'' recalls Vergara. The friend pointed out that Vergara told details of his life to a female friend he'd only known for six months that he'd never shared with him, a friend of several years. 'I was relying on my female friend to be that emotional support. I was being that guy,' says Vergara. The moment inspired Vergara to try to treat both his male and female friends better, by opening up more to the men in his life, and burdening the women less.
How does he burden the women less? How does any man do it? There isn't a terribly specific prescription yet (though there are men's retreats, and lots of online support groups to sift through). But Vergara, personally, is trying to build a strong foundation. 'I'm trying to just watch myself for moments when I might be guilty of mankeeping,' he says. 'But the deeper strategy is to formulate and maintain close bonds with people other than your partner.' Vergara doesn't have a partner, but he's building the friend sector steadily and practicing being the first one to reach out to male friends in particular. 'I think that goes a long way to ensuring you have multiple pathways for emotional support, so you're not burdening one specific person. I think that's my path forward,' he says.
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