Not your therapist: Women weary of emotional labour of ‘mankeeping’
Much of the time, Lioi said, 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 said, “doing all the emotional labour.”
Justin Lioi is a licensed clinical social worker in New York City, specialising 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 said, 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 said, “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.
“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.
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% of men said they didn’t have any close friends, up from 3% 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% 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 said. 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. She finds herself offering her boyfriend a fair amount of social and emotional scaffolding, she said. They’re both busy attorneys, but she tends to take charge of their social plans. “When are we going to meet each other’s parents? When are we going to go on our first vacation?” she said. “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.”
Her partner, Glenn, 37, said his gut reaction when his girlfriend first described mankeeping to him was that it seemed consistent with what he’d seen play out in many heterosexual relationships. He wondered, “OK, but is that bad?” However, for Tilley-Colson, talking about mankeeping explicitly has helped ease her burden.
Rather than viewing “mankeeping” as an internet-approved bit of therapy-speak used to dump on straight men, experts said they see it as a term that can help sound the alarm about the need for men to invest emotionally in friendships.
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