Mankeeping: The Reason Women Are Giving Up Dating Men?

A new term ‘Mankeeping’ has swept the internet, diagnosing modern day relationships – but what does this really mean?

And how has it been affecting straight modern day relationships?

What is Mankeeping?

Mankeeping, a term coined by researchers Angelica Ferrara and Dylan P. Vergara, describes the caretaking role that women often play for the men in their lives, including fulfilling their emotional needs as well as supporting their well being.

The past 30 years has seen the decline of the male social circle in comparison to women’s, leading to women often harbouring the emotional labour to maintain men’s social networks and friendships to overcompensate for this.

But the mental labour that women invest in providing emotional support is consequential.

Their research paper at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University found that some women spend several hours a week helping the men in their lives manage their emotional and social well being.

Women take on a disproportionate amount of emotional invisible emotional labour often supporting men through intense feelings of failure and feelings of disconnect from friends.

Additional baggage

In the research paper, Ferrara breaks down her invisible emotional work into three components; emotional support, building social connections and teaching social skills.

This could encouraging the men in their lives to continue to value their friendships, like instigating a catch up, or teaching men to ask thoughtful questions and to listen carefully to each other.

Women often feel as though they are the ones checking in, listening and overall supporting, becoming the emotional support system for men. Through hundreds of interviews, Ferrara found that 62% of single women are not looking to date at all, compared to 37% of men.

The paper also found that dating is harder than it was 10 years ago. When asked about opening up to male friends, men described it as “weird or like a waste of time”, instead reserving emotional vulnerability for their relationships with women.

This additional emotional baggage has lead to many women ‘quiet quitting’ relationships, withdrawing emotionally before actually ending the relationship.

According to another study, 23% of women these days are less likely to date men, not necessarily because they don’t want to date, but because they feel they have invested too much emotional labour in past relationships and not received the same back.

An interesting turn, especially when stereotypes suggests that women require more emotional support in relationships, compared to men.

So what needs to change?

By naming this issue, psychologists can understand the male loneliness epidemic better and find solutions – but women also need to be released from all of this expectation.

Men are spending less time with their friends than ever, but that doesn’t mean that women need to feel the brunt of this shift.

Words by Edel Hickey