https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/well/family/mankeeping-definition.html?smid=url-share
I’ll try this again with a more directed discourse. The above article appeared yesterday in the New York Times. The gist is that the modern man needs to be babysat emotionally by their partner. Their premise is that we cannot plan, don’t socialize, vacation or do much of anything without direction from the female partner. So much so that we lose friends and family without direct female intervention.
I find the turn particularly present in my professional female friends. A few years ago they were buying each other “mental load” books decrying their oblivious partners. This is the first I’ve seen “mankeeping” used as a phrase.
I try to compare my lifestyle as an emotionally supportive husband and parent to my father and it’s not even close. I’m at least 50/50 responsible for childbearing, I do most household duties and fully support my physician wife’s professional choice.
I’ve seen these types of articles shared on social media, but top of the page New York Times, the biggest paper in the country with millions of readers…woof.
Edit: Copy and pasted article below.
Justin Lioi is a licensed clinical social worker in Brooklyn who specializes 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, Mr. 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 labor.”
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,” Dr. 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 Dr. 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.
Dr. 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 percent of men said they didn’t have any close friends, up from 3 percent 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 over 20 percent said the same.
Dr. 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.
Ms. Tilley-Colson, who lives in Los Angeles, is happy in her relationship with her boyfriend of nearly seven months, and described him as emotionally mature, funny and caring. They make a good team, but Ms. Tilley-Colson finds herself offering him 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. Ms. 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 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.”
“Mankeeping” put a word to her feelings of imbalance. “I feel responsible for bringing the light to the relationship,” she said.
Her partner, Glenn, 37, who agreed to speak to The New York Times but asked to use his first name only, 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?”
“We’re in a moment where more women are speaking up about how drained they are by this dynamic,” said Justin Pere, who runs a therapy practice in Seattle that focuses on relationships and men’s issues.
Ms. 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 said 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,” said Tracy Dalgleish, a psychologist and couples therapist based in Ottawa. “Men need those outlets as well. Men need social connection. Men need to be vulnerable with other men.”
Mr. Pere said finding additional sources for emotional support does not require going from “zero to 60,” adding 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.”
But some of the challenges men face in making strong connections are societal, said Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a think tank, and author of “Of Boys and Men.” Many of the institutions and spaces where men used to organically make friends have eroded, he said, like houses of worship, civic groups and even the simple workplace.
“Men used to be able to put themselves in these institutional settings and it kind of happened around them,” he added. “That’s just not happening so much anymore. Men do have to do more, be more assertive. I’m finding that even in my own life.”
For Ms. Tilley-Colson and Glenn, talking about mankeeping explicitly has helped ease her burden.
Glenn admitted 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 said.
“I’ve put more effort in to try and even things out,” he said.
41 comments
Look, as a man you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. Look at your life and your relationship with your family. Is it working? Are they content and are you content? Look at your professional life and ask the same question. If the answers are yes, live in that. Everything else is peripheral noise. If not, make some adjustments. Communicate with the family. Don’t get eaten by the zeitgeist, culture war, generational labels or whatever else we’re calling this kind of bating crap these days.
I guess I kind of get it, but I genuinely don’t want to socialize. I don’t want to have someone “push” or “mother” me into social settings. I think a lot of us are just content within ourselves. Maybe I’m misreading/misunderstanding this though.
* Begged for years to be more in touch with our emotions.
* Told us to go to therapy.
* Want equity and equality in decisions.
Now we expect 50/50 in regards to planning, emotional support and use therapy language to exit situations we don’t like.
Women: **NO NOT LIKE THAT!**
I think a big problem with men these days is that many of us want the perks of being the sole provider without actually being that provider (which is, granted, insanely difficult in todays economy). It doesn’t have to be a 50/50 split but both partners need to feel like the other person is pulling their weight somehow or another.
From my perspective, this does have some truth. Most of my male friends can’t maintain an apartment on their own. I host d&d games because I am willing to clean and be a good host. Most of these dudes can barely maintain a friendship. Their emotional intelligence is low, and if they aren’t talking nerdy shit their social skills are low too. I think some men had overprotective parents who did everything for them, so those dudes assume they will be taken care of for the rest of their lives. This isn’t a new problem
“Their premise is that we cannot plan, don’t socialize, vacation or do much of anything without direction from the female partner.”
Yes. Because those are all things she wants to do and I don’t. Everyone I want to talk to already lives in my house. Everything I want to do I can do in my house. I am entirely happy and not a burden to her, but I can see how a more demanding man would be a problem.
I’ve noticed that, yes. There are some arguments that make sense – our social circles have indeed changed, they’re usually smaller than before, so it stands to reason that IF you find a partner, you’ll lean on them more. You’ll also tend to make their friends your friends, and in the advent of a fallout, you’ll more likely find yourself alone again.
I do not believe, however, that this is unique to men, nor that it’s an entirely real phenomenon. I’ve noticed women in the exact same condition, and it’s mostly because you make your social circles online, with people that unfortunately don’t live near you, or have the availability to be with you in your time of need.
I think men socialize differently, and women have a hard time understanding that. There’s a lot of tendency to claim that men need the same kind of relationships as women do, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. This is the part that I would consider somewhat artificial. “Men don’t talk about their feelings” – I think we do, just not as openly, but as you grow your friendships you begin to understand our language. I see a lot of women bring down men’s hobbies, or infantilizing them instead of trying to understand them. It’s really sad, particularly because men tend to connect with people through those hobbies.
I feel like a lot of men just aren’t planners or extroverted like that. But we do a lot of everyday stuff including teaching sports to kids, fixing things around the house, usually bringing in most of the income etc.
But the article is mainly talking about the emotional growth of men. Again a lot of men aren’t very social so don’t get the practice to “grow emotionally”. But it’s complex because men aren’t really allowed to show their emotions so they usually just tolerate whatever comes their way.
I don’t really trust the NYT and men are just an easy group to slam on nowadays.
Anecdotally, I can say that I’ve seen this among enough of my other male friends and acquaintances to believe it’s at least partly true some of the time. It’s not a majority, and most of my friends are solid dudes who carry their weight, but I’ve still noted how oblivious a lot of them are to how much work that mental load can be.
It seems most common among the guys I know who grew up in more traditional households, with a stay-at-home mom and working father, and where they didn’t divorce. None of these guys think of themselves this way, and some would even consider themselves feminists, but they just have this massive blind spot and don’t even realize it’s being filled by their partner.
And it extends to other areas too. Like, I know guys who will just kind of passively say “we should get together and do *x*”, but if I don’t go out of my way to make the plan, it just never happens. It’s almost like they think they’re doing the work just by having the idea, and they got so used to things just happening that they just… don’t think about it?
I would say don’t take it personally and instead look at it as an issue that affects some men that needs to be looked at. I like to read the women’s subs and many talk about partners like this. They either don’t contribute to the house and or have an obliviousness about them regarding problems around them or upcoming events that require attention. This is also important to understand: dumping your emotions on your partner is not being emotionally open. Your partner is there for symmetrical support, not therapy. I also have friends from college 10 years ago who I visit and still haven’t grown up past age 22. Their wives do everything that isn’t work a 9 to 5, while the guy is playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I see them as being part of this mankeeping discussion. This is all pure anecdote of course. This isn’t to say that all men are like that, thats silly. Instead ask, why are some men like this? How can we help them get better?
No, I’ve always been a more emotionally open, available guy who presents as conventionally masculine but has a big sensitive side. Woman have always liked the emotional side of me once they get to know me enough to see it. Not every woman wants that but I have never found the ones that do hard to find. It’s swung a little bit that way with the trad wife stuff but I have yet to encounter it from feminists.
If they don’t appreciate, which not everyone does, then they’re not right for me. I’ve mutually broken up with a girl because she wanted me to be more stoic and emotionless, but for that reason she wasn’t right for me.
Can’t see the article and I’m not that generation, so take this with a grain of salt, but I wonder if they’re trying to address the wrong social and emotional needs. You’re not helping if you’re trying to get somebody to socialize with people they don’t want to socialize with, go on vacations to places they don’t want to go, and talk about things they aren’t interested in.
My experiences with this are those falling under these made up words like mankeeping are those emotionally shunted or those that have poor communication skills. Men and women continue to be socialized very differently growing up. There are plenty of men who cannot keep their own living spaces tidy or make a doctor appointment to save their own health. It is not the majority of men though!
Mental load is such a crock of shit. Men have mental loads too that are unseen.
The truth is this is a woman on woman thing. Competing for the best men.
Fwiw, my wife is in a book club with a bunch of women in their 60s, solid boomers. They complain about this very same thing every month when they get together.
Feels like there are plenty of men from older generations who fit into that stereotype as well – not something new in my opinion.
We’re still living with the incompetent sitcom dad stereotypes of the last century despite the scales having been balanced in many aspects of the gender roles.
The pendulum is swinging back now after 40+ years and nobody seems to be benefitting or happy with the current dynamic
Its alot easier to just blame men than look inward and realize maybe its themselves
Have Millennials Killed Masculinity? /s
That’s a whole lot of words for a writer to say men need more friends. However, the problem is the lack of disposable income for millennial men. Hell, stepping out of the house makes 50 dollars just disappear. How do you expect me to make friendships when most are just trying to survive?
Its just more justification for nagging & hen-pecking.
Misandry isn’t new. It’s also not new from the nyt. Although I haven’t seen “Man keeping” before, just the newest term in a long list. The negativity displayed towards all men from a group probably totaling less than 1% is exactly why they are turning more conservative. It’s been happening for at least a decade or two.
My male friend group is 5-6 people and we take two trips a year. Half of us are married. We have a fishing charter to the Great lakes and a floater. Last year we did like a “primal camping” thing last winter that was interesting. Both of these are really important to us, and we have a great time. Make amazing memories, dump private trauma and secrets. Shit you do not tell even your wife. I guarantee if you ask she would say I haven’t been on vacation in years. We take a large family trip(80+ people) every 5 years. She goes to Vegas for the weekend or Mexico for a weekend, these are “vacations”. Most of the time this is with people she’s known for less than 2 years sans 1. I spent a week on lake Superior with friends I’ve had since childhood. We just don’t leave the state.
They think our lives aren’t fulfilled because they believe they wouldn’t be fulfilled by our lives. In reality I believe it’s very much the opposite. I think this is the crux of the problem.
We’re going to try bringing the girls on one of the next trips though because they have been asking a lot. I’m not hopeful 😂. Fk last time we did something like this, was board game night. We were playing a game that takes 4-6 hours. I asked her to drive herself, she said she was fine. I told her if we go in one vehicle I will be staying until the game is finished. She still elected to go in one car. She didn’t make it past hour 3, and got pissed when she had to Uber home. She did apologize the morning after. Mind you these activities are like twice a month at most, are planned well in advance, and it’s like the one thing I do not compromise on.
It’s always something. If it’s not this, it’s that. Complaining about men is one of the defining themes of this era. It’s unrelenting. Either we’re all inept, cruel, idiotic demons or a great deal of this stuff is spun up from nothing to farm drama for clicks.
Women seem to be the first ones to realize that cohabiting monogamous married relationships aren’t for everybody.
When you’re in one, by default you’re pretty much coming home every night. Waking up next to the same person. Weekends and vacations are by default with the other person. This is before we even get into having children. All it means the overwhelming majority of your time is spent with one other person. We are physically with them most of our time.
Add in the emotional component. If there isn’t one, then there’s no relationship.
Why is it a big surprise that men make women their therapists? You’re together most of the time. You’re having sex. You’re being vulnerable with each other.
If you don’t want an emotional vulnerable highly intertwined relationship with a man, don’t get into a relationship.
I for one don’t see much of a point being in a relationship with somebody who isn’t my main source of emotional support. They’re with me 80% of the time. They need to be 80% of the emotional support. If not, I’ll get emotional support somewhere else…. But then I need to be physically elsewhere as well.
If you tie someone down, prevent them from having sex with anybody else, bind them to you legally and financially, take up all their vacation and weekend time, make half of the decorating decisions… You better bring some emotional support to make all that worthwhile.
I feel like travel is mostly for the ladies? I hate long vacations away from everything I love to go sight seeing, eating out constantly and the now ridiculous lodging fees. I feel like the list of activities is mostly stuff I compromise doing for my ladies entertainment when I would much rather be outdoors or golfing, fishing, climbing, etc.
To be clear, I don’t think it’s that women are against “emotionally available men” no matter what the media + social media posits.
I think they’re against whiny, needy man children who depend on their wives to be their moms, the mother of their children, their maids, and their social planners.
And all these guys on here who say “well I don’t need to socialize because I have my fiddly toys at home” are missing the point: most people, especially kids, need to socialize and they need to engage.
As another physician spouse, I can say that I agree that I’m far more engaged than Boomer and Greatest Generation men were. Agreed. But consider that you’re probably not the frustration here. And let’s be real, LOTS of female doctors are married to lumps in the house. My wife mentions coworker husbands who can’t even be trusted with their own kids for a weekend.
Barring the potential misandry in the piece, I think there is some merit to this. I once went to my male friend for social support and he literally got fed up with me and told me to go lean on a woman for that. I’ve also had to confront a few guy friends on why they never seem to initiate plans for us to hang out and their excuse was really ‘I’m not really a planner.’ If by case by case fine, but this happened multiple times. I definitely see why male loneliness is on the rise. It’s really tough to change this narrative if no one wants to step up.
Yes, I have noticed. I think many of these pieces or stories are true, or are grounded in truth. However a lot of the wives/partners also have somewhat of a martyr complex, taking on responsibilities and efforts that are not their fault.
You know if your husband is social or not before you marry him. You see how he moves through the world and if he puts in effort. I find it unlikely that a guy was social, loving, in his community, generally exactly what these women describe wanting, and then the day they got married, he stopped. It happens. I’ve seen it happen. But at scale? Probably not.
This is why I very much support women being ruthless in their assessment of their partners. They face a lot of pressure to marry, to just pick someone, and then they resent him for not being someone else.
What exactly is the point of this article?
It ends with the two partners agreeing that they need to communicate more about the division of labor when it comes to making social engagements. How is that in any way new or problematic? When you’re in a relationship, this stuff happens all the time. Have kids and it goes into overdrive.
First off, the article is looking at gender roles that have long existed – this stuff is not new. Second off, despite the article’s explicit argument to the contrary, it’s just internet prattle dressed up as some sort of crisis in masculinity. I don’t believe there is a crisis on a broad level – gender roles are changing and that is disorienting for people. That’s not a crisis, it’s change but a lot of people don’t do well with change so here we are.
Interesting, but certainly doesnt even touch on the phenomenon of modern women and their endless browbeating of the men in their lives.
A man cant be too supportive or he is stripping away his partner’s autonomy and agency. He cant be too assertive because then he is domineering & manipulative. He must be sensitive, but not too sensitive or he is unattractive & unreliable. He must provide (no negotiation about that). He has to be social and indipendant himself, but he must always be available all the time to fix things, solve/sacrifice for financial issues, or be helpful to everyone in the family. He needs to be able to ask for help, but only for little things because otherwise he is too needy and, once again, unreliable. He has to be funny. He must be generous, but limit his own spending on himself. etc….
I’m glad they included a quote from Richard Reeves. Wish they would have dug a bit deeper into why domesticated men tend to socialize less.
In my personal experience and anecdotally from my peers, there are real costs (sometimes active, often passive) to spending time with our friends. Reeves often discusses how men do relationships “shoulder to shoulder”, how we often feel we need to be doing something together like fishing or hiking or going to a ballgame to get the quality time we need to open up and relate. Conversely, men are also good at simply “hanging” with a stupid movie or video games. No planning, no elaborate itineraries, no need to figure out who’s bringing what food or drink, just guys being guys.
Many men are consistently passively disincentivized by their female partners from doing the former (i.e. cold shoulder, passive aggression) and actively chastised and belittled for doing the latter. It’s not enough to want to socialize with our peers, it’s not enough to actually socialize with our peers, it must also look, sound, feel, and smell a certain way or it doesn’t count as “real” quality time. And, again, we’re actively and passively punished when we do take the initiative.
While the adage “happy wife happy life” may be more modern, the concept is as old as time. If I’m going to be hassled for spending occasional time away from the house or for choosing to socialize over computer games, I’m simply not going to do those things.
Not just millennials, but men in general have this weird tendency to expect their partner to be their social everything. Lover, friend, therapist, partner, event planner, etc. Even if they’re happy with this setup, they don’t realize the pressure it puts on their partner. Having a life outside your partner is not just for your benefit, but your partner’s too
This has been some sort of narrative since at least the 1960s, at least if you go by TV sitcoms. (“Oh honey, don’t forget we’re seeing the Johnsons tomorrow” “But honeeeyyy I want to go fishing!” — “I have to remind Bob to even tie his shoes haha”)
Honestly, I have been very guilty of this in the past. I think the narrative that we tell ourselves is that we are just content living simply which may be partially true but also a lie we tell ourselves so that we don’t have to put in effort. I can say that particularly the social element was compounded for me by partners that didn’t like me having female friends, when I have always had great platonic relationships with women.
Being single for the last three years (being in my late 30s) has taught me a lot and I think I’ve made a lot of changes, I put more effort into my social life and go on holidays etc by myself. At this point I understand why so many women want to remain single, I think I will too unless I meet someone excellent just by chance, other than sex I don’t think I’m missing out on much
Oh my God I’m so fucking tired of this stupid fucking gender war can we please focus on something useful for 30 FUCKING SECONDS
The utterly brilliant bell hooks speaks to this:
>When I was in my twenties, I would go to couples therapy, and my partner of more than ten years would explain how I asked him to talk about his feelings and when he did, I would freak out. He was right. It was hard for me to face that I did not want to hear about his feelings when they were painful or negative, that I did not want my image of the strong man truly challenged by learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Here I was, an enlightened feminist woman who did not want to hear my man speak his pain because it revealed his emotional vulnerability. It stands to reason, then, that the masses of women committed to the sexist principle that men who express their feelings are weak really do not want to hear men speak, especially if what they say is that they hurt, that they feel unloved. Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure. Since sexist norms have taught us that loving is our task whether in our role as mothers or lovers or friends, if men say they are not loved, then we are at fault; we are to blame.
The answer is *not* for men to go back to shitty gender norms that force us to be emotional cripples. It’s to continue normalizing the idea of men as being just as emotional as women.
I don’t crave outside validation or extreme experiences. I am, and always have been, a homebody. I have no problem socializing, but I don’t seek it out.
“Honey, there’s that new seafood restaurant that opened downtown. I want to try it. I made plans to go with Jeanie and Tom. You like Tom don’t you?”
Husband planning to finish “The Sopranos” that weekend grimaces.
Listen. I am NOT one of these manoaphere red pill guys. I am married to a strong independant woman who makes a good living. Like OP i do a good ampunt of the house keeping and try to help support her and out family the best I can. I am of the belief that men and women can only have good relations when both are on the team and engaged in the teams goals. That requires communication and it cannot include blame and accusation. We all have flaws and being in a relationship means accepting and living with this partners flaws.
All of this said, men have been continuously attacked for patriarical behavior for decades. Good men do actually listen to these things and change their behavior to allign with what they think their partners will want. Men are deliberately becoming less assertive and less dominant in decision making as a result and essentially saying ok you make the decisions then and i’ll follow your lead. It also might be interesting to note that lots of men are no longer the primary bread winner in their family and with the loss of thst status comes a perceived loss of power.
I just think its a relfection of what is happening in men’s lives
This doesn’t affect me personally or anyone I know. Seems like the author and women experiencing this are dating men they’re incompatible with or losers, which is also not my problem or anyone else’s other than their own. If they are not happy with the scenario they can put work in their relationship or leave. You can ascribe the same relationship problem properties to many other issues and attack the problem just the same.
If I were single and dating someone like this, telling me they do not want to interact with my thoughts and share and socialize, I would also just leave the relationship rather than turn it into a pissing contest as is so often done on Reddit.
While this may come off as the “just divorce!” Reddit meme, it’s more that by seriously engaging with her article id be performing emotional labor.
I mean I don’t get what you’re trying to bring up. Just because YOU are emotionally balanced does not mean that majority are. I 100% believe this article because I have seen it with my own eyes with my other dude friends.
No one will read this, but what the hell.
For generations, men were bread winners — the fuel that kept the familial unit chugging along. Those men didn’t think about their social networks outside of work. Social planning fell entirely to women, while the harder labor expectations fell to men.
Now, the roles of men and women have changed. Girls are encouraged to become strong independent women, while still being raised to understand those old social dynamics.
Meanwhile, most young men were raised in the same way that young men have always been raised — be tough, be self sufficient, shoulder your own burdens, etc. The problem being, that doesn’t work in the world they are growing into. As a result, they have fewer social skills and they struggle with their emotions and vulnerability. Yet still, the world expects them to simply deal with it and demands they be something they were never raised to be.
This is the fault of a tectonic shift that occurred in society over the last 60-70 years that we never took the proper time to understand and adjust for. We never considered the negative impacts that this shift would have on young men and thus never made any adjustments, particularly in schools, to alleviate the problems it would create.
So all that to say, rather than harping on how bad men are, we should be taking the time to understand why problems like this exist. We should be developing empathy for men and coming up with solutions for future generations. Because I promise you, if we continue down the “men bad” path, there will eventually be a backlash, which I fear we may be seeing already, as young men are becoming more and more conservative in their ideals.