'Mankeeping' Is Exhausting Women. How Do We Teach Our Sons to Do Better?

Mankeeping is the latest controversial social issue making the rounds everywhere from the New York Times to TikTok. The term refers to the emotional labor in relationships (distinct from the considerable mental load) that women are tasked with in heteronormative relationships, essentially acting as unpaid therapists. In other words, not only are women expected to manage their own well-being and social life, but they’re also expected to serve as the social and emotional hub for their partners.

If you’re the wife or girlfriend who turns to friends and family (including maybe your life partner) for heart-to-heart talks, but your husband or boyfriend relies solely on you to vent or process emotions, you may be mankeeping. Do you make plans with girlfriends with whom you share confidences, while your man prefers to keep his social life to a group chat or work buddies? Again, mankeeping.

If you’re thinking that being your partner’s sole emotional support person is too heavy, you’re not alone. As a mom of an older teenage son, I see a generation of kids that need to learn how to form meaningful connections and grow to independence, including resisting mankeeping. It reminds me of an Instagram post showing a graded elementary school test that asked, “what is marriage?” The child’s response? “Marriage is whereby someone can’t take care of her grown up son and you have adopted him.”

In the interest of teaching all our teen boys to do better, I asked a medical doctor specializing in teens and a family therapist for advice on preventing mankeeping in future generations.

• Dr. Lauren Hartman, is a double board-certified physician in Adolescent Medicine and Pediatrics with more than a decade of experience. She specializes in teen mental health, eating disorders, body image, gender-expansive youth and the impact of social media. Dr. Hartman has served as Chair of Adolescent Medicine at Kaiser Permanente Northern California, Director of the East Bay Pediatric Eating Disorder Program and West Coast Medical Director at Equip.
• Todd Sarner, MFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist, parenting coach and expert in attachment-based approaches. For over 20 years, he’s helped families navigate behavior challenges and strengthen relationships at home. A former faculty member of the Neufeld Institute, Todd draws on leading research in attachment, neuroscience and child development.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with opening up to your partner and sharing your worries with them. In fact, this is a healthy thing to do in a relationship (and a good model for kids too). But when a man solely uses his partner to process his emotions, that’s a problem.

“How many times I've heard a grown woman with a man who is running a $10 million a year corporation say that I have four kids: three I gave birth to, and my husband,” says Sarner.

It’s not a woman’s job to carry the entire emotional burden. But when mankeeping happens, it makes her feel exhausted and resentful. And since kids absorb the anxiety and tension in their environment, this imbalance can actually impede a child's wellbeing as well. By contrast, the most successful families share responsibilities, says Hartman (whether that be unloading the dishwasher or unloading your emotions). A fair division of labor allows everyone to be more resilient during challenging times, the expert notes, and isn’t that what we all want for our kids?

In 2000, Harvard political science professor Robert Putnam wrote a bestselling book called Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,which detailed how Americans were shifting from being community engaged club joiners to isolated loners. Mind you, this was before social media exploded, so now the problem has become even greater. And while it’s true that social isolation is on the rise for both men and women, studies have shown that women’s friendships are stronger than men’s: A 2021 survey by the Pepperdine Institute of Family Studies found that women talk with their friends more often than men, express their feelings more openly and basically share struggles as well as seek out support and validation more. (For example, my female friends text chain is full of friendly “welfare checks” and rants about feelings, whereas my boyfriend’s is completely memes and sports commentary.)

Also dubbed “the male loneliness epidemic,” these increasing rates of social isolation amongst men means they’re more likely to be leaning on women for mankeeping.

And while this is undeniably frustrating for women, Sarner warns that if too much ire is directed at men over falling into mankeeping, it only exacerbates the problem: “Bashing or cutting men out of the process is not going to be the answer,” he says. I tend to agree—for example, the whopping 2,500 comments on the New York Times story about mankeeping includes bitter comments along the lines of Jim from Ithaca who wrote: “I don't get it. Men are supposed to be emotionally open and vulnerable, otherwise we're being toxic. Now, if we're too emotional that's apparently a problem too.”

So, what’s one way to tackle this issue? Teaching the next generation how to do better.

• Model healthy social and emotional wellbeing at home. Want to teach your teen son not to need mankeeping? Start by not mankeeping the adult man in the home. “If it's happening now in your home, you have to figure out how to deal with it, because you can tell a kid a million things and try to influence them, but they're mainly going to do what they see,” Sarner says. That means your partner needs to develop their own social and emotional network separate from you. Don’t know where to start? Encourage them to have a work friend join them for a social event, a social phenomenon Putnam called “repotting,” since you’re moving a work friend into a new sphere of your life, the friend circle.
• Have boys do 1:1 friend activities. “Actively support friendships among boys,” says Dr. Hartman. “During elementary school, boys often develop strong, intimate friendships where they share deeply with each other. We should celebrate and nurture these connections. During the teenage years, there's typically a shift. Boys' friendships often become more activity-focused (sports, video games) and less about sharing feelings and experiences [unlike girls, who often laser-focus on those aspects of consciousness].  This happens right when teenage boys actually need intimate relationships the most, but social pressures discourage emotional intimacy between males.” We still discuss how a friend calling to speak to my son when we put our dog to sleep and to share his own pet loss story meant so much to him—and I remind my son about that in order to encourage him to make calls of his own.

• Talk through the empathy you'd like the young man to feel. As cringe as it may feel to be talking about feelings with a teen boy, observations about empathy and suggestions on how to be a friend can be immeasurably helpful to boys and young men. As a mom, I’ve had good luck with talking about friends with my son while I was driving alone in the car with him, since we are trapped in a small space together and don’t need to make eye contact. In one case, I remember talking through why a distant relative might like to have a call from my son, and how that might make my son feel good to reach out. (Simple stuff, but a revelation to a self-obsessed and anxious teenager.)

• Be patient. Sarner says he could download all his proven suggestions for shared emotional and admin responsibilities between couples and within the family, but it would still take most of his clients nine months to effect a change. “They’re in muscle memory about being antagonistic,” he explains, bemoaning the requests for quick fixes in therapy with a few parenting tips. “That’s why I call the parenting stuff I do, or the couples counseling stuff a process,” Sarner says. As a parent whose family has spent hundreds of hours in therapy, I can attest to this fact, and co-sign the admonition: Give yourself time to change, accept it won’t be a linear process and have faith that taking new actions will yield a positive result…just not immediately.