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Why Women Are Weary of the Emotional Labor of ‘Mankeeping'
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,' Ms. 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 Ms. 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.
Ms. 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.
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