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Researchers have finally named the phenomenon experienced by heterosexual women who’ve been told at least once in their lives, ‘You’re not his therapist.’
Angelica Ferrara and Dylan Vergara from Stanford University published an article on ‘mankeeping,’ which theorizes heterosexual men’s growing dependency on their partners for their emotional needs.
According to Theorizing Mankeeping: The Male Friendship Recession and Women’s Associated Labor as Structural Component of Gender Inequality research, ‘the burden of patriarchy’ on heterosexual men often manifests as difficulty expressing emotions and forming meaningful friendships.
Because patriarchy tends to frame vulnerability or negative emotions as weakness, many men are discouraged from building emotional intimacy with one another. Ferrara and Vergara argue that the shrinking of men’s social networks contributes to a growing epidemic of male loneliness, leaving the women in their lives to become the only ‘support system’.
While ‘mankeeping’ takes its name from a 1985 theory – ‘kinkeeping’ – that discusses women’s invisible labor in holding extended families together, like organizing dinners, this new perspective points to another role women often perform unknowingly: emotional labor. Or, as the TikTokers love to say, ‘a free therapist.’
The article suggests three types of mankeeping: women acting as their partner’s social network manager, reminding them to call their friends, serving as emotional outsourcing centers, or taking on the role of emotional educators – teaching men how to identify and name their feelings.
Pete Davidson’s 2021 SNL sketch, in which girlfriends and wives take their partners to a man park to find them a friend, might be considered a preliminary version of what this article is exploring now.
