When my friend's husband was made redundant last year, she spent the six months it took him to find a new role bolstering his confidence and reassuring him he’d find something soon, while holding down her own busy job. ‘His ego, confidence and sense of identity were pulled from under him over- night,’ she tells me. Now he has a demanding new job, she reassures him he’s doing great at it and calms his fears whenever he hears whispers of redundancies.
Another friend’s husband injured his back while training for a marathon, which meant he had to stop running. ‘Not exercising isn’t great for his mental health, so I spend a lot of time managing his mood and encouraging him to go for a walk or see friends,’ she says. Welcome to the world of ‘mankeeping’. In a new study published in the journal Psychology Of Men And Masculinities, experts from Stanford University argue that women are taking on the emotional needs of the men in their life, adding to their (already significant) mental load. Study author Angelica Ferrara, who coined the term mankeeping, says her research shows women are spending several hours a week on it. Mainly because men’s social networks have been dwindling (a 2019 YouGov poll found that one in five men report having no close friends).
‘Women tend to be better at cultivating meaningful friendships, where they can share their worries and go to for support,’ says psychotherapist and couples counsellor Hilda Burke. ‘Men tend to rely on “legacy friendships” with those they’ve known for years but perhaps don’t feel comfortable confiding in.’
Burke says that within most relationships there is a person who does the ‘emotional dumping’ and one who supports. ‘What I see among couples is that one person tends to do the sharing, the feeling, the offloading, while the other tends to do the helping and the tiptoeing around of the feelings. It’s not always gendered, but it’s often the women supporting their partner emotionally and practically. Women tend to look after the household calendar, organise social events and remember family birthdays. We all know the woman who buys their husband’s mum a birthday card because she knows that he’ll forget. It’s a heavy, invisible load and it’s exhausting.’
Little wonder a 2023 report from Gallup found that burnout rates among women have more than doubled compared to men in recent years, largely due to taking on more unpaid and invisible household labour, childcare and eldercare.
Burke says that where mankeepers can come unstuck is when they have emotional needs of their own that aren’t being met. ‘If a woman builds her identity around being the coper, the strong one, the helper, when she hits an emotional wall or has her own crisis, will her partner be there for her in the way she’s been there for him? Emotional caretaking needs to work both ways.’