Mankeeping is the real reason women are refraining from dating and relationships
It seems women are opting to spend their lives alone due to the extensive emotional labour they have to carry in their heterosexual relationships.
In the past 30 years, male social circles have shrunk significantly compared to women’s.
Because of this shift, many men rely on the women in their lives to help carry their emotional burdens, rather than their male friends.
This emotional dependence on their partner can place excessive strain on women, according to recent research.
Stanford researchers have dubbed this strain “mankeeping”.
As men’s social connections decrease, the more women take on their emotional burdens. The mental labour women invest in providing emotional support to men is consequential.
Angelica Ferrara, lead author of the paper and postdoctoral scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, claims the research shows that some women spend several hours a week helping the men in their lives manage their emotional and social well-being.
Ferrara goes on to explain that this time spent “mankeeping” encompasses the invisible emotional work that women invest in their relationships with men, including partners, family members, coworkers, or friends.
Women taking on the role of social coordinators
She breaks this invisible work down into three components: emotional support, building social networks, and teaching social skills.
Frequently, women become the emotional support systems for the men in their lives, as they’re the ones doing the listening, checking in and overall supporting.
Additionally, women take on the role of social coordinators, ensuring that the men around them continue to value their friendships and meaningful suggestions by, for instance, instigating a catch-up.
Last but not least, women often teach men the interpersonal skills they need to make a relationship thrive. These skills include thoughtful questions and how to carefully listen to one another.
These three components combined can result in a lot of additional emotional baggage women have to deal with, leading to young women “quiet-quitting” these relationships.
According to a different study, women are now 23% less likely to want to date than men, not necessarily because they don’t want to date, but because they feel they’ve invested too much emotional labour in past relationships without getting an equivalent amount of support in return.
