Mankeeping: why single women are giving up dating

As the male social circle continues to shrink, their partners have to take on much more emotional labour – and many are opting to spend their lives alone instead

Mon 16 Jun 2025 09.20 EDT

Name: Mankeeping.

Age: Semantically, about a year old.

Appearance: Needy and exhausting.

Oh God, a new term with the word “man” as a prefix. These are always tedious. Go and cry about it in your man cave, you manspreading mansplainer.

See? It’s a cheap and lazy rhetorical device. Yes, but mankeeping is a real thing: men don’t mankeep; women mankeep.

How so? Increasingly, the dynamic in a heterosexual relationship seems to be that a woman is tasked with coaching her partner through his problems.

I don’t understand. A whole generation of men don’t feel comfortable opening up to their male friends, which means some of them dump their worries on their female partner. It’s an extension of emotional labour – remembering birthdays, organising social calendars – but effectively it requires the partner to act as an unpaid therapist.

Why? The Stanford researchers who coined the term think it’s a result of the so-called male loneliness epidemic. As the social circle of men continues to shrink, their partners bear the brunt of everything that has historically been shared among friends, colleagues and acquaintances.

It’s sweet that you think this is a new phenomenon. OK, fine, some men have always been lousy at this sort of thing. But this is the first time that women are starting to unionise against it.

How? Many of them have stopped dating. In the US, only 38% of single women are on the dating market, compared with 61% of single men, according to the Pew Research Center.

But that will just make men more lonely, which will only exacerbate the problem. Right. The only way to solve this problem is to make women have sex with undesirable men. Way to go, Gilead.

So, what, men should work on themselves instead? Bingo. Perhaps if men weren’t so beholden to ridiculous masculine archetypes and developed a toolkit for processing their emotions, some of this discrepancy would disappear.

And then men would be so desirable that they could go out and pull a load of 10s. I don’t think you’ve got this quite right.

I have. It’s brilliant! If we can convincingly fake emotional regularity, we can have more sex. I think that number just went down to 37%.

Oh fine, you’re right. I am. You shouldn’t need to rely on women to shoulder the burden of your emotional constipation. Get a therapist. Join some clubs. Develop a well-rounded social circle. It will enrich you beyond words.

And then you will have sex with me? Er, 36% and falling.

Do say: “It’s not my job to carry your entire emotional burden.”

Don’t say: “This is exactly why I don’t open up to women.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5739320&forum_id=2...id.#49024869)

Guessing plenty of Chads came and went, and she’s frustrated with the Losers who stick around.

Typical Loser Woman.

https://gender.stanford.edu/people/angelica-puzio-ferrara

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Angelica Puzio Ferrara

Angelica Ferrara

Postdoctoral Fellow, 2022-25

Angelica Puzio Ferrara is a developmental and social psychologist at The Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. Her writing and research seek to understand how gender ideologies manifest in human behavior throughout the lifespan and across cultures.

Ferrara is primarily interested in how gender norms become fixtures of our social and emotional worlds. In her doctoral work, she used natural language recordings to document how raced and classed gender ideologies are embodied in the language use of adolescent girls and boys. Some of Ferrara’s previous graduate research in The Journal of Adolescence deals with how gender norms may affect children’s and adolescents’ abilities to be direct about thoughts, opinions, and emotions with others. Together with scholars at the Toward Gender Harmony Project, Ferrara has explored the culturally situated nature of gender stereotypes in 62 nations through collaborations in Social Psychological and Personality Science, The Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, and The European Journal of Social Psychology.

A second stream of her research investigates ideological influences on the gendered economy of work. For example, Ferrara’s research in Psychology of Men and Masculinities has addressed why gender disparities persist in occupations that have been culturally “feminized,” such as early childhood education, healthcare, and domestic roles. While at Stanford, Ferrara is also completing a visiting fellowship at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she works to understand barriers to women’s and other marginalized groups’ advancement at workplaces in the United Kingdom.

Ferrara’s postdoctoral work is Men Without Men, a book that examines boys’ and men’s friendships across history and cultures. This work illuminates how cultural conceptions of manhood became incongruent with men’s needs for close, intimate bonds, leading many men to report that they have very few or no close friends. Drawing on the voices of men and boys who defy this pattern of loneliness, Ferrara uncovers how the state of men’s friendships became so fractured, who pays the price for men’s social isolation, and how these dynamics can be disrupted. Men Without Men will be published by Simon and Schuster in the United States and Penguin Random House in the United Kingdom and Canada.

Ferrara comes to The Clayman Institute after completing her Ph.D. at New York University, where she was part of the global fellowship program at NYU’s London center. Ferrara’s writing on the intersection of gender and culture has been published in The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and FiveThirtyEight, and her work has been featured by The Economist and The American Psychological Association.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5739320&forum_id=2...id.#49024921)

Yose ben Yochanan (a man) of Jerusalem used to say: Engage not in too much conversation with women. They said this with regard to one’s own wife, how much more [does the rule apply] with regard to another man’s wife. From here the Sages said: as long as a man engages in too much conversation with women, he causes evil to himself, he neglects the study of the Torah, and in the end he will inherit gehinnom.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5739320&forum_id=2...id.#49024962)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5739320&forum_id=2...id.#49024946)

i feel like these articles are now posted as ragebait for clicks more than they're posted to be read by an actually receptive audience

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5739320&forum_id=2...id.#49025008)

When women complain about the quality of men available to them: "Men today are trash!"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5739320&forum_id=2...id.#49025048)

my life plan is to make $ and try to look as good as possible and maybe some retarded woman saves me from this hellish reality

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5739320&forum_id=2...id.#49030172)

DEFINITELY no way NYUUG could bump cumskin male threads complaining about women though! IMPOSSIBLE!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5739320&forum_id=2...id.#49030229)

Yet somehow when this same dynamic occurs with an older successful man coaching an attractive young female through her problems, he's "controlling" and "exploiting" her and she's living a "less full life" because she doesn't get to make her own mistakes.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5739320&forum_id=2...id.#49030394)

I don’t understand. A whole generation of men don’t feel comfortable opening up to their male friends, which means some of them dump their worries on their female partner. It’s an extension of emotional labour – remembering birthdays, organising social calendars – but effectively it requires the partner to act as an unpaid therapist."

It's insane to me that women are complaining about this.

Providing emotional support to your partner is one of the most important- and rewarding- things you can do in a relationship. I'd say its of equal importance as regular sex for men because (as they point out here) most men don't have the kind of emotional support networks that women do. And working through this kind of stuff brings couples closer together.

Some people will bitch about anything, I guess.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5739320&forum_id=2...id.#49031234)

but then again my guy friends aren’t huge fags

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5739320&forum_id=2...id.#49031288)

these women are so vapid that they unironically see this as a solution. like playing squash once or twice a week is really the sort of connection that men are seeking. because they are just fine on their own with their bookclub and cats, so why aren't you? what more could there be?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5739320&forum_id=2...id.#49031362)