Never heard of mankeeping? I hadn’t either but apparently it’s the hip new topic after the word was coined last year by a postdoc at Stanford.
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,” Dr. Ferrara said, taking care to note that the dynamic isn’t experienced by all couples.
My first reaction to this is to think it’s just the latest bit of social-science based complaining directed at men. And that may be how it winds up being translated on social media. That said, there may be something to the underlying idea here. There really is a consensus of sorts that men don’t have the same number and depth of relationships with other guys that they did even a few decades ago.
In a 2021 survey, 15 percent of men said they didn’t have any close friends, up from 3 percent in 1990. The same report showed that in 1990, nearly half of young men said they would reach out to friends when facing a personal issue; two decades later, just over 20 percent said the same…
…some of the challenges men face in making strong connections are societal, said Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a think tank, and author of “Of Boys and Men.” Many of the institutions and spaces where men used to organically make friends have eroded, he said, like houses of worship, civic groups and even the simple workplace.
“Men used to be able to put themselves in these institutional settings and it kind of happened around them,” he added. “That’s just not happening so much anymore. Men do have to do more, be more assertive. I’m finding that even in my own life.”
That much of it rings true to me. In the 1990s I had a few close guy friends, people I knew from college, from church. Plus there were lots of guys around at work. But over time a lot of that has changed. I moved across the country which cut me off from friends I’d had since elementary school. I still go to church but it’s different being a husband and father meeting other husbands and fathers than it was when I was single or just married. There’s just not as much room for new people as their once was. And while I’m friends with my colleagues here at Hot Air, I’ve never met most of them face to face because we all work in different states. So it’s not like we could go grab a beer and hang out on the weekend even if we wanted to do so. That’s how it is for a lot of people since the pandemic made working from home more routine.
I’m lucky in that I still have some close friends I’ve made here in California, though one of my good friends left the state a decade ago and moved to another city and then to upstate New York. I think it gets harder to replace the people you’ve known for 20 years as you get older.
All that to say, the underlying premise does ring true to me. It’s probably not as easy for men to make friends now as it was decades ago. All the authors are really adding to that is the idea that your wife or girlfriend is probably taking up the slack. If you don’t have guy friends to hand out with, you lean more on that primary relationship.
Is that a bad thing? I thought the common complaint from women was that men don’t share enough?
Why Women Are Weary of the Emotional Labor of ‘Mankeeping’ https://t.co/qJIQC6ocSj via @NYTimes
Last year’s problem: He doesn’t tell me about his feelings!
This year’s problem: He tells me about his feelings!
— Caitlin Flanagan (@CaitlinPacific) July 28, 2025
I honestly don’t know if this is a problem or just something new to complain about. There’s an example in the NY Times story about a couple where the woman is the main social director for the relationship. She says that’s a bit of a burden because she’s responsible if plans don’t get made or things don’t go well. It worked out this way because they’re always basically meeting with her friends, not his. I guess I can see how that would get tiresome if it was just assumed you’d handle it all the time.
Anyway, you’ll probably be hearing more about mankeeping in the next few months or years. Does any of this ring true to other men? Do women readers see this play out in their own lives or the lives of friends? Or is this much ado about nothing that will soon become the next “mansplaining,” i.e. something women throw in the faces of men online as a way to tell them to shut up. If you’re so inclined you can read Dr. Ferrara’s study about mankeeping here.
