Your Relationship Problems Aren't Always About the Patriarchy
Are you "mankeeping" or is he just a loser?
This week, The New York Times sparked online fervor when writer Catherine Pearson penned an article discussing "mankeeping," the hot new internet term describing women's exhaustion and annoyance at having to perform various acts of "emotional labor" for their male partners.
"Mankeeping," Pearson writes, "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."
For the story, Pearson interviewed 37-year-old Eve Tilley-Colson, who while seemingly happy with her boyfriend, "finds herself offering him a fair amount of social and emotional scaffolding," according to Pearson. Tilley-Colson said she tends to make the social plans, and she and her boyfriend hang out primarily with her friends.
"I feel responsible for bringing the light to the relationship," she told Pearson.
The article quickly attracted online controversy, with X users in particular pointing out that mankeeping seemed to describe, well, the typical emotional support most people are expected to provide in a loving relationship.
"Why does it seem like so many people just don't enjoy being with their partners??? My bf can spend all his time with me I love him," wrote one user.
"'Emotional labor' has become code for 'people should never present an inconvenience to me' This is why so some people's friendships consist of very little more than going to brunch," added commentator Allie Voss. "If you want surface level 'emotional labor' you're going to get surface level love."
I'm inclined to agree with this criticism. Healthy relationships usually require that we provide emotional support to our partners—the support "through daily challenges and inner turmoil," derided as "mankeeping" in the article. Pathologizing this support is to misunderstand what close human relationships are even about. Loving someone else and receiving their affection and comfort requires give and take. It won't always be perfectly equal, nor will it be entirely pleasant.
When the proposal for my upcoming book was on submission, I certainly was not particularly pleasant to emotionally support. I spent the month of May cycling between various forms of dread, panic, and hysterical despair. I remember the month primarily from the vantage point of my couch, which I frequently flung myself onto during fits of anguish. (The book, by the way, sold to a great publisher, and my fears that it wouldn't sell went unrealized.) Through it all, my husband was extremely patient and very sweet. If he was annoyed by my antics, he certainly didn't show it.
Was he "womankeeping" that month? Was I forcing him into some kind of burdensome "emotional labor"? If he thought so, I somehow doubt that a legacy media organization would publish an essay about how men everywhere are being worn down by their neurotic wives and girlfriends.
While this construction rightly strikes most as a bizarre overgeneralization, contemporary cultural criticism is full of essays premised on wild generalizations from individual relationship dynamics, usually stemming from the idea that anytime a woman is dissatisfied in her heterosexual relationship, not only are her complaints justified, but the patriarchy probably has something to do with it. Just in the past two months alone, The New York Times has published essays from women bemoaning that men are retreating from emotional intimacy and that men themselves are "what is rotten in the state of straightness." I don't think these women are exaggerating their romantic woes; rather, I'm just not convinced that their problems represent broader cultural trends, especially trends that boil down to sexism in some way.
Even the popularity of the term emotional labor itself is part of this tendency. The original meaning of the term was literal, coined in the 1980s to describe how service-sector jobs often require employees to perform certain emotions for customers, such as the way waitresses are required to act friendly in order to get good tips. Now, the term applies to just about every act of service you could imagine. Compromise? Emotional labor. Playing with your kids? Emotional labor. Warning your husband that he's about to accidentally break a lawn mower? Somehow, also emotional labor.
To be sure, there are plenty of persistent problems faced by heterosexual couples that probably come down to gender or sexism. But surely that doesn't mean you should blame every unhappy relationship on men or heterosexuality in general.
Still, doing so remains a bankable tactic. The past few years, for example, have seen a glut of "divorce memoirs" that paint one woman's unhappy marriage as representative of all heterosexual marriages. Lyz Lenz, for example, writes in her 2024 memoir This American Ex-Wife that her book "[is] about how specifically breaking the bonds of marriage, the system that was designed to oppress you, will open up your life to create something new and something better."
The unnamed protagonist of Sarah Manguso's 2024 autofiction novel Liars paints marriage with an even broader brush. "Maybe the trouble was simply that men hate women," she muses. "A husband might be nothing but a bottomless pit of entitlement. You can throw all your love and energy and attention down into it, and the hole will never fill."
These books describe genuinely miserable marriages, but none seem to consider whether their marriages could have been bad without representing the state of heterosexual marriage itself. The individual woman's experience is uncritically presented as universal, provided that it is a negative one.
"I feel like there's a certain script you have to abide by if you're a woman writer, writing about motherhood, dating or marriage, in certain literary circles," Substacker CartoonsHateHer wrote in a post about the mankeeping dust-up. "You basically have to embody the spirit of someone who is vaguely put-upon, not only by men but by life, and it's society's problem."
My plea to the divorce memoirists—and now, for those complaining of "mankeeping"—is that an unhappy relationship is not always a symptom of female oppression. Especially when it comes to the minor annoyances described in the latest trend articles, the simplest answer might just be that you don't like your boyfriend that much. Your relationship problems might just be downstream of the fact that you're dating a loser, not the male loneliness epidemic or male entitlement. Sometimes a relationship is just unhappy. Unfortunately, those stories are much less likely to go viral.
