If you want to build everlasting relationships or want a resilient marriage, stay away from internalizing certain psychology studies on relationships. Don’t get me wrong, there’s value in some of these studies, but some can make women feel constantly overburdened. And men are either clueless, devious, and child-like creatures. Who wants to fall in love with that? Enter a recent study from Stanford: mankeeping. It’s a play on the word housekeeping.
What Is Mankeeping?
Women are spending hours of their time listening to their man complain about life and unloading their problems. Mankeeping happens when women take care of the emotional needs of their partner, but fail to get the same emotional support. Mankeeping occurs, according to the study, because of men’s dwindling social network. Without the luxury of a support network outside of their relationship, women disproportionately have taken on this “work”.
The concept has gained traction. Magazines and news networks have articles on mankeeping. Titles include phrases such as “may burden women”, “how women are bearing the brunt”, and “exhausting women”. Then there’s social media. I still remember when weaponized incompetence gained traction. This is the idea that men pretend to be clueless about housework, so they can get away with it. As a result of men’s deceit, women end up disproportionately responsible for housework, or what I call The Sponge War.
The Problem
The problem is that in the social sciences, to add theory and framework to research, you have to add elements of power, imbalance, and inequality. There’s always a loser and a winner. But love, relationships, romance, the resilient and true kind, doesn’t keep tabs. When the goal is equality without a precise way to measure it, neither party will feel victorious. Everyone ends up feeling shortchanged.
I have always thought that the beauty of marriage is that you have a constant—the first person you reach out to when times are tough. Marriage means having someone who listens to you and gives you their honest opinion. Psychology concepts such as mankeeping turns the human connection we form when being part of a relationship into a burden. Mankeeping takes what I consider my honor and a privilege, and turns it to buffoonery.
Imagine if your partner stops talking to you about their problems and instead talks to someone else—how would that feel? Why is talking to your partner about the challenges they are going through, at least the frequency in which it’s done, suddenly a problem?
If I still haven’t convinced you of the unloving nature of looking at relationships through mankeeping, imagine this. Joanna Gaines talks about how overburdened she feels that Chip doesn’t have friends and he keeps on relying on her when he needs a good talk. So she makes sure Chip spends as much time away with friends so she can have some peace of mind. Unlikely right? Not a true story. Because America’s sweetest married couple will probably do no such thing.
Here’s My Take on This
In life, it’s inevitable that you’ll come across advice, expert ideas, scientific concepts about love, marriage, and relationships. Know that these ideas can change the stories you tell about your partner and yourself. When your partner is in a bad patch and talks about it—are you going to think about how you can work together to solve problems, or are you going to focus on what a burden they are placing on you? You decide.
More than ever, we need to have a strong sense of self when it comes to who we are in our relationships. Because it’s noisy out there. Everyone’s an expert, the scientists, the romantics, and the broken-hearted. And if you take to heart concepts such as mankeeping, your relationship will revolve around self-protection and power. What you have is war, not romance.
