“Mankeeping” takes a toll on women’s mental health and relationship satisfaction, study suggests

A newly developed psychological survey provides a way to measure the unpaid, emotional labor that women perform to manage and maintain the social lives of their romantic partners. The research, published in Sex Roles, details the creation of a scale that captures how women experience the effects of men’s shrinking friendships. The tool offers a standardized way to study this dynamic and its impacts on relationship satisfaction and individual well-being.

The survey centers on a concept called mankeeping. This term describes the effort women exert to compensate for the decline in their male partners’ social networks. It involves behaviors like organizing social events, encouraging men to reconnect with friends, and serving as a primary or sole source of emotional support to prevent the men from becoming isolated.

The concept builds on a long history of sociological research into household and emotional labor. For instance, a 1985 study established the idea of kinkeeping, which refers to the everyday, invisible work that women typically perform to keep family members connected and preserve relational harmony.

At the same time, recent public health data indicates that men are facing a widespread decline in close friendships. A 2022 study observed that men generally face greater social isolation than women across most of their adult lives. This vulnerability is also reflected in a study covered by PsyPost in 2026, which showed that psychological distress tends to shrink men’s support networks much more severely than it does for women.

Recognizing the intersection of these two trends, researchers Angelica P. Ferrara and Dylan P. Vergara formally theorized mankeeping in a 2024 paper. They proposed that the ongoing decline in men’s friendships shifts a heavy, unreciprocated social burden onto their female partners, who act to shield the men and the relationship from the negative consequences of isolation.

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“‘Mankeeping’ is something many women express that they have been doing for their partners for quite some time,” lead researcher Vincent Mancini told PsyPost. Mancini is an adjunct senior research fellow at the UWA Medical School and a senior research fellow at the UWA Centre for Child Health Research. “With loneliness being a population health crisis that has gendered features, the aim of this work was to better understand how women may engage in additional effort to help maintain their male partner’s social needs.”

Prior to this work, scientists lacked a validated survey to actually quantify the extent of mankeeping and its psychological toll. By developing a specialized scale, Mancini and his colleagues aimed to provide a reliable way to investigate how men’s loneliness reshapes the daily lives of the women who care for them. To build the scale, the researchers first drafted a large pool of questions based on the initial theory of mankeeping.

They recruited 402 women residing in the United States who had been in a heterosexual romantic relationship for at least six months. The participants rated their agreement with 62 potential scale items using a seven-point rating system. They also completed several established psychological questionnaires measuring depression, anxiety, stress, relationship burnout, relationship burden, and overall relationship satisfaction.

Through a statistical process that groups related questions together based on how participants respond, the researchers refined the survey down to 46 items spanning six distinct categories. These six factors include the actual behaviors women perform to manage their partner’s social life, the emotional impact of that labor, and a recognition that their emotional support is often unequal or unappreciated. The remaining three factors capture the woman’s appraisal of her partner’s social network status, a desire for her partner to expand his friendships, and the extent to which the partner depends on her for emotional support.

The results indicated that the survey accurately captured theoretical predictions about mankeeping. Higher scores across the mankeeping dimensions strongly correlated with lower relationship satisfaction and higher levels of relationship burden and burnout. In addition, five of the six dimensions positively correlated with women’s self-reported depression, anxiety, and stress.

“There is now a validated and useful measure that can help to assess how women engage in this effortful process to help address their partner’s unmet social needs,” Mancini said. “Women who engage in these behaviors more tended to show poorer relationship satisfaction, which may signal the importance of social connections outside the romantic relationship that can help to more widely distribute social needs.” He added that “these results, whilst preliminary, indicate fairly robust and strong effects.”

Interestingly, simply appraising that a partner lacked friends was not strongly linked to psychological distress; rather, it was the active behaviors and the resulting emotional impact that were associated with poorer mental health. The data also showed that women who held more traditional beliefs about gender roles were more likely to report engaging in mankeeping behaviors.

Next, the team sought to verify that their newly developed survey, titled the Mankeeping Scale – Partner Report, operated consistently across different populations. They administered the 46-item survey to a second group of 395 romantically partnered cisgender women living in the United Kingdom. Statistical analyses confirmed that the original six-category structure fit the UK data just as well as the US data. This suggests that the survey measures the same underlying concepts regardless of which of these two countries the women reside in, establishing what researchers call measurement invariance.

Recognizing that a 46-item questionnaire can be overly long for many research or clinical settings, the scientists combined the data from both the US and UK participants, totaling 797 women. They identified the three most mathematically and theoretically strong questions from each of the six categories to create an 18-item brief version. Testing showed that this shortened survey maintained excellent reliability and produced similar associations with relationship satisfaction and psychological distress as the full-length version, offering a practical alternative for future studies.

“It is incredibly useful to have validated measures of concepts such as mankeeping, so that research can move from theory to actually testing associations with possible outcomes,” said Sara B. Chadwick, an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study. “Having a validated measure of mankeeping will allow researchers to better understand how women’s efforts to support and maintain their men partners’ social networks and emotional health are connected to a variety of outcomes for both women and men in these partnerships,” she told PsyPost.

“The development of this measure offers a clear extension of research theorizing ‘mankeeping,’ and builds on previous feminist scholarship that has aimed to conceptualize the many ways that gender norms shape women’s romantic relationships with men,” Chadwick added.

She noted that earlier research has highlighted how gender norms often position women as caregivers for their male partners in ways that mimic a parent-child dynamic. “Overall, I would say this offers an important contribution to feminist research by specifically naming the kinds of behaviors that women engage in for the sake of supporting their men partners and by creating a way for researchers to measure and thus further explore it.”

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind about these findings. The survey relies entirely on self-reported data from one partner, meaning it captures a woman’s perception of her partner’s social life rather than an objective measure of his actual friendships. A man might feel his social needs are adequately met, even if his partner appraises his network as lacking. Future studies would benefit from surveying both members of a couple simultaneously to get a complete picture of the relationship dynamics.

“It is absolutely crucial to recognize that these results at the population level might not apply in the same way to the individual/couple level,” Mancini cautioned. “Romantic couples are incredibly diverse, not every man is lonely, nor does every woman need to engage in this process. This paper should also not take away from the importance of understanding loneliness as a population health issue, that all genders can experience.”

Chadwick agreed that context is crucial, noting that emotionally supporting a partner or helping them maintain social networks can sometimes be a consensual arrangement or a necessity based on temporary life circumstances, such as moving to a new city or dealing with a period of depression.

“The behaviors listed are not in themselves problematic, even when they may be burdensome,” Chadwick explained. “The key here is consent and mutuality, or in other words, it is essential that women either have consented to an arrangement where they take on the majority of social networking and emotional labor, or that this labor is offered to women in their times of need from their men partners.”

The current data is also a single snapshot in time, which makes it impossible to determine a strict chain of cause and effect between mankeeping behaviors and declining mental health. In addition, women’s responses to the survey might be influenced by internalized societal expectations about how a romantic partner is supposed to act.

Because the study focused on populations in the US and the UK with similar cultural norms, the survey might perform differently in other cultures. Expanding the research to include non-Western populations, as well as developing a companion survey to capture how men experience and perceive this social labor, will help clarify the full scope of this dynamic.

The issue arises, she pointed out, when women are automatically expected to take on this labor. “Unfortunately of course, with the way that gender norms function, the majority of mankeeping is indeed likely to be nonconsensual and non-mutual and thus have a disproportionately negative impact on women,” Chadwick said. In future research, she hopes to see investigations into whether this support is reciprocated, noting that the labor might not have a negative impact “if women feel they are offered the same types of labor from their partner in their own time periods of loneliness or need.”

“Our team is looking to engage in some longitudinal work that can allow us to follow couples over time, so that we can better understand how the phenomenon of mankeeping unfolds over time,” Mancini explained. “Being able to also capture the experiences of male partners, and develop interventions that can bolster the relationship quality between partners are our key future priorities.” He noted that the researchers are “always happy to chat to clinicians, researchers, and communities who have thoughts and ideas about the utility of this work!”

The study, “Measuring Mankeeping: Development and Validation of a Scale Assessing How Women Experience the Impact of Men’s Declining Social Networks,” was authored by Vincent O. Mancini, Briana N. Guerrini, James J. Clarke, Dylan P. Vergara, Zac E. Seidler, and Angelica P. Ferrara.