Does your partner pen the birthday card for your pops, pick and paper the holiday gifts for the kiddos, pester you about making plans with your recently-dumped pal? Do they play the unofficial role of your therapist, life coach, and social secretary? Hate to break it to you, my friend, but you might be mankept.
Mankeeping is a relatively new term for the often-invisible emotional, relational, and logistical labor that people do to maintain their male partner's social and emotional lives, says Jesse Kahn, LCSW, CST, a queer sex therapist and director of The Gender & Sexuality Therapy Center in New York City.
The term was coined by developmental and social psychologist Angelica Ferrara, PhD, to describe the work women, specifically, do to meet the social and emotional needs of their men. And yes, mankeeping tends to happen most often in heterosexual relationships, according to Kahn, "but similar patterns can show up in any gendered dynamic where one partner quietly manages the other's emotional and social world."
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