To The Contrary

Funding for To The Contrary provided by: This week on To The Contrary: You should be able to go to your partner and talk about your deepest, darkest secrets, fears and your dreams.

It needs to be a plac where both parties can do that, and that is not the same thing as therapy.

But if you feel that your partner is over sharing his feelings with you, you could always say, could we have less feelings talk?

Hello, I'm Bonnie Erb.

Welcome to To The Contrary, a discussion of news and social trend from a variety of perspectives.

Mankeeping is a new term to describe a rising trend in partner relationships.

Some women complain they are spending too much time managing the social and emotional needs of their partners.

They feel their significant other has somehow reduced them to becoming a therapist, a secretary, or the partners only friend.

But some ask where the boundary lies between mankeeping and healthy emotional support Or if there even is a boundary?

Joining me this week are Kat Rosenfield, writer for The Free Pres and host of the Feminine Chaos podcast, and Dr.

Nikki Coleman, a psychologist and founder of Dr.

Nikki Knows, a mental health firm.

Welcome to you both.

And let's start out here you first, Kat, then you, NikkiDr.

Nikki.

How do you define mankeeping?

Okay, so I think the most important thing, honestly, is how do the people who use this term define it?

And what it seems to mean is their experience of having to emotionally support thei partner as burdensome in a way that is somehow separate from the ordinary business of loving and supporting your spouse.

I'm not entirely clear o where that line is, but clearly it is about the experiencing o that as a burden as opposed to, like you were saying a healthy relationship dynamic.

I appreciate that perspective, Kat, for sure.

When I think about mankeeping, I think about it as the combination of both domestic labor and emotional labor, and it's the double part that create that sense of burdensome, right.

I think that there's been a long standing sort of expectation tha there are certain domestic labor distributions that are not really equitable between men and women in marriage.

And this concept of mankeeping is really naming the emotional labor that comes along with the the calendar-keeping, the sort of cheer bringing that comes around holidays, the expectation to do all of the other, as we might define soft or more feminine thing in the relationship, in addition to being in relationship to your partner or spouse.

But some of that's going to be inevitable in any relationship, right?

Sure.

I think that it is the unspoken expectation that because of our ideas around women and femininity, that those things get relegated to women in relationships and that assumption without the ability to sort of with an informed, thoughtful shared decision making process about how things get distributed in the relationship is where the burdensome piece comes, is where the concept of mankeeping comes from.

Your thoughts on whether there's a boundary between the two.

I think that a lot of what's happening in this conversation is that the idea of man- keeping or emotional labor that's somehow burdensome to women is getting lumped in with the concept of the mental load, which is much more about the upkeep and maintenance of household, of family.

Now, being there for your partner emotionall is a completely different thing from being the perso who sends the Christmas cards, or being the one who remembers to fill the soap dispenser.

And so we have these two things, both of whic are maybe frustrating to women, but which are really in different spheres, getting conflated with each other and getting brought into the conversation as though they're one entity.

I think that's probably a little bit of a mistake.

The other thing is, when we talk about the mental load and about domestic labor in the household, you know, it's an interesting thing to be discussing in the contex of contemporary relationships, because millennial men for instance, do I want to say like 200% more housework, more domestic work than, for instance, their fathers did?

And yet we still have this sense somehow that they're not doing enough.

Is that fair?

I absolutely think it's fair.

I see a lot of couples and individuals.

My practice is really focused on relational wellness, and this is an issue that comes up a good deal.

And so while millennial men, even Gen Z men may be doing 200% more, the assumption is that what their forefathers were doing was equitable or sufficient.

And so if there's been a long pattern of insufficiency or inequitability, 300% more, 500% more doesn't necessarily mean tha we're even meeting the standard.

I think the other thing that I want to highlight from what Kat said is that we can name that there's emotional labor done, but it is the inequitable distribution, right?

So it's one thing to be there for your partner, right?

I'm going through a tough time.

I feel like we have a relationship where I can share that with you and vice versa.

This concept of man keeping is this inherent imbalance in which women are carrying more of that emotional labor for their male partners, that is not being reciprocated by the male partner, and they're carrying that more by virtue of the fact that they are the woman in the relationship or the more feminine person in the relationship.

So he feels because he's a man and she's a woman in heterosexual relationships, that it's okay for him to lean on her heavily, some would say?

I think, in fact, it' that men are conditioned to keep their softer, emotional, more insecure, maybe more intimate parts of themselves relegate to their romantic relationships rather than in their platonic relationships or even other familial relationships.

And so I think it's sort of an expectatio that that's how that plays out.

The mankeeping, the burdensome part is that women aren't feeling that that is reciprocated, right?

And so if we're equally co-sharing in challenges and stress and needs and joys and celebrations, that's one thing.

But if I'm taking care of mysel and holding all of your stuff, then that's where this disequilibrium is coming.

Is that how it always breaks down, though?

You said, you know, if I'm taking care of my stuf and all of your stuff, is it?

Isn't the boundary all over the place depending on the relationship?

I think it is when that it's an expectation that is not explicitly discussed.

That's the issue, right?

And like I play thi exercise out a lot with folks.

If I start talking to yo about a partner and I don't name gender and I start saying that one partner has expectations at work, and then the kid's birthday party is coming up and they're planning the party, but also their mom got sick, so they're trying to figure out how they can get there to support all of these caregiving tasks that come up planning for the party.

And then I say, what gender pops in your mind wholike, what is the person that you think is doing that?

More times than not, people are seeing the woman partner doing that, right?

That speaks to our underlying conditioning and expectations around domestic labor and emotional labor that happens.

Kat, is that your view of things as well, that rarely, if ever, falls on the man and just about, it always falls on the woman?

Well, I mean, the way that Dr.

Nikki is describing this, it's interesting because the way that my view of this is very much how is i discussed in the kind of broader cultural discourse which is being driven by, for instance, the New York Times style section, which is one of the place that this term first popped up.

And how is it being discussed amongst younger women, you know, millennial Gen Z?

So the thing that I've noticed is it really is not about my husband or my partner won't reciprocate by being there emotionally for me, it's very focused on I don't want to deal with this man's feelings.

He has too many feelings.

He is putting them all on me and I don't want it.

And the thing that strikes me is, you know, I was alive all throughout the long 2010s of feminism in which we were constantl saying that men being unwilling to talk about their feelings was toxic masculinity.

And we were quoting bell hooks at them and we were saying, you need to open up to us.

We want you to talk about your feelings.

You need to be more in touch with your emotional side.

Please talk about your feelings.

And now it's like, okay, which one of you women was holding the monkey's paw when you wished for men to talk more about their feelings because they're talking about them with us, and it turns out we don't actually want that.

People don't actually or women, rather in heterosexual relationships, don't necessarily want to be hearing about their man's feelings all the time.

Well, I mean, isn't there a happy medium, though?

Shouldn't they be bringing it up occasionally?

I mean, personally, I would say it's great for men to talk about their feelings, but the question is, if you asked for this, if you've been talking for a decade about how men not discussing their feelings is toxic masculinity, but then they're talking about their feelings and it's mankeeping, I think it does kind of raise the question of how what are they supposed to do How can they do anything right?

I appreciate that perspective, Kat, for sure.

That's an angle that I hadn't really thought about or perceived.

What that makes me think about is I think we'r in a bit of an intimacy crisis, broadly speaking.

And by that I mean being i close relationship with someone, intimate relationship with someone, whether it's romantic or platonic, requires that you make yourself emotionally available not only for expressing you needs and your vulnerabilities, but as well as being a support for the other person.

And I think as a product of this digital age that we're living in, I also see and talk to my clients a lo about even unresolved vestiges of our pandemic experiences, that we're not all at the same place where we can handle both sitting in our own emotions, vulnerabilities as well as holding someone else's.

And so I think that there's a lot of work to be done.

I think we're at a age where people can use a lot of psychological terms and speak as if they have a great deal of insight, but the process of actually being in relationship and navigating those disconnects, difficulties feelings of burdensome are two totally different things.

And it sounds like there's some skill deficits on both sides with the wa that Kat is describing things.

Has either of you ever seen the script completely flipped where th the woman is getting supported emotionally by the man, and the man is just listening and taking care of her?

I havent.

That shut you both up, sorry about that.

I mean, I don't personally have, you know, like a couples therapy practice and I'm not spying on my friends in their homes to see what their relationship dynamics are like.

So I couldn't speak to that, no.

What's the transition that tells you that you're being, I hate to use the term abused because it's not exactly abuse, but some people see it lots of people see it that way.

But how do you know if the man has turned your relationship, is using you as a free therapist?

Every relationship, romantic relationship for sure, should absolutely be a space where there is emotional intimacy.

You should be able to go to your partner and talk about your deepest, darkest secrets, fears, and your dreams.

It needs to be a plac where both parties can do that.

And that is not the same thing as therapy.

That if there is something that is happening with you internally, that is a pattern that consistently gets in the way of you living a life that feels happy, balanced, healthy for you, that you feel like you can express your psychological needs, the that is the role of a therapist.

And so if any partner in a relationship is feeling as if they are not allowed to also show up as their own selves, then that's a time to sort of think about, can we offload some of this emotional labor somewhere else?

My job as a therapist is I don't go and talk to my clients.

Like, let me tell you about how my kid has been acting up, right?

There's not an expectatio of reciprocality in the same way And so if there is a situation in which there's only room in the relationship for one person's emotions, then that's a relationshi that's out of balance, period.

And so that might be an opportunity for one partne to consider individual therapy.

Or maybe for the couple themselves to seek out couples therapy.

It's when there's more extremes on one side or the other.

I'm really, really hesitant to use the word abuse.

I could talk about emotional manipulation or gaslighting or stonewalling.

When we start seeing those sorts of behaviors happen regularly in a couple, then those are really serious red flags that I would encourage anyone to seek out therapy.

But if there's this sense of imbalance around being able to negotiate, hold, navigate emotion from one partner or the other, I think that's an area where the partner, the relationship needs to sort of reassess.

How do we define emotional intimacy?

How do we establish bette boundaries around communication and getting our needs met in the relationship?

Kat, your thoughts about have you ever been told by a female friend that she feel she's being used as a therapist?

She's not her partner therapist, but she's being used that way by the partner?

No.

And I would also want to just echo what Dr.

Nikki said, tha I think that it would really be kind of over the line to describe a ma oversharing about his feelings, even if it's very annoying as abuse.

We should really reserve that word to talk about a very specific thing, and not allow the concept to creep in that direction.

I do also think So what would you call it if not abuse?

Annoying.

Okay.

Possibly, I mean, it depends on who you are and what you want out of your relationship.

If you feel that your partner is oversharing his feelings with you, you could always say, could we have less feelings talk?

The question is, is feelings talk something that you've previously requested?

The other thing, though, and I think it's important to just keep this in mind whenever we're talking about stuff like this, is we want to try to avoid pathologizing the normal relationship dynamics, normal conflicts, normal things that you have to work out.

One of the thing that we've seen happen very much within, you know, the past I want to say five years, especially as people have started making a lot of content about relationships in short form videos on TikTok and the like, is the introduction of therapeutic language into our everyday conversations about our relationships with each other, how we're connecting and how we're feeling, which is resulting in us really pathologizing what is actually normal, ordinary friction that all of us experience in everyday life, that all of us need to figure out a way to work through healthily without making i into like a psychological issue.

Now, when you say pathologizing, do you mean turning it into something that's noxious emotionally?

I mean that, you know, if your partner disagrees with you and you accuse him of gaslighting you, that's pathologizing.

If your partner is complimentary to you and you accuse them of love bombing you, that's pathologizing.

We need to have better ways to talk about this that don't involve retreating to these terms that originally had very specific uses.

They described legitimately abusive behavior as it was more than just I don't like this.

It was a pattern, and it was something toxic and somethin very specifically psychological that we sort of lost sight of the original definitions of these words.

And in doing so, we've really lost the ability to make them mean something.

And your thoughts, Dr.

Nikki?

Yeah, I really want to thank Kat for echoing what I was saying previously in that I d think the advent of social media and giving the broader culture language that reflects psychological sort of thoughts and ideas is part of the issue that we're experiencing.

Incensed is probably the mildest way that I can describe my experience after being a licensed psychologist for 20 plus years to log on to any social medi platform, and see relationship coaches and people who've just been in really bad relationships think that they can give relationship advice and it'd be really harmful.

And so when we talk about abuse, a really simple way to think about the distinction to your question earlier, Bonnie, is whether something is hurtfu or whether something is harmful.

And we all experience hurt in relationships, its the nature of being in connection with other human beings; you get hurt.

When someone is harming you, where they're doing something intentionally to create problems for you, to cause you harm, to make you uncomfortable, to bring you pain.

That is when we're talking about abusiveness.

And so this is why this idea around mankeeping in the way that we're describing it isn't necessarily not abusive in certain instances but we don't know the intentions or the patterns in any one individual relationship.

And I think that's the other piece that's really, really important is we can talk about generalities a great deal, like we can talk about patterns, but only the people within the context of that relationship dynamic can talk about what the real impact is for them, whether it feels like this behavior is intentional, whether it is causing harm to the individual or not.

Right.

And that's a really significant distinction to make.

Now, what are the tell for women who are saying, I don't know if I'm supposed to be listening to all this?

It sounds very repetitive.

I get bored wit the same questions all the time.

What are the telltale signs of men relying too heavily on women for their emotional support?

I think the too heavily goes back to Kats point from the beginning, right?

Like it's the internal.

It's the internal relationship experience of it feeling burdensom that sort of defines that line.

As a therapist, what I would say is if your partner is coming to you with something over and over and over again, there's not any movement around it.

You don't see that they're taking any initiative to change anything.

I think that's an opportunity to say.

You ever thought about going to therapy?

Have you been talking about this with your therapist?

Or reflect back that, you know, we've been talking about thi for six months, and every time it feels like the same level of emotions that you have around that, maybe there's a different wa that we can look at that.

Right?

I think that there's a way to sort of better negotiate boundaries around that sense of emotional labor, that sense of burdensomeness in a relationship.

Now, do me a favor, both of you, please: define emotional labor.

I am so glad you asked this question.

This is one of my bugaboos.

Emotional labor, as it originallyin the original coinage was meant to describ literal work, professional work, and it is a form of labor that you do when you work in, like public facing jobs, where you work in service industries.

I'm a yoga instructor in my non-journalist life.

I have to do emotional labor in that job.

I have to maintain positive energy in a room for an hour.

I have to manage people's feelings and expectations.

Flight attendants have to engage in emotional labor, police officer who have to project authority.

They have to engage in emotional labor.

Emotional labor is not something you do in a relationship with another person who you've chosen to be intimate with.

It is something you do in your professional life that is part of your job description.

Or originally, that is what it was supposed to be, and I really, really don't like that we've started using it to describe things like remembering your husband's birthday or laughing at his jokes.

That is not emotional labor.

That's just being in love.

Okay, so what is emotional labor?

How do you tell the difference?

Well, I actually disagre with Kat in this perspective in that despite how the term originated, I think that we canthat things evolve and concepts evolve.

I think one of the important things in this context is that we will talk about actual labor.

We talk about the time that we spend outside of the home, making money, all the other responsibilities that we have.

The laborsome part around emotional labor comes along with the additional cognitive load.

Right?

And we would all be gaslighting the audience and ourselves, if we said that all of us ar not managing multiple stressors.

And in managing American life on a daily basis, right, with the level of responsibility.

Kat just named that she has two jobs, right?

So there's a great deal o cognitive and emotional output that is happening.

In your relationship, you want that to be restorative, right?

That's supposed to be the place where you come back to get filled up.

But if we see thi consistent pattern in imbalance of expectations around who is emotionally available, who is responsible for domestic tasks, for caretaking tasks, that is when we switch from intimacy to labor.

And that is what I'm speaking about, right?

When that is not being offset by other tasks or roles or responsibilities in the relationship.

I hear this all the time within the couples that I see in that the men want more intimacy in the relationship, but they've also sat around on the couch, scrolling on their phone or watching TV while the woman has prepared dinner, gotten the house tidied up, done some other work emails.

Like, there's all of these things that are happening that women are additionally doing after work, which has been consistent in the research literature since women have entered the field of work that men are not doing.

So then at the end of the day, at 10:00 and we're in bed and you want to offload emotionally, that is labor for me.

I have not had any time off all day.

And you don't want to spend it laboring for your partner?

No.

Now, since we're coming to the end of our time, what if people don't have money because therapy is expensive?

Let's face it.

What if you don't have health insurance?

Or what if you don't have healt insurance that covers therapy?

What alternatives are there that are free?

Are there alternatives out there?

I think there are better, credible resources online that can support couples in having more thoughtful, reflective conversations around boundaries and managing emotional intimacy in relationships.

I think a simple Google search, or just listening to your favorite relationship influencers is not enough.

There are licensed therapists like myself, psychologists out there, and we have websites still, you know, and oftentimes there's really helpfu information there in blog posts.

There's actually free resources around workshop worksheets, things that couples can actually use to help better structure how they engage with one another at free or no cost.

Even simple things like being able to use I statements, being able to learn the difference around expressing empathy, and validating your partner's experience, right.

I think there are credible source that people can access and use.

And I alsoone of my pet peeves is that, yes, therapy can be expensive, but we also prioritize other things for ourselve when we want to invest in them.

And so maybe at some point you have to decide, do I want this $300 haircut or do I want to maybe improve my relationship?

Right?

So, Kat, last question to you.

If a woman feels that she is being used by her partner emotionally.

What should she do?

Is there anything you can think of short of breaking up?

I think that she might want to ask herself where she originally got the idea that it's being used for her partner to share his emotions.

Is sh assessing the situation fairly?

The entire conversation about man- keeping can't be disentangled from this extremely online kind of grievance oriented feminist conversation.

It's not that talking about feminism online is bad, but it can be bad for your relationship if you are getting to a point where you've imbibed so much content from TikTok influencers or Instagram Reels or, you know, Reddit relationship posts that you've started to pathologize the ordinary frictions and the ordinary discontentments that you might experience in a relationship.

Or to start wondering if your perfectly functional, healthy dynamic is somehow toxic because it resembles love bombing or mankeeping.

And so, although I think it' great for people to get therapy, if they feel that they need it, then I think it's great that we have so many ways to access therapy at this point.

I also think there is some value in just being sure that the problem you think you have is actually a problem.

Very interesting.

Thank you both for a very enlightening conversation.

That's it for this edition of To The Contrary, let's keep talking on social media, including X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, and reach out to us @tothecontrary and visit our website, the address on the screen and whether you agree or think to the contrary, see you next time.

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