EDITORS' CORNER
OPINION: So much for ‘in sickness and in health’
Are you a woman who provides for “the social and emotional needs” of your man? If so, you may be a victim of “mankeeping.”
Or at least so says a Stanford University researcher.
While most normal Americans use terms like “marriage” or “relationship” to describe the intimate emotional bonds between a man and a woman, those in academia inhabit a different world, devoid of reason, but full of nonsense.
According to Stanford University scholar Angelica Ferrara, many women are struggling under the weight of providing emotional support for their male boyfriends or spouses.
“What I have been seeing in my research is how women have been asked or expected to take on more work to be a central — if not the central — piece of a man’s social support system,” Ferrara told the New York Times for a recent article about the concept. She first coined the term in a 2024 academic paper.
“Many men’s social support systems are romantically centered, with fewer men than women reporting regular emotional disclosure and intimacy outside of heterosexual romantic bonds,” Ferrara wrote last year. “The field has not yet reckoned with the ways that shortcomings in men’s social networks may further instantiate women’s disproportionate emotion work on men’s behalf.”
When men are struggling emotionally, the question we should ask, according to Ferrara is this – how are women being hurt?
The term, according to the New York Times’ paraphrase, “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.”
While it is certainly true that men can struggle to form close friendships, everything listed as a problem is a simple part of a relationship, whether it be friendship, dating, or marriage.
In fact, if someone is not ready “to meet the social and emotional needs” of another person and “support [them] through daily challenges and inner turmoil” they should re-examine what the purpose of relationships is.
“I promise to be faithful to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, to love you and to honor you all the days of my life,” Catholics promise each other on their wedding day. “Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live,” the Anglican 1662 Book of Common Prayer states.
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes in Book VIII: “Friends are an aid to the young, to guard them from error; to the elderly, to tend them, and to supplement their failing powers of action; to those in the prime of life, to assist them in noble deeds.”
According to her bio, Professor Ferrara “seeks to understand how gender ideologies shape behavior and relationships.”
Based on her comments, she still has a lot to learn.
MORE: ‘Household labor’ study is biased against men
IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: A husband and wife discuss issues; Mikhail Nelov/Pexels
