A new psychological survey has been developed to measure the unpaid, emotional labour women perform to organise and sustain the social lives of their romantic partners. The research introduces a scale designed to quantify how women experience the effects of men’s shrinking friendships, offering researchers a standardised way to study its impact on relationship satisfaction and personal well‑being.
The study centres on a concept called mankeeping, which describes the efforts women make to compensate for declines in their male partners’ social networks. It includes actions like arranging social gatherings, urging men to reconnect with friends, and providing the primary or sole emotional support to prevent isolation.
The idea sits within a long lineage of sociological work on household and emotional labour. Notably, the 1985 concept of kinkeeping defined the everyday, invisible work women undertake to keep family members connected and preserve relational harmony.
Public health data in recent years have highlighted a trend of increasing social isolation among men. A 2022 study found men generally face greater loneliness than women across much of adulthood, a vulnerability echoed in a PsyPost report from 2026 showing that psychological distress tends to shrink men’s support networks more than it does for women.
Recognising these two developments, researchers Angelica P. Ferrara and Dylan P. Vergara proposed the theory of mankeeping in a 2024 paper, arguing that the steady decline in men’s friendships shifts a heavy social burden onto their female partners, who act to shield both the men and the relationship from isolation’s harms.
“‘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 quantify the extent of mankeeping and its psychological toll. The researchers sought to provide a reliable method to investigate how men’s loneliness reshapes the daily lives of the women who care for them. To build the scale, they drafted a broad set of questions grounded in the initial theory of mankeeping.
In the US, they recruited 402 women in heterosexual relationships of at least six months and asked them to rate 62 potential scale items on a seven‑point scale. Participants also completed several established questionnaires measuring depression, anxiety, stress, relationship burnout, relationship burden and overall relationship satisfaction.
Using statistical methods to identify clusters of related questions, the team refined the instrument to 46 items spanning six distinct categories, later described as six factors. These include the actual behaviours women undertake to manage their partner’s social life, the emotional impact of that labour, 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 broaden his friendships, and the extent to which the partner depends on her for emotional support.
The findings indicated the survey accurately captured the predicted dynamics of mankeeping. Higher scores across the six dimensions correlated with lower relationship satisfaction and higher levels of relationship burden and burnout. In addition, five of the six dimensions were positively associated 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.”
Intriguingly, simply judging that a partner lacks friends was not strongly linked to psychological distress; rather, it was the active behaviours and their emotional toll that correlated with poorer mental health. The researchers also observed that women who held more traditional views of gender roles were more likely to report engaging in mankeeping.
To test whether the findings extended beyond the US, the team conducted a replication with a second cohort of 395 romantically partnered cisgender women living in the United Kingdom. Statistical analyses confirmed that the UK data fit the original six‑category structure as well as the US data, indicating measurement invariance across these populations.
To address concerns that a 46‑item questionnaire may be unwieldy in research or clinical settings, the researchers merged data from both the US and UK samples (a total of 797 women) to derive a shorter instrument. They selected the three strongest items from each of the six categories, yielding an 18‑item brief version. This brief form demonstrated excellent reliability and produced associations with relationship satisfaction and psychological distress similar to the full version, offering a practical option for future work.
“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.
Chadwick added that the development of this measure extends feminist scholarship that has sought to conceptualise how gender norms shape women’s romantic relationships with men, noting that prior work has highlighted how women are often positioned as caregivers in ways that resemble a parent‑child dynamic. “Overall, I would say this offers an important contribution to feminist research by specifically naming the kinds of behaviours 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 studies, there are caveats. The survey relies entirely on self‑reported data from one partner, capturing a woman’s view of her partner’s social life rather than an objective measure of his friendships. A man might feel his social needs are adequately met even if his partner assesses his network as lacking. Future research would benefit from surveying both partners in a couple to obtain a fuller picture of the dynamics at play.
“It is absolutely crucial to recognise 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 underscored the importance of context, noting that emotionally supporting a partner or helping them maintain social networks can sometimes be a consensual arrangement or a necessity during life changes such as moving to a new city or facing temporary depression. “The behaviours 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 labour, or that this labour is offered to women in their times of need from their men partners.”
The authors emphasise that the study provides a snapshot in time, and cannot determine a strict causal sequence between mankeeping behaviours and mental health. They also acknowledge that cultural context may shape how the tool functions outside the US and UK. Expanding the research to non‑Western populations and developing a companion study to capture men’s experiences could help illuminate the full scope of this dynamic.
Looking ahead, the team plans longitudinal work to follow couples over time to understand how mankeeping unfolds and to explore interventions that might bolster relationship quality. Mancini also expressed openness to engaging clinicians, researchers and communities in refining the approach.
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.
