Mismatched Pace

The phenomenon this NYT article describes has existed for a long time and did not materialize just now. It is not an American phenomenon either. Most of the men of my father's generation that I know are very much the product of said "mankeeping". They disintegrate physically and emotionally once the wife dies. In the overwhelming majority of of cases, the men had outsourced social connection with largely including stay in touch with children and grandchildren to the wife. They just needed the highlight reel that the wife would provide and go on with their lives without having to invest in keeping and building a bunch of relationships in life and the messiness that accompanies it. Having been the primary bread-winner and provider for the family, it seems to think this is a fair division of labor.

Dr. Ferrara, who researches male friendship at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and Dylan Vergara, a research assistant, published a paper on mankeeping in 2024, after investigating why some men struggle to form close bonds — a growing and well-documented issue.

In a 2021 survey, 15 percent of men said they didn’t have any close friends, up from 3 percent in 1990. In 1990, nearly half of young men said they would reach out to friends when facing a personal issue; three decades later, just over 20 percent said the same.

Dr. Ferrara found that “women tended to have all of these nodes of support they were going to for problems, whereas men were more likely to be going to just them,” she said. She sees “mankeeping” as an important extension of the concept of “kinkeeping” — the work of keeping families together that researchers have found tends to fall disproportionately on women. 

I would imagine modern men continue to be this way because of what they observed the men in the lives do growing up. The conditions have changed dramatically for the women in the meantime. They are equal in every way and often better. So they have no capacity left to mankeep.