Why Your Boyfriend Has No Idea If His Best Friend is OK

On The Male Loneliness Epidemic and Mankeeping

Last year, I asked a former partner how his best friend was handling a tough breakup. He shrugged and said, “I don’t pry. We don’t really talk about that stuff.” I was floored. How do you not ask? How do you not know? His friend was free-falling through a breakup, and one of the closest people to him had no idea how bad it was because talking about feelings wasn’t a typical part of their dynamic. Meanwhile, if my best friend so much as changes her go-to hot sauce brand, we’re having an hour's debrief about how it’s impacting her sexiness, budget, mental health, and sense of self.

I came across a brilliant, incisive breakdown of the male loneliness epidemic by Vulga Drawings, and it hit me like a truck. She references Theorizing Mankeeping: The Male Friendship Recession and Women’s Associated Labour as a Structural Component of Gender Inequality by Angelica Ferrara and Dylan P. Vergara, and Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam, and Kinkeeping in the Familial Division of Labor by Carolyn J. Rosenthal.

I get that it’s ironic that I’m here writing about community and loneliness, because I, too, have been searching for a real connection. I’ve felt lonely. I’ve wanted more. I’ve craved a kind of emotional safety that isn’t just showing up but being held. But I know this: real connection isn’t just playing golf. It’s nine holes and “How do you feel about that?”

Vulga calls it mankeeping, the unpaid, unseen emotional labour women do to keep their male partner’s social life functioning. She describes how women so often quietly maintain the emotional infrastructure of their male partner’s lives. The term stems from kinkeeping, the unseen emotional labour women have historically performed to keep families connected. You know, the remembering of birthdays, sending of holiday cards, organizing of gatherings and staying in touch. And just like kinkeeping, mankeeping is unpaid, exhausting, and taken for granted. These things get worse as men and women age. It’s the invisible glue that holds relationships together. And because men often aren’t taught to do this work, women, wives, girlfriends, and even daughters, end up picking up the slack.

“Male Loneliness Epidemic” or “Patriarchy is Eating Itself”

Men aren’t inherently bad at feelings. Emotional intelligence isn’t encoded in the second X chromosome. It’s a taught skill, one that women are conditioned to develop from childhood, while men are told to shake it off, man up, and avoid eye contact unless it’s over a beer or a game of Call of Duty.

One of my favourite insights from Vulgadrawings' breakdown is the concept of side-by-side or shoulder-to-shoulder communication. Women meet up to talk. Men meet up to do something else, and talking happens as a secondary function. Watching a game, playing golf, lifting weights, playing video games, these spaces are pre-approved for conversation because the talking is happening next to something else.

Men are more likely to gather socially to do an activity while women gather to speak to one another. For men, discussing something personal happens inadvertently while playing golf, video or board games, watching football, or pretending to fish. You see this perfectly in When Harry Met Sally: Meg Ryan and Carrie Fisher talk breakups over dinner, fully engaged. Meanwhile, Billy Crystal and Bruno Kirby do it at a baseball game, staring at the field, only barely acknowledging each other’s pain before returning to sports discourse. Whereas women will get together and dissect the inner workings of their lives, as the main course. This is not a coincidence. Emotional vulnerability has been so gendered, so hyper-coded as feminine, that men need an activity buffer to access it.

If men only talk about feelings inside their romantic relationships, then of course those conversations feel overwhelming. Imagine bottling up every emotional thought for months and then suddenly unloading it on one person, in one setting. It feels exhausting because it’s never been practiced, never been made a muscle.

Men aren’t avoiding feelings because they’re inherently bad at it. They’re avoiding it because they don’t know how to do it without feeling completely depleted. And when something feels that hard, of course you’re going to resent your partner for asking you to go there. Of course, beers with your buddy feels easier, especially if you have no f***ing clue how depressed he is, or how he hurt you, or how you hurt him. It’s all unspoken, and that makes it feel safe.

But it’s not safe. It’s a slow erosion of emotional capacity.

If emotional check-ins with your partner feel like running a marathon when you haven’t trained, it’s because, well, you haven’t trained. If you’re not flexing that muscle in your friendships, if you’re not regularly practicing emotional processing in your daily life, then, of course, it’s going to feel exhausting when you’re suddenly asked to do it in a high-stakes moment with your partner.

It’s no wonder so many men feel drained or even resentful when their girlfriends or wives want to “talk about things.” But what if those conversations didn’t have to feel so heavy? What if emotional labor wasn’t something you only did under duress, but something you exercised regularly? What if it felt natural to check in, reflect, and work through things because you’d already been doing it with your friends, your family, and yourself?

Being more emotionally attuned to the inner workings of your friends’ lives doesn’t just make you a better friend. It makes you better prepared for your relationship. When emotional awareness is part of your everyday life, not just something you tap into when there’s a problem, it stops feeling like a crisis and starts feeling like communication.

The patriarchy has also convinced men that emotional vulnerability is gay (and god forbid!) it’s poisoned their ability to form deep friendships, leaving them socially isolated in ways that are, ironically, entirely self-inflicted. And this loneliness? This alienation? It’s a gift to the alt-right.

The Alt-Right Will Take It From Here

Here’s the darkest part: lonely, emotionally stunted men are prime bait for radicalization. When women feel isolated, generally they join a book club, a yoga class, write weird fanfiction or join a niche internet forum where everyone is wildly passionate about one thing (shoutout to the historical fashion girlies). But men? They isolate further. And when you feel like no one in the world understands you, an internet stranger in a Men’s Rights Activist thread saying “It’s not your fault, bro, women are the problem” sounds a lot like salvation.

This is how we get incels. This is how we get men who see relationships as transactional, and who resent women for having full lives. And unless men start actively changing the way they engage with each other, this cycle isn’t stopping.

Image via Lily O’Farrell of @Vulgadrawings

So What’s the Fix?

Obviously, this is a generalization, but social scientists and psychologists have amassed fantastic data over the last few decades that supports Vulgadrawing’s point. Not every man avoids emotional labor, just like not every woman is a highly skilled empathy machine. But enough men do this that it’s a recognizable pattern—one that shows up in study after study, in relationships, friendships, and entire communities. And enough women have felt the exhaustion of mankeeping that it’s worth acknowledging.

Men are the ones who can fix this. Women cannot keep doing the emotional labor of teaching them how to maintain friendships, build community, and express themselves in ways that don’t involve arguing with each other in a parking lot or, just memes.

The point isn’t to shame men into forced vulnerability or to say that deep, meaningful friendships don’t exist between them. It’s to recognize that emotional intelligence isn’t a personality trait, it’s a skill set. And just like any other skill, it can be learned, nurtured, and strengthened.

So, maybe that starts today. Maybe you text your friend and ask a real question. Maybe you let yourself be seen a little more. Because the alternative? Is a lonely, quiet place.

So, gentlemen, talk to your friends. Not just about your favorite anime fight scenes or who should have won MVP, but about your actual lives. Look each other in the eye. Ask how they’re doing and really listen. It’s going to feel awkward at first. It’s going to feel weird. But if you can train a muscle in the gym, you can train an emotional skill. Get better at giving and receiving care.

Or don’t. But don’t be surprised when your girlfriend stops trying—she’s tired. And your friend, well…he’s probably going through something he’ll never tell you about.

Maybe, just maybe, you should pry.