Mankeeping describes the emotional labor many women perform to meet male partners' needs, providing empathy, understanding, and intimacy. Emotional gold-digging names male partners who repeatedly draw emotional support from female partners without offering comparable reciprocity. Many men lack close friendships and therefore turn to partners for everyday emotional needs rather than therapy, which some view as costly, risky, or associated with weakness. The resulting burden can exhaust women, though some gain relational power from it. In some situations, men who depend on partners may exploit that position to isolate other family members, such as grandparents.
Mankeeping refers to the work many women carry out to meet the emotional needs of their male partner. The term was coined by a researcher on male friendships who observed that women are often the central source of empathy, understanding, and intimacy in a man's life. Because so many women experienced this burden themselves, they have welcomed the term as a means of identifying a cluster of daily, previously unrecognized interpersonal tasks.
Emotional gold digger, a term coined a few years before mankeeping, identifies the behavior of a male partner who constantly draws on the emotional life of a female partner. She soothes anxieties, strokes his ego, and empathizes with the ups and downs of workplace tensions. He may show gratitude and appreciation ('I don't know what I'd do without you,' or, 'You are my better half') but does not reciprocate with comparable emotional gifts.
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