21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Let’s Be Alone And Unhappy.

I paraphrase, of course. Though not, I think, wildly:

Researchers at Stanford have finally given a name to something many women have been dealing with for years. It’s called mankeeping. And it’s helping explain why so many women are stepping away from dating altogether.

Yes, from the pages of Vice, it’s a men-are-the-problem-and-therefore-unnecessary article. Because we haven’t had one of those in weeks.

Mankeeping describes the emotional labour women end up doing in heterosexual relationships.

Lesbian relationships being entirely free of aggravation and disappointment, you see. With rates of failure and divorce twice that of heterosexuals, more than double that of gay male couples, and with high rates of alcoholism and spousal abuse. What one might infer from that, I leave to others.

[Mankeeping] goes beyond remembering birthdays or coordinating social plans. It means being your partner’s one-man support system. Managing his stress.

And,

Interpreting his moods.

At which point, readers may wish to share their favourite joke about female indirectness and the two dozen possible meanings of the words “I’m fine” when uttered by a woman, depending on the precise intonation and the current alignment of the planets.

Readers may also note the replacement of a once common but now seemingly unfashionable grievance – ‘Men don’t express their feelings’ – with one of a much more modish kind – ‘Men are expressing their feelings and it’s exhausting and unfair.’

As Timothy P. Carney concluded in August at the Washington Examiner, when the Gray Lady had learned a new word, “Unpaid emotional labor is intolerable for the modern feminist. It’s also known as loving one another, which sounds a little too much like the stuff Jesus used to talk about. Jesus, marriage, commitment? That’s the patriarchy, after all.”