More and more women are deciding that "mankeeping" is a step too far and are opting to just not get into relationships with men.

Ava, 27, seemed unbothered by her partner’s inability to communicate his emotions. “We have enough to think about,” she told me as she slid her laptop out of her tote bag, still dressed in her tweed blazer from work. It wasn’t serious, anyway.

She’d been dating Max for a few months when it struck her — mid-conversation with a friend — that she had no idea what he felt about her or their future.

So she stopped asking.

There was a time, she said, when she would’ve tried harder.

Sara, 21, recalled sitting on her bed while her boyfriend begged her to hear him out. He wasn’t remorseful for cheating, he just no longer wanted to sit with his shame.

“I was done,” she said. And yet, he expected her to comfort him. “I had to help him find the words for his feelings, not his actions,” — long silences, teasing through shame and self-hatred. “He didn’t know what he wanted to say,” she said. “And then I made him feel OK about it”.

These stories reflect a shift among young women in which more and more of them are “quiet-quitting” these relationships. Women are now 23% less likely to want to date than men, not because they don’t care, but because they feel they’ve invested too much emotional labor without support in return.

The Other Side Of The Masculinity Crisis? The Exhausting Emotional Intelligence Gap.

In intimate relationships, young women are taking on a disproportionate load of invisible emotional labor, often supporting men through intense feelings of failure and isolation from friends. Many men described feeling “weird or like a waste of time” when opening up to male friends, instead reserving vulnerability for their relationships with women.

While men consider this unburdening to women a “natural part” of their relationships, those same women describe it as work— what researchers at Stanford University call “mankeeping.”

Over the past two years, I’ve interviewed dozens of young men and women about their relationships. What’s emerged is a sense that women are absorbing the emotional fallout of a crisis they didn’t create. The anxieties surrounding what it means to be a man in 2025 should matter to everyone. They’re reshaping not just our politics, but the very fabric of how women and men interact — shaping how we love, how we vote, and whether we can build a future together at all. Telling the other side of the “masculinity crisis” is key to solving it.

The crisis is especially acute for younger men — with two-thirds reporting that “no one really knows them.” Christopher Pepper, co-author of Talk To Your Boys, notes that Gen Z is the first generation to rely mostly on their phones to communicate.

“There’s no responsibility for what’s on the receiving end [of online communication],” he said, with online spaces often devolving into slurs and death threats “that wouldn’t be acceptable in other situations.”

For the 60% of men who engage with masculinity influencers, friendship itself is evolving:........

© HuffPost