Sometime last year, an essay titled “he’s not a good husband” circulated widely on social media. It was written by feminist writer Emily May, and it struck a nerve because it named something many women recognize immediately: the exhaustion of being married to a man who is not cruel, not abusive, not unfaithful—but who also does not reliably carry his share of the daily, invisible work of family life.
The piece argues, forcefully, that women have been trained to soften their language around this problem. To call these men “amazing” or “good guys” because they clear the lowest imaginable bar. To gaslight themselves into gratitude and accept being the unpaid project managers of adulthood while reassuring their partners that everything is basically fine.
This is not a frivolous argument, and much of it is true.
When the essay made its way onto social media, I replied in that spirit. I agreed that women often shoulder an unequal share of the mental and emotional labor in heterosexual households. I said plainly that there are many marriages where women feel like unpaid managers of family logistics, and that this is a real and legitimate grievance.
But I also asked a question that immediately complicated the exchange.
I wondered whether any part of this story was missing the interior life of the men being described. Whether something real was being flattened by a framework that only allowed us to talk about outcomes, never inner strain.
Emily replied that she couldn’t acknowledge what was happening inside these men because it was guesswork. That men, in her experience, were not introspective or articulate enough to explain their inner lives. And that it wasn’t her job, as a woman, to do that work for them. She could only speak to the very real effects of their behavior.
This reveals the quiet rule governing so much modern relationship writing.
Empathy, in this framework, is conditional. Women deserve it automatically, because their labor is visible and narratable. Men only deserve it if they can articulate their inner struggle clearly enough to be legible. If they fail at that task—if their distress is clumsy, inarticulate, or expressed as withdrawal—then it is treated as either nonexistent or irrelevant.
This same logic appears, with more professional polish, in recent relationship coverage from The New York Times, including the now-popular concept of mankeeping. Once again that’s mankeeping, like a zookeeping or beekeeping, but for men. This is idea that women are unfairly burdened as the primary emotional infrastructure of men’s lives, that they are left to deal with the “epidemic of male loneliness”. Again, there is truth here. Men are more socially isolated. Women often become the sole outlet for male vulnerability.
But notice what quietly happens in both arguments.
Intimacy becomes the thing you’re supposed to protect yourself from. Need—the plain fact of needing someone, or worse, being needed back—gets treated like a diagnosis. The shared labor of sustaining a life together is described as something one person endures while the other passively benefits.
If a martian were to read the latest gender discourse in the New York Times. I’m talking about columns written by journalists like Catherine Pearson, they would understandably come to infer that men are simply the less-evolved pets of the women they attach themselves to. That they are not competent enough to handle the burdens of a household unsupervised.
But to share a life with another person is to consent—again and again—to being needed. To need, and to be needed in return. That is not love malfunctioning. That is love working. That is the unspoken contract two people sign when they choose to construct a life whose duration exceeds what either of them could sustain alone.
When we lose the courage to need and be needed—when we start treating mutual reliance as a moral failure—we don’t become liberated, but instead become brittle, and resentful. We lose the small mercies: the unglamorous accommodations, the patience with inarticulateness, the grace that allows people to grow inside a bond rather than audition for it.
Because if the price of being grown-up is never needing anyone, then what you are advocating for is loneliness.
I wrote down the thoughts that will follow, because I became so disheartened by the kind of relationship article that appears with dependable regularity in places like The New York Times, that arrives wearing the calm authority of therapy language and the moral confidence of an HR slide deck, and it explains—patiently, why modern heterosexual men are exhausting, underdeveloped, and in need of supervision.
They use degrading words like “mankeeping”, probably because they think it’s clever and edgy, but it’s a lazy moral shortcut: a vocabulary that confers righteousness without curiosity, used by female writers in their late 30s who haven’t earned it, because they have never been able to sustain intimacy over decades. Women who have left behind a wake of failed relationships, and use the New York Times as an outlet for their frustration, calling it relationship advice.
I am tired of the media treating men like creatures one keeps out of obligation rather than affection, fed and tolerated, perhaps even named, but never really trusted to roam the house without supervision. We are told, again and again, that men “can’t express emotions,” as though this were a biological defect rather than the predictable outcome of a lifetime spent learning which feelings are permissible and which must be packed away quickly, lest they cause trouble.
Somehow, the difficulty of expression gets translated into the absence of feeling altogether. And over time, this misreading hardens into a story we tell ourselves about an entire half of the species, until it becomes a shared cultural script, widening the distance it claims merely to describe.
So if you’re one of those female columnists—bright, educated, fluent in the language of insight, typing late into the evening in an apartment so orderly it feels faintly reverential—I hope you’ll pause for a moment and consider this: what you are describing as emotional absence may actually be a lifetime of feeling things intensely and being told, repeatedly, to keep it to yourself.
And I offer this, ladies, as a diplomat. I offer it with love, in the hopes that you may understand us. I do not speak for all men, but probably a lot of them.
This is called The Quiet Way Men Love, which I posted in written format a few weeks ago.
The Quiet Way Men Love
There is a myth men inherit without consenting to it: that love announces itself.
That it arrives as certainty, as conquest, as unmistakable arrival. That you are supposed to know – immediately, definitively – and that hesitation is evidence of failure rather than the beginning of seriousness.
But for many men, love does not arrive that way. It moves in like water into low places. No sound or warning. Just there when you look again.
What comes first is often not joy, but responsibility. A low, steady awareness that something fragile has been placed in your care.
Men rarely say this because the culture has taught them that fear is a disqualifying emotion. That if love is real, it should feel triumphant. But fear often comes first; not fear of the other person, but fear of losing her, fear of inadequacy, fear of discovering that you are not large enough to hold what is being asked of you.
And sometimes fear is not the enemy of love, but its earliest signal.
For many men, love begins not as certain, but with quiet instability. Men are taught to distrust that moment, to override it with decisiveness and to convert uncertainty into action. Many of these men stay with it, and so they choose before they understand. They commit without the reassurance of grandeur.
This kind of love is deeply unromantic in its early stages. It looks like showing up without conviction and staying when it feels so much heavier than leaving. It looks like choosing the work before the feeling arrives.
Over time (and this is the part no one tells men) something changes.
Through arguments that leave sediment rather than solutions, conversations that erode the same cliff face grain by grain, the slow accumulation of shared disappointments and private reconciliations, the other person soon becomes less of a story and more of a landscape.
You begin to learn the interior geography of another human being: the soft ground that gives underfoot, the ridgelines they defend without knowing why, the low places where loneliness collects after the weather passes. You learn which silences mean safety and which ones mean retreat. You learn that access to another person’s inner life is not a right but a privilege that can be revoked by carelessness.
And so at some point, without anyone saying so, it’s different. Love stops being something you feel and becomes something you do.
It becomes the choice to turn toward rather than away, and the discipline of staying present when withdrawal would be easier, and maybe even defensible. It is the moment when you stop narrating yourself from a safe distance and step fully into the room.
This kind of love does not break the surface. It takes hold underground, like a cottonwood finding water, roots following what is hidden until the tree can stand.
Men don’t always recognize this as love because it arrives before they feel ready for it. It asks them to stay in the room even on days when they feel like a pile of loose parts, failures, and inadequacies.
But the repeated choosing, the persistence, is not the absence of love but instead its most durable form.
The tragedy is that men are rarely told this: love did not require certainty, only that you not turn away. That devotion can be quiet, and that courage does not always swagger.
No one tells men that love doesn’t require you to know. Only to stay.
So many men carry this truth silently, convinced that if they say it aloud they will be exposed as defective rather than revealed as honest. But for those who recognize themselves here, the relief is often profound: the realization that love did not bypass them, but simply arrived without spectacle.
The Lives We Interrupt
Women are often taught a different myth.
Not that love would announce itself, but that it would hold them whole; that it would widen the world around them instead of asking them to bend to fit inside it.
And yet for many women, love does not arrive as expansion, but as calibration.
It starts out small, almost bureaucratic in its modesty: paying attention. Learning the emotional thermostat of a room and making tiny, near-invisible adjustments. Discovering, not without a flicker of pride, which version of yourself keeps the machinery humming.
At first it feels like closeness, like competence. Like maybe you’ve finally learned something useful.
Women learn to wait ahead of things so others need not wait at all. They learn the measure of a voice, the weight of a silence, the cost of letting trouble arrive unsoftened. For this they are praised, rewarded, and assumed to be untroubled.
And they allow themselves to be misread because telling the truth would demand more strength than they have left. Marriage asks little at any one moment, only a domestic spoonful at a time, so small it feels unworthy of refusal. It is only in looking back that a woman sees how much has been taken. It’s like realizing the system kept running because you were the battery, and no one ever thought to recharge it or bring a spare.
A preference shrugged off. A reaction rephrased mid-sentence. A need postponed and stowed away, in the same place for instructions “saved for later”, appointments never rescheduled, or clothes you meant to donate.
Women are not warned that love does not always hollow you out all at once. That it can make you smaller so gradually you do not notice the contraction until you pause and realize you haven’t felt hunger in years.
Many women love their partners with real care – not romantically, exactly, but faithfully, like a job they want to do well. The problem is that love, when it’s all self-editing and no risk, starts eroding parts of a person away. Women are often praised for endurance and self-effacement and told this is maturity.
In the dark they lie awake and weigh a question without answer, like a splinter set too deep to pull and too sharp to forget: whether they would be mourned, or whether their absence would only reveal the load.
This question is a form of grief.
Grief for the version of the self that did not get to fully arrive. Grief for the desires that were postponed until she forgot the language for them: the career she meant to return to, the afternoon she never took for herself, the appetite she learned to quiet, the thought she never allowed to finish itself. A life not constantly interrupted.
Women often do not regret the people they loved, yet they regret how easily they agreed to become smaller to preserve harmony.
They worry that saying it aloud would make them sound ungrateful, or worse, dramatic, so they default to the familiar solution: silence, competence, and the ongoing maintenance of everything.
Until one day the silence becomes too loud to ignore.
What We Carry Quietly
Women endure thankless, invisible labor. Men endure thankless, invisible pressure.
We do not always have the language for what happens in the shadows of ordinary life. For women, it is the steady erosion of the self by a thousand small obligations: the dinners planned, the birthday cards remembered, the invisible scaffolding that holds up the lives of others. These acts are so ubiquitous, so seamlessly woven into the fabric of family, that they are mistaken for nothing at all.
And for men, there is an equally invisible burden: the unspoken demand to be endlessly successful, tirelessly competent, and unwaveringly strong. They must be providers of both security and solace. They must appear untroubled even when they are quietly breaking. They are told to measure their worth in increments of achievement, as though love itself were a ledger of accomplishments.
These forces are not symmetrical, nor are they competing tragedies. They are parallel stories of exhaustion - two quiet forms of attrition that conspire to leave both partners feeling unseen in different ways.
It is a peculiar cruelty of modern life that we are so often expected to pretend these pressures do not exist. We make jokes about them; we dismiss them as weakness. And then we pass them along to the next generation, thinking that if we do not name them, they cannot hurt us.
But they do hurt us. They drain marriages of their tenderness and leave people alone in the very relationships that were meant to be their refuge.
Maybe the most radical act of love is simply to look across the dinner table and say: I see what you carry. And I will not pretend it is weightless.
