When Women Carry the Connection

A growing conversation has emerged about men and loneliness.

Men are lonely. Men have fewer close friendships. Men may be less likely to confide in friends when they are struggling. Many heterosexual men rely heavily on their female partners for emotional intimacy and support.

All of this deserves our attention. But there is another question I think we need to ask: Who has been keeping everyone connected? Who remembers that it has been months since you saw those friends? Who sends the text? Who makes the dinner reservation? Who invites people over? Who remembers birthdays, checks in with family members, buys the card, organizes the holiday gathering, notices that someone is struggling, suggests reaching out, and keeps the threads of relationship from quietly disappearing?

Very often, it is women.

And that changes the conversation about loneliness. Because sometimes the woman keeping everyone connected is lonely too.

The Male Friendship Recession

Psychologist and researcher Angelica Puzio Ferrara, together with Dylan Vergara, has proposed a term for one part of this phenomenon: mankeeping.

Their work examines what happens when men's friendship networks shrink or do not provide the emotional closeness and support they need. In heterosexual relationships, a female partner may become not only a romantic partner, but also a confidante, emotional processor, social coordinator, encourager, friendship facilitator, and sometimes the primary source of emotional intimacy.

That does not mean men do not care about friendship. It also does not mean every man is isolated or every woman carries this burden.

It means that gender socialization matters.

Boys have historically received powerful messages about independence, toughness, emotional restraint, and what kinds of vulnerability are considered acceptable between men. Those messages can have consequences long after adolescence.

The need for connection does not disappear simply because we learn not to show it. It has to go somewhere. And sometimes it lands almost entirely inside the romantic relationship.

The Work We Do Not Call Work This connects beautifully with Eve Rodsky's work in Fair Play. Rodsky has helped make visible something many women understand instinctively: household work is not only about who actually performs the task. It also includes the work of noticing, anticipating, planning, remembering, organizing, and following through. It is one thing to buy a birthday card. It is another thing to know the birthday is approaching, remember that a card is needed, know what kind of card the person would appreciate, purchase it in time, make sure everyone signs it, find the address, mail it, and notice next year when the whole cycle begins again.

The same thing happens with relationships. Social connection requires infrastructure. Someone is often maintaining it.

When Connection Becomes Another Job

There is a difference between enjoying being social and being responsible for your family's social existence.

There is also a difference between choosing to nurture relationships and feeling that, if you stop, everything will disappear.

A woman can be surrounded by people and still feel lonely.

She may be the one creating dinners, arranging holidays, maintaining friendships, and making sure everyone remains connected. From the outside, her life may appear wonderfully social.

Inside, though, she may be thinking: Would any of this happen if I didn't make it happen?

And underneath that question may be another: Who is creating connection for me?

That is a very different kind of loneliness.

It is not necessarily the loneliness of having nobody around.

It can be the loneliness of always being the initiator.

• The rememberer.
• The emotional temperature-taker.
• The person carrying the relationship clipboard.

Sometimes what she longs for is not another dinner invitation.

She wants someone else to say:

• I called our friends.
• I made a plan.
• I noticed you haven't seemed like yourself.
• I've been thinking about us.
• I miss you.
• Let's do something together.

It is the difference between being included in connection and being responsible for producing it.

And Then Comes the Vicious Circle

This is where things can become particularly painful inside a long-term relationship.

Imagine a couple in which the woman already carries much of the social and emotional work.

Her partner has few close friendships and does not regularly seek emotional support elsewhere.

She becomes increasingly tired.

• Maybe resentful.
• Maybe less playful.
• Maybe less interested in sex.
• Maybe less enthusiastic about planning another outing.
• Maybe she simply has less emotional energy to make everything feel good.

Her partner feels the change.

He may experience her as distant, irritable, preoccupied, dissatisfied, or no longer as interested in him.

And he complains about the relationship.

• Perhaps about her mood.
• Her availability.
• Her desire.
• Her attention.
• Her lack of enthusiasm.

And because she cares about the relationship, she may begin working even harder to make things better.

• She explains.
• Reassures.
• Initiates.
• Plans.
• Makes more time.
• Attempts to create intimacy.
• Tries not to seem irritated.
• Softens the conversation.
• Organizes the date.
• Manages his disappointment.

And now the person who was already carrying too much relational labor has been given another job:

• Fixing her partner's unhappiness about the consequences of her carrying too much relational labor.

That is the vicious circle.

• The more depleted she becomes, the less connection she has to offer.
• The less connection she offers, the more dissatisfied her partner may become.
• The more dissatisfied he becomes, the more she may feel responsible for restoring the relationship.
• And the more she tries to restore it alone, the more depleted and lonely she can become.

This does not require a villain.

He may genuinely feel lonely.

She may genuinely love him.

Both experiences can be true.

But love does not automatically make the system sustainable.

What About Men? This conversation cannot end with, "Men need to do better." Many men have inherited a remarkably narrow blueprint for emotional connection. They may have learned how to work beside another man, play a sport with him, drink a beer with him, fix something together or talk about politics, but never learned how to say: I'm scared. My marriage feels shaky. I'm worried about getting older. I don't know what my purpose is anymore. I miss my kids. I'm lonely. Can we talk? That is not simply an individual failure.

It is partly socialization.

But adulthood eventually asks all of us to examine the things we inherited and decide what we want to carry forward.

A partner can offer love.

She cannot sustainably be someone's entire emotional ecosystem.

And Then There Is Menopause

Now place all of this inside midlife.

A woman may already be carrying decades of accumulated responsibility.

• Children.
• Work.
• Parents.
• Household management.
• Healthcare.
• Family traditions.
• Friendships.
• Relationships.
• Appointments.
• Birthdays.
• The emotional weather of everyone around her.

Then perimenopause arrives.

• Sleep may change.
• Mood may change.
• Anxiety may appear or intensify.
• Cognitive bandwidth may feel different.

Her body may suddenly demand attention after decades of being expected to function quietly in the background.

And something else sometimes happens.

She begins questioning things she once automatically tolerated.

• Why am I responsible for this?
• Why am I the only one remembering?
• Why am I smoothing this over again?
• Why am I managing everyone else's feelings?
• Why does maintaining our life depend on me noticing everything?

This can be interpreted as a woman becoming difficult.

Or angry.

Or selfish.

Or ‘not herself.’

This Isn't About Abandoning Men

I want to be very clear here.

The answer to men's loneliness is not indifference.

Connection matters enormously to human wellbeing.

• Men deserve deep friendships.
• Men deserve tenderness.
• Men deserve places where vulnerability is safe.
• Men deserve emotional intimacy that is not mocked or treated as weakness.

And women deserve partners with rich enough emotional lives that romantic relationships do not have to hold everything.

Those goals belong together.

Women cannot solve men's loneliness by taking on more responsibility for men's emotional lives.

Perhaps the better question is not:

• How can women take better care of lonely men?

Perhaps it is:

• How do we create cultures, friendships and partnerships in which everyone learns how to participate in the work of connection?

A Few Questions to Sit With

You do not need to answer these quickly.

Notice what catches.

• Where am I carrying invisible relational labor?
• Which parts of maintaining connection genuinely bring me joy, and which have become obligations?
• When I say I'm lonely, what am I actually longing for?
  • Company?
  • Curiosity?
  • Initiation?
  • Touch?
  • Conversation?
  • Being asked a question?
  • Someone else making the plan?
  • Someone noticing me?
• What relationships am I maintaining for someone else?
• If I stopped automatically filling relational gaps, what am I afraid would happen?
• Where am I working hard to appease someone else's dissatisfaction rather than asking whether my own needs are being met?

And perhaps most importantly:

• What would reciprocity actually look like in my life now?
  • Not twenty years ago.
  • Not when the children were little.
  • Not according to what women are ‘supposed' to do.
  • Now.

Because one of the invitations of midlife may be recognizing that the relationships we built in one season do not have to remain unchanged forever.

• We can renegotiate.
• We can ask more of one another.
• We can widen our circles.
• We can stop confusing exhaustion with devotion.
• And we can begin creating connection that sustains the person doing the connecting, too.

What's Coming

These are exactly the kinds of conversations I want us to have about menopause and midlife.

Not simply hot flashes and hormones, important as those are, but identity, relationships, resentment, longing, grief, boundaries, emotional labor, intimacy, and the question so many women eventually find themselves asking:

• Who am I in this next part of my life, and what do I want to carry with me?

This fall I'll be opening The I'm Still Hot! Circle, a space for women to explore menopause, mental health, relationships and the complicated, funny, painful and sometimes liberating experience of becoming ourselves again in midlife.

More soon.

We're going to talk about the things that don't always fit on the symptom checklist.

Take care,

Audrianna Joy

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