Are you a kinkeeper? Looking into the art — and work — of keeping people together

Originally defined by sociologist Carolyn Rosenthal as the “efforts expended on behalf of keeping family members in touch with one another", if you're the one creating the WhatsApp group, then the answer is yes, says Suzanne Harrington

wx040223

Are you always the one to let everyone else know the date and place of family get togethers? Gets in touch to say which relative has just had a baby, who has recently got married, graduated, got a new job? Who has moved house, or split up? Who is ill or has died? Who needs a thank-you card, a congratulations card, a condolences card? Whose birthday it is next? Which special occasion is coming up? Which presents to bring?

If you’re the one creating the Whatsapp group, you’re doing what sociologists call “kinkeeping”. Originally defined by sociologist Carolyn Rosenthal in 1985 as the “efforts expended on behalf of keeping family members in touch with one another”, chances are that if you are a kinkeeper, you are also a woman. No surprises there. A 1996 study showed how 85% of kinkeepers were women in mid life, aged mostly between 40 and 69, although some were older. Only the methods of communication have moved on — according to a recent Psychology Today study, 27% of kinkeeping is done by text, 22% by phone, 19% on social media, 17% by email, and just 8% face to face.

While none of this comes as a shock — women have always communicated the milestones of family life to other family members, for reasons of both obligation and emotional attachment — the reason we’re talking about it today is thanks to a 19-year-old Tiktokker, @Thought_Dumpy, whose recent post on kinkeeping went viral.

Having learned about it on a gender studies course, the young American woman identifies it is a significant source of stress in women’s lives, comparing kinkeeping to a theatre production, where the actors get the applause while the behind-the-scenes workers go unrecognised; in everyday life, women remain behind the scenes, invisibly creating comfort and connection for everyone else.

When men do undertake kinkeeping, she says, they do it far more performatively. She adds that by naming the dynamic, and creating vocabulary around it, it brings the idea more into the open, rather than a thing that women have been conditioned to do automatically and silently. And by talking about it, we can de-gender it. She adds how one family member began calling herself the “primary parent”, resulting in the woman’s male partner changing his parenting behaviour and stepping up more — not because she had set out to shame him, but because she used language to highlight ingrained behaviours and subsequently create change.

KEEPING KIN - OR EMOTIONAL LABOUR?

While this Tiktok take is refreshing and breathing viral life into an age old dynamic (it’s had 58,000 views so far), I do wonder if we are not confusing kinkeeping with emotional labour. Kinkeeping is merely the comms branch of emotional labour — another layer of invisible responsibility placed on women, who respond to it from a sense of internalised duty.

So while kinkeeping could be reminding your partner to send his mother a birthday card (which in itself could be seen as both infantilising and co-depedendent, yet we still do it), emotional labour is broader. It’s all the stuff women do that nobody notices, until we stop doing it and the domestic structure falls down. Emotional labour is cross-referencing the family calendar to ensure the playdate doesn’t clash with the dental appointment, remembering who needs to be collected from where at what time, when the cat needs to go back to the vet, what time the delivery is arriving, and making sure it all happens. Seamlessly, effortlessly, invisibly.

It’s planning, remembering, reminding, tasking, delegating, organising. We also call it juggling — a 2018 UN study showed how women do 2.6 times more unpaid work than men. In broad terms, men don’t juggle or multitask or perform invisible work because they have been socialised to regard work as something quite different. Something that you do during a specific timeframe in return for money.

So while kinkeeping comes under the umbrella of emotional labour, it’s specific to the maintenance of social connection — is there a link between this kind of communication and the traditional idea that women are generally better communicators than men? More research is needed. Meanwhile, we continue to take it upon ourselves.

“After our mother died quite young, I took on the role of keeping my siblings connected,” says Frances, a therapist now in her mid-50s. She has nine brothers and sisters, and dozens of nieces and nephews, scattered around the country. “For years, I was the family news co-ordinator; letting my siblings know what was happening in each other’s lives. I did it because I felt that if I didn’t, we’d all lose touch, drift apart, and so I felt this anxious sense of duty that I should be the go-to person for family communication.”

But when their father died, something shifted in Frances. She realised that it was not her job to be kinkeeper, that it was making her resentful — and so she stopped. She wonders if her family even noticed. Some of her relatives did drift away, but some did not, and the communication became more equal and balanced between them as a group.

“It feels more real now,” she says. “Less overwhelming. I’m just one individual within a group.”

THE DYNAMICS OF GIVING

In her book Down Girl, philosopher Kate Manne defines something she calls “Human Giver Syndrome”, which suggests that one class of people — the human givers — are expected to offer their time, affection, attention and bodies to another class of people, the human beings. You can guess which class belongs to which gender.

Human Giver Syndrome is the false yet contagious belief that women have a moral obligation to be happy, calm, pretty, generous, and attentive to the needs of others, while believing that failure to be these things makes you a failure as a person. It’s the belief that you owe it to others to be a giver. And that these beliefs are not symptoms of social conditioning, but normal and true ideas. We call this “patriarchy blindness”.

In her 2017 book Fed Up, which stemmed from a viral Harper’s Bazaar article — US author Gemma Hartley describes how her husband would say “all you had to do was ask”, regarding household and family tasks. This, she says, is the crux of emotional labour — having to ask. It’s when we describe men caring for their own children as “babysitting”, or doing domestic work as “helping”. Yikes. And all this before we ever go out and do a day’s paid work.

The game is rigged, write twins Emily and Amelia Nagoski, in their book Burnout, which examines the long-term effects of stress on women, and how to overcome it. While men can suffer from what is grandly known as executive burnout (ie paid work burnout), women can suffer both executive (paid) and domestic (unpaid) burnout simultaneously. We are encouraged to address our multiple stressors not systemically, but with scented candles. And while self-care is obviously crucial — as Audre Lorde put it: “Caring for myself is not self indulgence, it’s self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” — what’s needed in the longer term is a change in societal messaging. Starting with small kids.

Men are generally not socialised to see emotional labour, never mind kinkeeping. This is why the socialisation of children is so important — because no matter how we may believe we are on the case, we still battle unconscious bias. Bringing your sons and daughters up to equally see — and do — emotional labour is crucial. And while all labour should be equally divided, we need to acknowledge that humans are all different. Some women may enjoy kinkeeping while others find it a chore. Maybe some men would like to have a go at it too, given the chance.