Love actually? OR JUST MANKEEPING?

Women aren't just tired; they're over it. The invisible work of 'mankeeping' - being therapist, mother, PA and social secretary to their partners - is draining relationships dry.

- By Eleanor le Riche

All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid Nymph, then a virgin, nurse, then a servant Just an appendage, live to attend him So that he never lifts a finger 24/7 baby machine So he can live out his picket-fence dreams It's not an act of love if you make her You make me do too much labour

The lyrics above are the hook of Paris Paloma's viral track 'Labour': part indie ballad, part feminist battle cry, and very much the unofficial soundtrack to modern heterosexual frustration that women face in their daily lives.

Go ahead and google her singing it live. The scores of women at her shows singing along word-perfect makes one thing very clear: Women aren't just tired; they are fed up with carrying the invisible emotional, social and practical load of men.

And that, in a nutshell, is mankeeping.

The term was coined by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, who described it as 'the invisible work women perform to manage men's emotions, relationships and sense of identity'. It's being your boyfriend/ husband's therapist, life coach, social secretary, personal assistant and mom, while also paying the bills, raising the kids and remembering to buy his sister a birthday present.

'What I have been seeing in my research is how women have been asked or expected to take on more work to be a central, if not the central, piece of a man's social support system,' Dr Ferrara says. Sound familiar? Thought so.

WHAT DOES MANKEEPING LOOK LIKE?

Clinical psychologist Dr Jeanie Cavé breaks it down into three main types: practical labour, social labour and emotional labour.

PRACTICAL LABOUR