It’s holiday season, and there’s a very good chance you have multiple lists of things to do. There’s gifts to buy, dishes to cook, and plans to firm up. This, of course, is on top of all the usual rigors and responsibilities of your daily life. And if you’re a woman partnered with a man, particularly if you have children, those lists are even longer because they include your kiddos and, very likely, your partner’s family as well. It’s called “kinkeeping” and it’s something TikTok creator Paige (@sheisapaigeturner) highlighted in a recent video.
“Women are often unfairly responsible for maintaining relationships with their husband’s families,” she observes. She goes on to point out that women married to men often do a lot of the legwork to maintain relationships with his family: they find themselves reminding him of his mom’s birthday, for example, or buying and wrapping gifts for his family, or prompting family get-togethers just because it’s been a minute since the last gathering.
While it’s true throughout the year, it’s particularly arduous during the holidays… and it doesn’t always go well.
“Around the holidays, you will often hear this unfair narrative that ‘Oh, my son’s wife is always with her family. … Once he married her we no longer see him anymore. She really doesn’t put in any effort with us.’ There’s a lot of blame placed on the woman,” Paige says before continuing,
“I think it’s really important if you are the mother-in-law, father-in-law, whatever [you] might be, and your son’s family doesn’t spend a lot of time with you around the holidays, or you feel like they don’t put in a lot of effort: [remind] yourself that that is not his partner’s fault. That is your son’s fault. If you feel like you don’t see your son enough, if you feel like they don’t spend enough time with your family, then you need to talk to your son about that.”
It sounds simple, but it’s a message more people could stand to internalize.
Based on commenter responses to this video, it seems as though Paige truly was holding up a mirror to a large segment of TikTok.
“I stopped kinkeeping and honestly my husband doesn’t care to maintain that relationship because they don’t make an effort to do so,” says one commenter.
“My ex hated spending time with his family but they blamed me,” recalls another. “Now we’re divorced and he sees them even less than when we were married.”
Another commented highlighted an element to this issue that Paige did not mention, but that also bears discussion:
“I worry about it so much and my husband literally doesn’t think twice about it,” writes a commenter sheepishly. “Like why am I stressing when he doesn’t care?”
Honestly, I think this cannot be overstated. Because, yes, a lot of our husbands’ families expect this labor from us out of habit… but why do we feel the need to get into the habit in the first place? Is it because we’re being asked? Sometimes for sure. (I can’t tell you how many texts I get about making family plans from my husband’s relatives when my guy has asked, over and over, to be the one to get those messages.)
But how often are we picking up the slack without being asked at all? Yes, society at large expects too much of women… but we’re also in that society and perhaps we need to do a little deprogramming of our own as well.
