This is a tough topic sometimes, because whenever you bring up dudes feeling bad about anything of late, it feels like it can get drowned out by “Look at what dudes have wrought on females!” All that is true. Dudes have done terrible stuff to women over time, and the #MeToo movement is just one small example of that. But I still think this discussion needs to happen.
Let’s do some backstory to start, with some reading materials to boot. Start with me at this present moment. I’m sitting in a coffee shop typing. Well, on what appears to be December 10, 2013, I was also sitting in a coffee shop — that one was in Minneapolis — writing about the decline of male friendships. That was almost six years ago and I doubt much has changed.
As for reading materials: Here’s a little ditty on “male loneliness killing millions,” here’s one calling the whole deal “an epidemic,” and maybe the No. 1 thing in this canon, a Boston Globe article about how loneliness is a bigger threat to dudes than obesity. You also might enjoy “Why do we murder the beautiful friendships of boys?”
Why is this a thing now? What’s happening?
It has probably always been a thing, in reality, but here would be my take:
Men tend to make friendships side-by-side, i.e. at bars, at sporting events, at conference tables, etc. As you get older and have more responsibilities/children, and/or your friends have more responsibilities and children, and/or people move for work, and/or you aren’t as athletic as you once were, well, the ways and opportunities for guys to make friends are less and less. Plus, in a lot of situations a wife with kids wants to work less, or not work at all, which increases the male commitment to work, i.e. you are now essentially beholden to work because that money is providing for your wife and x-amount of children. Who has time to find new friendships in that ecosystem, ya know?
If you want to go a tier deeper and talk about depression, well, listen … not having a lot of friends can be depressing. I know this personally very well. And male depression is an interesting thing. Boys are supposed to be tough, and men are supposed to be, well, men. Own it. Kill it. Conquer it. All that shit. So being legitimately sad can be hard for a guy, because they don’t have the right words and ideas and concepts and topics around it, because they were never supposed to land there, in the eyes of broader society.
My own personal deal
Look, everyone’s situation is unique, and my own situation probably colors a lot of how I feel on these topics (and general depression).
I was with someone for about nine years, married for four. I had a whole ecosystem of friends through that, mostly tied to NYC/the general Northeast. Me and her got divorced, and a lot of them, for better or worse, “went with her.” So that was a big blow to the people I had spent most of my late 20s/30s with in terms of a friend world.
I’ve also moved a bunch. I’ve been in the same place now close to five years, and I have some friends there, but I’m also an older dude (almost 40!), without kids, and I don’t like being the creepy uncle, ya know? When I got divorced I thought about moving to the DC area because I have some guy friends there, but they all have kids, so they wouldn’t have a ton of time to hang really, and then I’m like this oafish weird dude in their kids’ lives … that was a depressing convo to have with myself, but between that and cost of living I think I made the right choice.
I do think it’s harder than we admit to make friends over 30, and honestly I could also try harder. I have a little ecosystem of friends through my girlfriend, but I entered most of their lives when they were buying houses and having first kids, so I wouldn’t say I’m tremendously important to that group or anything.
I have a good college group that I interact with daily (Slack!) but none of us live in the same place and we see each other maybe once a year … and the once a year stuff only started back up again recently.
Now, it’s also important to note here that a lot of men derive pleasure and success from their job. I like what I do but it goes up and down; right now it’s kinda down. I’m trying to find some professional spark and that contributes to depression, too.
So, yes. I’m a dude, and I have some friends, but broadly I do feel lonely and depressed. And that’s OK to say, I think.
What all do we do?
At a broader societal level, I would say — >
- Encourage new definitions of masculinity
- Talk more openly about this stuff
- Don’t shout down guys who want to discuss it because of the other terrible shit guys do
- Create more flexible workplaces
- Encourage people to get more involved civically
- Have more small groups for men
- Encourage men to find success definitions outside of work and sex
- Listen to the research
All these things are big, big shifts and will take time. But I think that’s where we need to head. And it all starts with dudes being able to admit that, yes, they do feel lonely and depressed.
This is good stuff! I was on a work trip last week and planned to stay an extra day to see an old buddy of mine from high school and have a few beers. What I expected to be a catchup on life and both of our young families turned out to be a long boozy talk about his struggle with the things that you point out in this blog. I’ll be honest, I was pretty shocked. He moved around a lot for work and I stayed rooted in one place, so I have a much bigger and better established group of people in my life. I always figured that was just him following his lifes path and he was cool with it, but it seems like lonliness has really worn him down. He’s almost not functioning and hasn’t worked in a long time (which was news to me).
I wonder much like you do what has changed that creates this. I think your points on the matter are very spot on. I like that you include lack of civic engagement as part of the problem. My “Norman Rockwell” image of the America of the past is one of neighbors and neighborhoods and churches and the like. I am basically a stranger to my neighbors. Maybe if guys could spend more time and build better relationships with other guys in their immediate neighborhoods it would make for better guys and better neighborhoods?
I came away from my time with my friend really feeling lucky that things went the way they have for me (although I have always felt that way). Hope you and other good guys out there can catch a break with this kind of stuff.
Hey Ted. As an introvert (in my early fifties), I’ve always had only a few friends at any one time and over they years as a whole, I’d say only one or two of all of those friends I would define as “true friends”, where we could somewhat comfortably talk about deeper things that were affecting our lives as a whole. Right now, I only have one friend that I connect with online and the rest are my wife’s friends that we usually see offline.
While most of my friends were often formed offline (work friends), they definitely were maintained and grew online, usually using video games as the social space to keep in contact (ie WoW, Counter-Strike, etc). People rave about social media but it doesn’t hold a flame to the sense of telepresence that can be experienced within games, where you feel like you’re actually in front of a person and can feel their presence within the game environment. So much so that you can actually learn tacitly by shadowing a more veteran player and watching what they do.
In terms of losing friends though, the typical reasons such as them moving elsewhere or them having kids can cause definitely cause this drifting apart, especially if they’re primarily offline friends. At other times, when I was jobless for considerable periods of time and trying to figure out why I didn’t fit into the (conventional) world, my inability to have the money to do social activities with them definitely strained things as well. I’d say the main reason I lost touch with them though, especially online friends, is that I outgrew them because I started questioning the conventional things within society and wanted to step beyond them (because it’s ideals weren’t ideal to me and the way work worked no longer seemed to work for me).
BTW I started noticing these changes within myself by 2003 and by 2008 I realized this desire to step beyond society and the conventional world was becoming pretty much overwhelming. At first I thought I was just having a midlife crisis, but by 2010 I realized that what I was experiencing was a greater identity crisis tied to societal shifts, something that I believe that many more people will experience as time goes on, especially as the world continues to rapidly change around us.
In terms of men and masculinity, I think these words get confused at times. Men and women both can have aspects of masculinity and femininity. So I don’t think it’s so much a redefining of what masculinity means, as we need to redefine “what it means to be a man”. The problem, if you look back, is that men have been taught predominately masculine characteristics with feminine characteristics often seen as being weak. Yet as we’re learning more and more today, when you combine these masculine and feminine characteristics, that’s when people start discovering and becoming more of their whole, true selves.
Some quick examples of this are Bréne Brown’s work revealing vulnerability as an essential stepping stone for courage and leadership. Even Stoicism, which is becoming more and more popular among men, isn’t about burying your emotions but more about the “strength to be vulnerable”. So we’re redefining and reframing things that previously may have been seen as “bad” and “weak”, that we were in conflict with and thus avoided as men, to now seeing them as an integral part of feeling alive and whole.
And I think that ability to feel whole and alive, expressing and articulating oneself in new ways is essential for growth and development. Without it, things get trapped within us and build up to a point where they overload, either exploding outwards harming others or imploding inwards harming ourselves. As I noted in my comment on your other post, I believe we get stuck and trapped in these “sandboxes” because we’re societally expected to play the “Game of Life” a certain way. Yet we don’t have to do so. If we have the vulnerability and courage, we can step beyond these common, conventional societal games that we learnt growing up and discover even greater ways of playing the Game of Life that provide far more possibilities and meaning to our lives than the last “level” of it ever did.