Men are struggling. It’s a tragedy of fewer social connections
Sometimes things seem insignificant upon first glance, but look different upon reflection. After a few years of being separated in friendship, I’ve reconnected with some of my guy friends. Something sparks the reconnect, and soon I’m in their home or their parents’ home, trying to recover the past and facilitate our conversation into the present. But something is abundantly wrong.
Men are struggling to maintain friendships. About 20% of them stated receiving emotional support from a close friend in the last week, compared with 40% of their American female peers, according to 2021 survey data. And these numbers reveal a worsening trend. In 1990, the number of men that had six to nine close friends hovered around 40%. In 2021, it was 15%. The role of friendship in men’s lives is shrinking. When enduring difficulty in life, most young men now turn to a parent, not a friend, as was true a few decades ago.
And so, it’s only now, reflecting on the times sitting in various homes of my white straight male, comfortably-classed friends — empty pizza boxes and pop cans lying about, the television running, them sitting alone in a living room chair with a dazed look hiding the emotions beneath their face — that I begin to notice their narrative and the broader ecosystem in which they’re swimming. In each of these incidences, close friends have moved away. In these moments, the friend doesn’t have a stable job or workplace to walk into each day. Each time, there is no girlfriend, there are fewer people that one feels comfortable enough to call, to acknowledge and appreciate their hardships. Their personalities have changed, the vibrancy has faded, enthusiasm has gone, their edges are sharper. Not that partnered men are completely spared from these feelings — I’ve heard grown men speak of the same phenomenon impacting their married friends, too. One can be lonely in a room with others. For my friends, the loneliness has eaten away at their spirit.
Men’s struggles made clear
In a way that hasn’t been true before — maybe in most of the scope of human history — men are really not doing well. According to data accumulated by Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Richard Reeves, real wages for men have declined by 14% since 1979, male labor participation has shrunk, and male college graduation rates are declining. Black men face a similar and yet entirely unique set of challenges — the carceral state, including policing, incarceration and parole — have eroded their earnings and made family structures harder to maintain. The role of the surveillance state in Black boys and men’s lives shouldn’t be understated. A staggering 16% of low-income Black boys born in 1980 have been imprisoned. The combination of this toxic brew — and the need Black boys and men feel to enact a harder façade and rationally distribute physical violence — seems to have impeded the possibility for pro-social friendships and an improved social trajectory.
To be sure, despite these trends, it’s not as if men don’t dominate much if not all of social life — politics, the workplace, the home, and relationships between men and women writ large. All of this is a truth that should be an anachronism. But that supremacy doesn’t negate the problems men face. In fact, they may be its magnifier.
Over the past 40 years, women have been performing a lot better on a number of economic and social measurements, which should be celebrated. And men — particularly those who are low-income and heterosexual — are also doing less well, on average. This is their tragedy.
The waters in which men swim
Historically in the U.S., men have bonded in two prominent spaces: work and war. American values and status symbols are intimately tied with the workspace, and for at least a century, men have dominated this space. Men are more likely to be CEOs than women. They are more likely to be promoted within the workplace than women in part because they are historically more represented in the workplace, and they are allowed more flexibility to switch into job different roles than women. Because men are more likely to gain status and power through the workplace, that’s where they end up spending so much of their time, which means many of the people they know also occupy that space. Importantly, because the workplace is a space for competition, men don’t always make friends in that space, but it is still one of the most prominent social lubricants for men.
The latter space for male connection — war — is, in some ways, more outsized in importance. As Sebastian Junger writes in “Tribe,” war has given men the opportunity to connect equitably with others. The chaos and uncertainty of the moment also fosters an intimate understanding between the men (and women) in combat, creating a stronger social glue. Feeling like people are part of an important, mission-driven project unites individuals in common-cause, creating both generous and pro-social actions on one end and devastating and often unjustifiable violence on the other. Still, the connectivity that occurs within units is noteworthy. According to Junger, many veterans describe being in the act of war — or simply training for the possibility of war — as some of the best moments of their life.
But war among large, democratic nations is less frequent today than it was in the 1940s and 70s (thank God), and it’s not an idealized form of manhood as it was in the prior century. Unfortunately, men’s development — their values, attitudes and affect, the way they feel masculinity should be enacted — has not changed terribly in the last one hundred years. Compared to women, men still feel less comfortable being vulnerable, sharing their feelings, and are also less likely to invest in developing and maintaining friendships. They are less likely to value the benefits of sharing, caring, and recognizing the needs of the men around them. The potentiality for violence creates a different social opportunity for men, but that space is, encouragingly, less desired today. The result has left a social vacuum of friendship development, with generations of many men needing to be retrained to connect for a more peaceful moment.
Misogynistic outcomes
The answer to dilemmas of men connecting may be simple, but shifting cultural values is hard. Heterosexual men need the emotional flexibility shared by their female and gay peers to freely explore friendship without fear of reprisal. They need to be re-taught, and given the opportunity to reexamine their soft sides — their tenderness and care — to expand the emotional flexibility that has been stamped out of them around puberty.
Not having these outlets for shared recognition may help explain the rise in Redpill or incel behavior, where boys and men are openly preaching the need to dominate girls and women in all spheres of life. As blogger Darrell Owens notes, these men don’t feel comfortable asking for help or advice, particularly as it relates to sexual encounters and dating.
“Men don’t create similar ecosystems [of support] and instead perpetuate the idea that all males are inherently supposed to know how to flirt and build relationships. Asking for advice is emasculating, and for many boys, sexual education begins and ends with some condoms, pornography and a pickup artistry book.”
Loneliness and social isolation are not the only causes of misogynistic behavior, but they appear to be part of the story. They multiply feelings of insecurity and foster community around hate. One way to combat them is to create safe spaces for vulnerability, and to encourage — by word and deed — men to express the full range of their emotional depth, and their broader desires.
The friends in my life thankfully haven’t traversed the incel path. But there are multiple worlds where I can imagine this possible. My hope is enough people encourage them to explore their full range of self before the only friends they’ve found are ensnared in spaces of hate.
