Loneliness is rife among young men. It's time to get offline and talk to each other

The Guardian

2 days ago

At first I was startled when the psychologist Angelica Ferrara told me that most of the time it's women, not men, who want to write about her research into male loneliness. But this is the crux of the issue, isn't it? That we men need to talk, and we don't: not nearly enough, anyway.
Since 1990, there has been a sharp decline in how many people men say they are close to, says Ferrara, who is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics. In the US, two-thirds of men aged between 18 and 23 think that nobody really knows them; one third haven't seen anyone outside their household in the past week; only a fifth say they have friends they can really count on; and a staggering 69% of young men think 'no one cares if men are OK'.
Of course, women also experience this same loneliness, isolation and disconnection – at rates that are not far behind their male counterparts. In addition, many women in relationships with men find themselves doing something that Ferrara has named 'mankeeping', a term that has recently gone viral: picking up the emotional weight of being their male partner's only intimate social connection. With this in mind, Ferrara has had her work dismissed as 'himpathy' – in other words, too kind to adult men who should be able to look after themselves.
While I understand the reflex to lash out and ask, 'Why should a bunch of incels get so much attention?', such a dismissal is a mistake. 'Our lives are so interlinked,' as Ferrara put it to me: men's failures to maintain close connections are hurting society at large.
Since 2017, there has been a marked increase in the number of men inhabiting what some researchers refer to as the 'man box'. That is, men who have deeply misogynistic beliefs about masculinity and gender roles: who want to know where their wife or girlfriend is at all times, who think they should always have the final say in a relationship, and who think gay men 'are not real men'. The same survey found that 63% of men wished they were more 'masculine'.
Let me address men directly: this is our problem and our responsibility. We need to find a way out of this, and I think that starts with separating masculinity from 'domination'. For too many men, domination is where masculinity is grounded. Dominating conversations online and offline, dominating the physical space around them, dominating women ('Your body, my choice,' Nick Fuentes tweeted after Donald Trump's second election victory). An identity formed around domination was always going to damage men, because it is fundamentally at odds with community. I think community is what whole swathes of alienated westerners are really yearning for deep down.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that domination is not only at odds with community, but with true confidence. Domination is something that the insecure seek as a means to generate confidence; the truly confident do not need it. Disturbingly, Taveeshi Gupta, the senior director of research at Equimundo, says being in the man box often correlates with a better sense of purpose, because men identify with the roles of provider and protector – an identification that women place on to men too, Gupta says. But what if we could get the same result by reframing this as care?
'Men talk about their friendships with a lot of desire for what is not there,' says Ferrara, who, as part of her research, has conducted hundreds of interviews with men and their romantic partners. 'One of the stereotypes that I combat, and that men combat too, is that men don't need closeness.' I have male friendships whose natural setting is banter, and I have male friendships that involve deeper intellectual and emotional sharing, where we have found the space to just sit and talk, or refaire le monde, as the French are fond of saying: to set the world straight.
I do wonder if the ability to cultivate deeper connections can be taught. Ferrara and I are roughly the same age, and both from the US; neither of us encountered any kind of unit on identifying and discussing emotions in our elementary schooling. But she hit me with something surprising: among the men she has interviewed who do report having close relationships, a fair number of them (including a curious concentration of Canadians in particular) did talk about emotions and relationships at school.
'There aren't enough scripts for raising boys,' says Gupta. At an extremely young age, they talk openly about how they 'love' their male friends, she says, and then society whisks that away from them and shoves them into a world where 'they can't have these relationships'. Sometimes that means literal scripts as well: Ferrara told me she could recall multiple examples from her childhood and adolescence of pop culture showing women discussing their feelings with each other, in shows such as Sex and the City. We both paused for a moment and tried to think of similar examples involving men. I couldn't. Neither could she.
We live in a cynical age, thick with essays about newly coined terms such as 'heterofatalists': people who are fed up with modern dating and are convinced there are no more 'good men'. It is an age where the 'manosphere' is full of grifters ready to prey on men's loneliness and need for connection by selling them poor substitutes for real community, such as the sad bravado of masculinism. It would be devastating if all of this became a self-fulfilling narrative.
It's up to us – to men – to change the narrative. It has become a truism that it is tough to begin deep friendships later on in life, once we're far away from the crucible of shared classrooms or university campuses. But it's on us to make the effort to change this: to reach out, to ask deeper questions, to create that absent sense of community – hopefully in offline 'third spaces' rather than online ones. We may not have had to face a glass ceiling above us, but too often we've put ourselves behind glass walls of our own making. Let's shatter them.
Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist