Male Loneliness
a Few Thoughts On
Today, while listening to a podcast, I was surprised to hear a description of a phenomenon I’d already recognized on my own.
The episode was entitled “Voting as a Marital Crisis,” and was not intended to provide a sociological critique. It was, instead, a pundit’s table analyzing the state of the current presidential election. When considering voting habits among women, men, and married couples, however, writer Sarah Isgur happened upon the following analysis:
“As […] community organizations have fallen by the wayside, and people are less likely to be members of the Elks — the Bowling Alone thesis — your spouse has become more central to your social world.
This is like Bobos in Paradise — you used to just marry the girl next door. She might not’ve been very smart, or she might have been a lot smarter than you. But you married her because she was right there, and you’d grown up with her.
Now, you’re far more likely to marry someone who is also supposed to be your peer and best friend. So you don’t need all those other friends. This is your best friend.
So I think couples end up relying on each other a lot more socially than they used to in the past.
I think that’s had all sorts of negative effects on our culture. Men, for instance, being very lonely later in life. They don’t have male friends, because they have their wife — but their wife actually has maintained all of her female friends.
As a serial monogamist, I recognize this phenomenon in myself.
When I lived in Iowa City I (then single after three failed relationships) used to visit a weekly Zen sangha. This sangha had a sub-group — the Mindful Men group, which met every other Sunday. We’d have coffee and share around a table in a somewhat formalish way.
I love these men. To this day, if I need to, I can reach out to them and get an answer to a question, or possibly to follow up and see how they are and what’s going on.
But what I found with this group was that the men — even though we explicitly talked about the Bowling Alone hypothesis — were not interested in a lot of interaction outside of group. They had wives, children, jobs, and other things that kept them from the interpersonal activity of one-on-one conversation and time spent with another.
So, I was left to schedule a single hour at a time here and there, hanging out with a few of them. I found that it almost always had to be structured around an activity. It was hard — though not exactly impossible — to get one to commit to an hour for coffee. It was much easier to inspire them to do something they liked — reading a book on a subject we both enjoyed, going for a hike on the local nature trail, etc.
Even this was difficult, but it still worked.
Now, these men are among the most self-aware and emotionally mature men that I have ever known. I was skimming cream off the top of the sangha.
But the theory remains the same for other sorts of men. Find activities, get to know people through empathetic questioning, coordinate activities to be able to get face time.
The underlying thirst, however, still persists. That is, how can I make these men into women? That is, how can I get time to speak with them about the topics that matter — the topics that ordinarily get forced into the square peg of an hour with a therapist, the topics that I feel are, frankly, very easy to talk to women about.
So why not just be friends with women, instead? That’s another blog post.
This won’t change immediately, but something substantial will change today. Here are the three goals I’m considering setting for myself.
Make it a priority throughout the week to reach out to one male friend. No motive, no goal. Simply get my name into the mix with people I already know, maintaining contact and stimulating potential connection.
Continue to maintain the same degree of platonic friendships I have with women, and take care to not cross boundaries. This will also require lots of self-awareness about potentially unconscious intimate or sexual motives. They can be there, but they just need to be accepted.
Make it a point to participate in at least one social activity per week and, while there, push against my discomfort and engage with males in the group, going out of my way to ask them questions about what’s going on with them. Pay attention, and recognize where there’s commonality or overlap.
Or start a band. That’s another option.
I hope your week is starting off well! Thanks for reading.
Attendantly,
Aaron