Male loneliness crisis is the most recent “hot topic” on the internet, with many people sharing their opinions. And there are quite a few opinions to give! Studies have been produced by psychologists, while podcasts now have endless three-hour shows on the subject.
Influencers have jumped onto the trend by starting “Alpha Male Recovery Programs,” with the passion of someone who thinks they just discovered the start-up that will be the next unicorn.
However, it’s odd how people are divided on how to respond to the epidemic. Some say that women simply do not care, while others say that men engineered this crisis with the precision of a poorly planned merger between two separate companies.
The truth, as with most things, is much less dramatic and much more human.
For thousands of years, boys have been given an inadequate operating manual for being a man: Be tough, don’t cry, find solutions yourself, and—most importantly—do not talk about your feelings unless your cricket team has just lost a final during the last few overs.
Instead, every time a boy has an “emotional moment” , the emotions are treated as “contraband” (illegal items) at an airport security checkpoint… declare them at your own risk.
As a result of this, many men are masters of having companionship with no intimacy. They have built friendships on activity rather than on having honest conversations.
They could have some of the most intelligent, articulate debates about anything from batting averages to politics, Bollywood villains to cryptocurrency, but when it is time to say “I’m having a hard time,” many of these men have difficulty with that statement.
Then adulthood arrives with an itemized bill.
A marriage ends, a parent passes away, children have moved out, retirement has left calendars full of nothing, an office “WhatsApp” group has gone silent, and the group chat that was once full of funny memes and birthday gifs is a deserted wasteland.
Suddenly, a man who has five hundred people he could call discovers he has no one to call at one in the morning.
Women are frequently portrayed as being bystanders to the male loneliness crisis. However, this accusation does not consider one very uncomfortable fact: women have performed emotional labor for many years without overtime.
They have remembered anniversaries, managed family dysfunction, listened with patience, comforted anxieties, and have assumed the role of the unofficial Chief Emotional Officer in their own family.
Many are also now reasonably saying, “We sympathize with you, but we cannot run the entire customer service department.”
Can you blame them?
The great irony in this situation is that the same men who mocked “girls' nights” for being a place to gossip have now discovered that the cups of tea, long phone calls, and “Are you home safe?” messages were not useless social niceties; they were maintenance on the infrastructure of human connectivity.
Loneliness is not male or female; it is a failure of society's systems in an age of extreme connectivity and emotional bankruptcy. We have Wi-Fi in every room, but no one has had a real conversation in any room.
The solution is not to blame women for not helping men in their time of need or to mock men for showing weakness and admitting their vulnerability.
The solution is to teach boys that courage does not live in silence, that no definition of a friend dictates that they be only a name on your contact list, and that a friend checking in does not require sending a funeral invitation.
While that may be the strongest sentence a person can say in any language, this could be just as strong: “Mate, life is quite difficult for me currently; would you like to have a cup of tea and talk?
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