A few weeks ago, I was messing around at my local public library and checked out a book by a former goop Content Chief named Elise. It’s about women and the seven deadly sins, and basically how women weave in and out of all seven with both guilt and ambition. It’s a good book. There are parts that are overly-wrought third-wave feminism, but in general, it’s good and interesting and well-sourced. So, I went and found her on Substack, and subscribed (free version, I’m broke) therein, and recently she sent this out on male loneliness:
I don’t know her particular situation or lot in life these days, but she had a high-ranking job with “Gwynnie" for a while, and she has two kids that she’s raising in (I think) Los Angeles and she’s likely in the “right circles” therein. It was interesting to me that she’d even cover this topic, because women in those worlds and arcs tend to almost laugh at male loneliness often, I.e. “Well, that's a man problem.” Yes, married women with children do this too.
Ultimately, her post above is an interview with James Hollis for her corresponding podcast, and he makes some good points. This here is probably the nut graf of what people generally understand, but don’t acknowledge, about men:
“Men collude in a conspiracy of silence whose aim is to suppress their emotional truth. By the time a boy is five or six, he has learned that to express his feelings, cry, or show what is going on inside is risky indeed. He has learned shame, ridicule, bullying, and isolation. If he doesn’t want to spend his life in those dismal neighborhoods, he has to keep his mouth shut. In time, keeping his mouth shut so strongly means keeping his mind shut also, and he often loses contact with what he really feels about anything. So, whenever he says, ‘I don’t know — I really don’t care what we do,’ he usually means it because he has lost his inner compass. For many, the chest is an arid zone.
This is a vulnerability problem for men. Modern society says that we need to show it, but when we do, people often recoil from it. Elise (the goop lady) even mentions that in her book, near the end.
So, if you’re wondering about the title of this post (the one you’re currently reading), last night I actually did an anti-male loneliness thing and had dinner with two guys from church (and one of their daughters) while our corresponding wives were stuffing feminine care products at another event. The dinner was good. Mostly sports talk, and/or generic work talk, but got into some deeper stuff. As three-male dinners/bar things go, it was well-rated.
Afterwards, I went and got a cigar. I am not an active cigar smoker, nor do I know very much about the hobby. However, I stopped drinking about six weeks ago, and it felt like an OK way to pass the time periodically, if I do maybe two cigars/month. I figured, OK, why not this Wednesday?
I got home and my wife went to do some work for a deposition she has coming up. I went into the backyard as night fell (poetic) and torched up this cigar, probably incorrectly. I was out there for about 45 minutes. My thoughts turned to a lot of things, including infertility, my relationship with my dad, friendship in general, male loneliness, automation, etc. I’m not a deep person, but being alone with a cigar in my backyard for 45 minutes will do that to me.
Eventually, I began to notice some beautiful smoke rings coming off the cigar, a bolder white against the night sky. The smoke rings would rise for 5–10 seconds, then disappear into eternity. I kinda thought it was beautiful. Meanwhile, I was gagging on my $13 “Big Betty” cigar or whatever brand I bought.
I started thinking about the smoke rings in the context of male loneliness, which I have definitely felt, and deeply at that.
There's no logical way for people, especially men, to be active friends as adults unless a lot of things overlap for those two guys, including:
Geography
Age of children
Whether their significant others like each other
Shared interest/background
If you live 1,200 miles from most of your college friends (as I do), or you got divorced (as I have), it’s a much harder hill to climb, especially if you don’t have kids and others are in the throes of raising kids.
Back to the smoke rings.
You know the expression “Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened?”
I think about that one a lot.
And I think that's kinda the answer to male loneliness: life, and friendship, is mostly about chapters. You live here for x-amount of years. You didn’t have kids for y-amount of years, and then you did. There's a z-amount of years gap between Kid 1 and Kid 2. You worked here for b-amount of years. You moved to this neighborhood at d-age. Everything is a chapter.
It’s not so much that males are lonely, although they are, it’s that I don’t always think men have a good model for reinvention of circle. And when they get into the wife and kids and career arc (“the duality of middle-aged man”), they tend to get socially led around by their wife. Not all men, no, but many men I know — and probably many men you know as well.
I’m often a lonely, broken person, and I’d be the absolute first to admit that. But, I also think I know how to reinvent circle when I need to. I’ll hang out with a guy from church here. I had bar friends over there. I had workout class friends over here. I had some people from a charity thing over there. I did a 5K group one summer and had some people from that. None of these are fill-your-cup friendships per SE, and I’d also admit that. They’re often high acquaintanceships, if anything. But I can still move between them and reinvent circle. It’s not “soul-changing,” but it’s something.
The smoke rings are there for 10 seconds, beautiful against the night sky, and then they fade.
Some dudes you knew 10 years ago will be the same. You get them for a minute, and you have quality memories and conversations therein, and then they fade. This is life. This is adulthood.
I recently went through this with a decent buddy of mine from college.
I was bitter and resentful about that one for close to a year. Over time, I just realized we were in different chapters, and the chapters didn’t align anymore. Now, I also did some probably bad stuff in that dynamic when I was drinking pretty heavily, so I own some of it. But at the end of the day, this is a guy who is 1,400 miles away with two daughters under 11, and works as a federal lawyer. What is this going to be besides a few text threads and maybe a trip every three years?
The chapters change.
So think of male loneliness more as smoke rings: you’re lonely in pockets, but you reinvent and fit into a new circle, if less ideally than before.
This is a much easier and more actionable approach to the broader moral panic of “male loneliness” than “Men should be more vulnerable” (doesn’t work) or “Women should help men” (women are usually the most angry at the man in their lives) or “Something about empathy” (vague).
Just think of life as chapters. As smoke rings. And then the loneliness rises and dissipates, just like the rings.