Why men are lonelier in America than elsewhere | Hacker News Reader

Why men are lonelier in America than elsewhere

economist.com

10 pointsaxiomdata31612 comments

Men are often very tied to their sense of progress/making it in the world, & it's not just the tax of doing the work that makes driven people lonely.

We're alienated from others, who are on different paths & who we feel will be hard to relate to. Whatever rate the friendship grows, distance will probably grow faster, as our experiences take us in different directions. How likely is it this is going to be another person who I won't be able to share my best parts with, who won't be on my level? Is what's left going to be enough?

And we're alienated from ourselves; we keep close the dreams & visions of better selves, who haven't quite made it yet. It's hard to relate to others honestly because we believe in a self that's better than we are, believe in a not yet found edition. Relating the past is easy and safe, relating today is ok, but to be able to speculatively imagine & make real our better, upcoming selves: now there's a journey that's hard to engage in.

Last it's hard to guess whose even worth investing in: who has the depth of character to be a rich rewarding friend, who has the time to share & enjoy, who walks a path that will be interesting? Honestly there's a lot of aspects of maleness that spike my misandry, that I don't like; how long will it take to find out all the reasons I won't like this potential friend?

> In childhood, she says, boys tend to be as open as girls about their need for friends. As they get older, they “feel they have to get into a gender straitjacket” and define their masculinity primarily as not being feminine. By the age of 15, many boys start saying they don’t need friends and worrying that close friendships will make them seem “girly”. This “clash of culture and nature”, Dr Way says, is much more marked among white boys than black ones.

Is it just me that is angered by statements such as this?

For me it seems to tie in with the thinking that the male is a defective female.

Im my experience, men make friends by doing things together. For me it's no coincidence that the men I am closest to at any one time are my work colleagues. I wonder if the structure of schools hasn't changed, and as has been discussed here before, whether schools just don't cater for what boys / men need anymore.

> For me it seems to tie in with the thinking that the male is a defective female.

men are defective females in a lot of ways, though the causes of those things are cultural and not anything inherent about being male.

maybe "emotionally damaged or stunted people" is more appropriate than any gender-assigned positive or negative traits.

my parents ruined me in a lot of ways, especially my mother. I'm male. I still carry her selfishness and shortsightedness with me decades later in a few damning forms: A) it is very hard for me to view myself as being worthy of the attention of any healthy female (the emotionally healthy females I've known agree that I am unworthy), B) my desire to attain even the most meaningless forms of approval from females gives those very females an extremely strong sense that I am horribly broken and to be avoided, and C) I am almost exclusively attracted to women who ignore me, manipulate me, or actively try to distance themselves from me, which is not surprising because those are the exact same interactions which constituted 95% of my relationship with my mother until I was in my mid-20s.

so yeah I am a defective person, a male, made defective at the hands of a female who simply hated me (her words) for being born. (as if I had a choice.)

lots (lots) of therapy means I can analyze this and understand her motivations, somewhat, but it doesn't really heal me on a fundamental level. I just won't ever be acceptable to women that I am attracted to, or wish to know on a personal level, because I am broken enough that I can only ever scare these women away.

now, to the point: the fact that no men in my childhood stood up for me, reassured me in any way, or did literally anything other than say things like "suck it up", "be a man", and "are you sure you're not a girl, you're really sad all the time HAHAHAHA" and the like, tells me that yes, men actually are like defective females in a lot of ways, especially in terms of emotional awareness and emotional health.

Your situation isn't typical. Most men are capable of healthy relationships with women, and with themselves.

yeah I know. I only have my own experiences to draw from, though.

besides, it doesn't matter what is typical and what is atypical in situations like mine. at the time this damage was done to me, there was no "typical" or "atypical" - there was only what was happening. and what happened shaped me.

I'm sure you've already heard this a million times, but you telling yourself that you're broken and unfixable is going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy until you decide to stop repeating it. The damage your parents did to you as a child isn't your fault, but you're an adult now and you're responsible for and capable of addressing these things and changing and growing into a better, healthier person.

As someone who's gone through this myself, all I'll say is it's not fun and it's not easy. I had to take a lot of long, hard looks at myself and even when I knew I was making progress frankly I still didn't like what I saw for a long, long time. I questioned whether it was really worth it, and even if I did change what did it matter because no one would love me even if I fixed myself anyways.

But eventually you realize that you're not doing it for anyone else, you're doing it for yourself, and that's the important part. You have to want it for you, because other people will come and go and if you're doing it for them you'll give up once they leave, but you're stuck with yourself forever.

That's when it'll all start to click and things will come together, and you realize people are capable of change and we do get to choose who we want to be, and you decide which parts of yourself are important and work on keeping them, and which parts aren't and work on letting them go.

It's a slow, gradually process but years from now you'll be looking back someday and realize just how far you've come without realizing and know it was all worth it.

Of course I don't expect you to believe any of this right now, that's just human nature, but maybe hopefully it'll set you down the right path at least.

Anyhow happy new year, and just know that someone somewhere is wishing and hoping for a better life for you. I think my email is in my profile, feel free to reach out if you'd ever like to talk about anything at all.

it's not a matter of self-fulfillment.

it's knowing myself, my age, my age at the time that I discovered that I was not normal, and knowing the rate at which these things can be fixed.

I simply won't live long enough to fix this completely. humans don't live that long.

I've accepted it, as much as it can be accepted.

I will just not be able to have a relationship with a female in which I can be open, because I scare away the good ones, and attract the ones that steal my identity and leave when they've used it up. and I simply can't get emotional support from men, it's always responses that boil down to "I don't want to talk about this."

so I'm part of a species that needs emotional support, without emotional support, and there is none on the horizon.

I'm trapped in this world, but not of it. That's just my role here, I guess. Forever an outsider.

anyone that says I'm not permanently broken just isn't aware of the situation. and to be honest, I would say what you've said, if the roles were reversed.

>For me it seems to tie in with the thinking that the male is a defective female.

I don't interpret it that way. Rather, I see the thinking that the masculine ideal boys are introduced to shames any traits typically considered "feminine" in a man, even if they would normally be healthy in a boy. That there is a marked difference in race suggests the phenomenon is linked to cultural and ethnic identity as it relates to the definition of "man" versus "boy." Rather than the male being a defective female, an 'effeminate' male is a defective male (in the same way a "mannish" woman is often seen as a defective female.) Unfortunately, the strict isolation of masculine and feminine traits in modern society means healthy traits which should be common wind up quarantined to either the "boys only" or "girls only" camp.

There is a common academic term to describe this phenomenon but it is impossible to speak its name on Hacker News without the thread immediately bursting into flames.

I can relate, after the birth of our kids, I have invested almost everything into my family. I spend energy ensuring my wife and kids lead happy fulfilled lives, my former life be damned.

I don't regret it at all, but I do occasionally grieve for the end of other aspects/phases of my life.

I'm in my 40s and am exactly the same. All my energy goes into work and family and at the end of the day, there is nothing left for cultivating friendships.

I tell myself that when my daughter grows up and I have more time I cultivate friendships again (though I may have forgotten how to).

https://archive.is/TGWDo

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