Friendship Won’t Fix the Male Loneliness Epidemic

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There’s been a lot of discussion about the male loneliness epidemic lately.

With the rise of manosphere communities in the past couple decades such as the pickup artists, red pillers, incels, and more, there has never been a greater outcry of lonely men in the zeitgeist of our global online community.

If we look at the statistics, we see that the majority of our society’s loneliness epidemic isn’t about these young men; it’s mostly about lonely seniors. However, it’s not difficult to see that there are more men with grievances about their struggles with dating than ever before. There is indeed a worrying pattern of increasing numbers of men who are lonely in the realm of romance.

Where did this problem come from? It could be a variety of factors. Some people blame pornography, some blame the COVID pandemic, some blame the economy, some blame the entitlement of these supposedly lonely men, and some even blame women as a whole.

I’m not here to point fingers. In fact, I think it’d be better not to blame anything or anyone at all. Rather, it’s better to understand each other to find a way forward together.

I used to be one of those lonely men who could have identified as an incel before the term was ever popular. Fortunately, I turned things around for myself. And now, as a men’s dating coach, I’ve talked to countless men who have gone through the same kind of experiences and struggles as I once had.

In many discussions about the male loneliness epidemic, women often offer a seemingly obvious solution.

They say that we need to make more friends and cultivate those platonic relationships.

Strictly speaking, the definition of “lonely” is the bad feeling you get from being by yourself.

Logically, this means any positive form of companionship should allay loneliness, right?

It doesn’t seem to work that way for a lot of men. Even if a man has tons of friends, he’ll still call himself “forever alone” and describe himself as lonely if he’s not getting laid. To explore the reason why, we need to look at four factors:

The way women generally experience platonic relationships
The way men generally experience platonic relationships
The way women generally experience sexual and romantic relationships
The way men generally experience sexual and romantic relationships

Women’s platonic experiences

We live in a society where women are encouraged to explore the emotional depths of their platonic experiences as fully and deeply as possible. Women’s friendships can be just as supportive as any romantic relationship, and they often are with enough trust and intimacy.

Women experience less social repercussions when engaging in intimate friendships with both women and men alike. It is expected of them, as it should be.

Men’s platonic experiences

We live in a society where men are discouraged from feeling and expressing our full range of emotions, and this “man box” also limits our platonic relationships. Men’s friendships are often less supportive than our romantic relationships. Developing deep trust and intimacy with friends can even feel confusing and irregular.

This is not necessarily the fault of any individual man. Allowing ourselves to be emotionally vulnerable tends to open us up to criticism. It is discouraged. And it can be difficult to find a community or support network free from this sort of patriarchal pressure.

Women’s sexual and romantic experiences

For most women, receiving external validation for their sexual desirability is a given. Patriarchy has made sure to objectify and commodify women’s sexuality to the point where even women who don’t meet conventional standards of beauty have an inherent desirability and value that most men will never feel.

Having too much sexual and romantic attention will often get in the way of true intimacy and connection, sometimes making platonic relationships seem even deeper and more valuable in comparison. This is why it’s usually easier for women to feel less lonely with real friendships even if they don’t have anything going on in their love lives.

Men’s sexual and romantic experiences

For most men, external validation for our sexual desirability is hard to come by. We’re fighting a constant battle for something to validate our sense of manhood, which many of us feel is an integral aspect of our very identity. This is a key part of self-esteem development that many men lack, and we can feel terribly lonely when this aspect isn’t present in an interpersonal relationship.

Additionally, this is often the only realm where we feel safe enough to open ourselves with true vulnerability. Our girlfriends and wives tend not to criticize us as much as our other peers when we do so. It’s often the only kind of relationship that makes us feel understood and, ultimately, not lonely.

I understand why these men feel lonely the way they do because it’s something I’ve experienced myself. It’s why I decided to title my book Never Lonely. I felt like it was the perfect title because it speaks to our visceral desire to connect with women, not just with people in general.

Each man has power over his own destiny, but it’s difficult to fight against the system.

We could tell every individual man to ignore the societal forces that attack us when developing intimate friendships. It’s true that it’s within the capacity of every single man to do so. However, how realistic is such an expectation on a broad scale? It’s no surprise that this male loneliness epidemic became a thing, and that the solutions aren’t so simple.

Because of the experiential differences between the genders regarding platonic and romantic relationships, men and women generally do not feel the same about the effectiveness of substituting romance with friendship. No matter how much we men surround ourselves with the closest of friends, many of us will still feel horribly lonely if we don’t have a woman who will validate us as a sexually desirable human being.

In summary, men tend to miss out on two key components that make them feel lonely when focusing on just friendship:

Sexual or romantic validation
Deep intimacy

Women often don’t understand how bad it feels when that first component is missing because they tend to get way more of it than they ever wanted. Such validation often holds no value to them, while it holds a crazy amount of value to men.

Women might also underestimate the difficulty men find in actually having deep and fulfilling friendships because they often don’t know what it’s like to be knocked down whenever they try to reach out for true platonic intimacy.

To be clear, I’m not writing this in a “women are dumb and should give us men more sympathy for being the true victims” sort of way that so many bitter manosphere members tend to do. I wouldn’t ever want to trade places with women because I’ve gained enough perspective to know how much worse it actually is on the other side in many other aspects of life. I’m not one of those delusional men who focus so much on my own pain that I blind myself to the struggles of other groups. I’m not a kid anymore.

I know that, when women suggest this platonic path to lonely men, they’re not trying to be dismissive.

They’re not intentionally dismissing our pain of not having enough of a certain kind of validation, or the scope of our difficulty in finding the kind of fulfillment in friendships that only emotional vulnerability can provide.

They just don’t know what it’s like because they haven’t been in our shoes, just as we haven’t been in theirs.

It’s a tough battle, but men need to take a two-pronged approach here.

The answer isn’t to just make more friends.

We need to develop true intimacy in friendships despite the challenges patriarchy presents. We need to have the courage to open ourselves up and be vulnerable with our friends, even if it results in some people calling us derogatory names, and even if we face a mountain of hurtful dismissiveness.

It may come as a greater challenge if we try to develop these kinds of friendships with an average man who hasn’t made himself aware of these patriarchal constraints. And it can even sometimes be challenging and confusing to try establishing such deep intimacy with women in a platonic way. Hell, even some immature women will hurl the same insults toward you if they feel you aren’t performing your masculine role of emotional stoicism well enough.

It will challenge your sense of manhood. The process will feel utterly emasculating at times. It will be tough.

With enough perseverance, though, you will eventually find compassionate friends who will understand and accept you. You will find greater fulfillment and support in platonic relationships.

Just make sure that these friends are from diverse backgrounds. Finding yourself in an echo chamber where everyone looks and thinks like you will be poisonous to your mental well-being.

The second prong is another arduous journey without the right guidance.

You can try to be a Buddhist monk who finds some sort of enlightenment without any sexual validation, but you can just as easily get enough of that validation to develop a healthy level of confidence and self-esteem.

Connecting with women and developing romantic intimacy isn’t just a luxury reserved for an exclusive club of genetically superior men. It’s a learnable skill that any man can get good at.

People like those in the incel community believe that they are doomed to be “forever alone” because attraction is something outside of their control. They think women’s attraction is all about looks and, if you’re not born a certain way, finding love will be impossible.

Well, they’re wrong. I write about this all the time: