Why Men Need to Prioritize, and Celebrate, Their Friendships

As a psychotherapist, I meet men lost in love and recovering after love lost, attached men, and unattached men. I witness men morph into stay-at-home dads, stay-at-work dads, and juggling dads who are determined to right the wrongs of their absent dads.

So many of these diverse males share a sense of alienation from other males. I label it "malienation." While malienation is a made-up word, it's an actual inner phenomenon. It's a lesser told story buried beneath the data on men's disproportionately high suicide rates and steep declines in close friendships.

Embodied Male Bonds

Malienation isn't just about men longing for men; we make up half the population, after all. It's deeper than that. It's the estrangement from an embodied and vulnerable brotherhood. A built-in understanding of what it's like to joust with fallen tree branches, evade bullies, build forts, heave yourself atop a pileup of bodies to test the threshold between play and aggression, share secrets, and wipe away your snot but leave your tears. Malienation is mourning this love, this synergy between emotionality and physicality.

What some advantaged men have gained in family time by working from home during Covid, they've let further slip away in full-bodied, wholehearted kinships, which are such a far cry from an occasional quip on a high school group text.

Men, primarily heterosexual cisgender men in the Western world, are particularly avoidant in fostering same-sex friendships, especially those who've sunk deeper into their couches of romantic, parental, or professional commitment. While men may desire close friendships, they often loathe or feel ashamed by this want. Planting and nurturing male friendships may sound appealing but seems like an outdated privilege, unjustified with 60-hour workweeks and diaper duty.

Men need more and must power through ambivalence and trust that diversifying their portfolio of intimacy is a decent return on investment. Men must tap into boyhood wisdom to reimagine their changed, adult social worlds.

What "Man Parks" Can Do

SNL's "Man Park" sketch from this past fall satirized how men in heterosexual romantic relationships struggle to make new friends. In one scene, a woman (played by Ego Nwodim), exasperated by her romantic partner (Pete Davidson), pleads, "I need you to go out of the house and make a friend, so you talk to other people about this stuff and not just me."

"That's insane!" exclaims Davidson, playing into the man-as-buffoon stereotype. "Where would I even go?"

Nwodim proceeds to walk Davidson to the "Man Park" for much-needed emotional exercise with other relationally impaired men. The implication is that by releasing Davidson into the local Man Park, she can be granted relief from caregiving.

Prioritizing friendships enriches men and those around them and can even help recalibrate the invisible labor imbalance within families. When men fill their buckets of belonging through some combination of physical and emotional interactions in men's groups, poker games, or pickup basketball, their romantic partners or moms don't have to be their default containers for pent-up aggression, work stress, and insecurities. Loved ones—more likely than not, women—then become less burdened with the heavy lifting of impromptu coaching sessions or social planning.

When men cultivate their social life with dinners, phone calls, or by dusting off and swinging their tennis rackets, I see them animated, energized with recognition through connection. I notice they are less likely to dump or displace their neediness.

Making Male Friends is Hard

In her book, Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, psychologist Niobe Way documented how society dulls down the emotional texture of young boys' natural interior design, contributing to their later "crisis of connection" into manhood.

As boys grow up and "man up," their friendships become infused with innuendo and stigma.

For instance, it's common to qualify friendships between men as "male bonding," psychologist Andrea Bonior noted in her Psychology Today blog post: "It's somehow not the same as any other two people hanging out and enjoying each other's company," she wrote. The same goes for bro-hugs, relative to regular hugs.

If we assume that male get-togethers are goal-driven or create an exclusive boys' club, if we toss out terms such as 'bromances,' we may elicit laughs but also trivialize and objectify male bonding. We collude with counterproductive ant-sissy and lone-wolf-your-problems cultural messaging.

For some men, acknowledging and acting upon platonic, same-sex yearnings can stir up fears of feminization or domination by other men. Yet what we fear in other men contains the camaraderie that we crave. Psychologist Michael Addis wrote about this fundamental male dilemma in his book Invisible Men explaining how "other men are as much a potential source of fear, shame, and betrayal as they are a potential source of companionship and support."

Relationships Essential Reads

Is Love Really Blind?

The Art of Relational Sharing

Men end up in friend deserts, partly from socialization, shame- and fear-based self-stories related to domination or feminization, but also because of pandemic-induced languish, the changing patterns in marriage, religion, and mobility, and increases in parental time investment.

Let's normalize the desire for male intimacy in its varied, face-to-face, and shoulder-to-shoulder manifestations. Let's construct new Man Parks—male communities—where we bark facts, make wisecracks, playfully bite each other in games of oneupmanship, and share our quieter, inner conversations and secrets before heading home, revived.

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