Deep friendships often fade when boys become men. We need a culture shift, for the good of us all

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Sam Eagan is a New York-based journalist covering politics, masculinity and sport.

As long as there has been publicly available data to quantify it, researchers have known that men struggle to maintain friendships into adulthood. From an early age, I remember vividly how much my own father’s social life revolved almost exclusively around my mother. This problem has only worsened with mine and subsequent generations, and has been further exacerbated by the gradual fraying of the connective threads in our societal fabric: the collapse of third spaces, like your grandfather’s local Elks lodge or grandma’s bowling league, and the dominant role that the internet now plays in nearly every aspect of our lives, which was supercharged by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This, importantly, affects everyone regardless of gender. A 2021 Statistics Canada survey found that loneliness “has no age restriction,” with at least one in 10 people reporting feelings of loneliness across all generations (though the number jumps to almost one in four people aged 15 to 24). In the midst of the pandemic, a 2020 Angus Reid survey found that 63 per cent of Canadian men aged 18-34 experienced considerable loneliness, compared to 53 per cent of similarly aged women. But the societal and patriarchal expectations placed on young men in particular – a pressure to achieve at all costs, even to the self – is a differentiating factor that should concern us all. It can be a social and psychological pressure cooker of alienation, and downstream from that alienation is a violence that we all suffer from.

In its purest distillation, patriarchy offers men a basic trade-off. In exchange for choking out the parts of ourselves that crave connection and intimacy, we are offered a place at the head of society; stern, but fair (and ideally chivalrous) stewards of the nuclear family, and a supposedly pragmatic dominance of the social hierarchy.

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The result of this conviction, that men must be the dominant presence in their domestic realm in order to derive complete satisfaction from it, is a duelling and untenable position that simultaneously pedestalizes and devalues the lives of men. It also fails to deliver on its basic premise: In the United States, the percentage of women killed by an intimate partner is five times higher than for men, and the leading cause of death for pregnant and postpartum women is homicide linked to intimate-partner violence and firearms. In Canada, one woman is murdered in cold blood every other day, with men forming the majority of the accused. Men are critically not spared from this violence either; in the U.S., men represent four out of five suicides, three out of four deaths of despair, and 98 per cent of mass shooters. In Canada, they represent three out of four suicides, three out of four homicides and 73 per cent of opioid-overdose deaths.

This trade-off is not simply offered for consideration, but instead implicitly demanded of young boys. Extensive research has shown that at a young age, boys maintain intimate and deep friendships with one another, as girls do. But by the onset of their teenage years, the intimacy of boys’ relationships fades away, according to Niobe Way, a developmental psychologist who has spent the better part of 40 years researching masculinity. Her recent book, Rebels With a Cause, argues that the culture that this emotional stunting creates – what she calls “boy” culture – is responsible for our inability to connect as grown men.

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“It’s a problem of a culture that raises young people to go against their nature … I would say probably more so with boys and men than girls and women,” says Prof. Way. “I heard the same boys who’d talk so beautifully about their desire for friendships and their need for it. And then I’d hear that voice disappear over time.”

It is this exact exchange – from emotional openness to a more closed-off state – that transforms the proverbial boy into a man. And the pressure to do so need not even come from the home environment. As Prof. Cynthia Miller Idriss, director of the American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL), and the author of Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism, describes it, boys’ teenage years represent a peer-enforced panopticon of masculinity that weaponizes homophobia to stifle vulnerability.

“The fear that boys have, the pressure that they feel to not be called gay when they’re young teenagers, they [begin] trying to slice off parts of themselves to fit in a box,” says Prof. Miller Idriss, “in order to survive the bullying and the potential violence from boys and other men who say they’re not manly enough.”

It is hard to describe to someone who has not lived through this process what it feels like. Perhaps impossible to understand in the way that I can never truly understand what a woman feels walking home late at night, clutching her keys in her fist and glancing over her shoulder every block. But your teenage years as a man can be characterized by a long and unending series of implicit reminders that nobody gives a damn about you. Men who are worthy of love are achievers – people who strived and struggled and in the end, dominated. The ties between achievement and worth are so implicit that it is impossible for me, at least on some level, to separate them from my idea of masculinity. The message was clear: For men to be loved they must achieve. To achieve they must dominate. To dominate, they must control – not just themselves, but those around them.

As a young man, I found ways – at times – to thrive in this environment. As an overweight and bullied young boy that struggled in school, I found a path to self worth through the avenue of sport. American football and wrestling illustrated to me clearly that if I was able to dominate those around me physically, I would be rewarded for it handsomely, both in the form of real-world opportunity and social capital.

When I was 12 years old, I vividly remember playing catch with my father and brother. I had just told my dad that I wanted to play football for the first time. Underneath barely concealed excitement, he shoulder-checked me while my brother was throwing me a pass, and left me writhing on the ground. They both laughed, and my father told me that to play football, I would need to be able to take a hit. Later that day, I went up to my room to cry.

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It was one of the first times I understood that there were two versions of my father: The version that he presented to the world, and the one at home who has always been a remarkably tender and affectionate man. He would tell me that to be a good football player, you had to be nearly sociopathic. He would lecture me (half joking) on the notion that a good linebacker was the kind of psychopath who might relish in harming small animals. I internalized this lesson.

The first time I won a wrestling match, I picked up and body slammed a younger, fatter and smaller boy so hard that he laid on the mat crying and wailing into the air. Instead of getting in trouble, my coaches told me that I had done a good job, my teammates laughed, and I got my hand raised at the centre of the mat for all to see. My reward for domination, for the humiliation of my opponent, was praise.

When I think back, I can summon a long laundry list of smaller and more feeble young boys that I hurt physically, boys that had no business in contact sports but who bravely tried anyway, because that’s what men do. When I think about these boys for too long, and about the ways that my younger self so relished in hurting them, I cry.

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I was so successful at dominating other people that I earned a division-one scholarship to wrestle in college. While in school, I was afforded special privileges and social status for my ability to control and harm other people; million-dollar practice facilities, free tutors, and doting girls. But as I jumped from high school to the D1 level, my peers got better as well. During this time it became clear how surface-level my perceived power was. Only those who continued to dominate – on the wrestling mat, and ergo life – were treated with the love and affection that they desired.

For those who fell behind, including myself at many times, the result was not chastisement or anger, but invisibility. Coaches went from offering individualized attention and technical advice to staring through the “losers” as they walked into the wrestling room. The worst thing you could be in this environment, however, was a “victim.” It was a derogatory word we all threw around frequently.

Even as I marched from accolade to accolade, my entire athletic career was plagued by an implicit fear, laundered as universal truth, that if I failed to continue to dominate, those who loved me would recede; they would love me less. Young men find the lessons that I was taught in this particular environment everywhere. That if you’re not achieving – i.e. not dominating – nobody cares, and (as you might hear on any “manosphere” podcast these days) nobody is coming to save you.

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It is not difficult to see how this implicit knowledge, ingrained in boys since childhood, affects the broader culture of masculinity, and the ever-growing industry of content that preys on the insecurities it produces.

I, like millions of other young(ish) men, wake up on any given day and immediately reach for my phone. Within 15 seconds, ads for Draft Kings (or one of its spiritual cousins) are offering me $300 to jump onto their sports gambling app. Then, a series of OnlyFans models offer to keep me company online for the low, low price of $15 a month. Black-belt Brazilian Jiu-jitsu fighters, juiced to the gills, tell me that the blanket of malaise that has settled over my life can be fixed with a quick round of testosterone-replacement therapy (for $500 a month).

At its best, this culture offers a way for men to cope with an increasingly hostile world, one in which income inequality is soaring, economic outcomes for young people are collapsing, and where men are significantly less likely to attend college, with their real wages plummeting. A desperate hunt for agency, or as the misogynist influencer and accused human-trafficker Andrew Tate might put it, an opportunity to escape the “Matrix.”

At its worst, this culture represents a retreat into a sort of hyper-masculine idolatry, born of a world in which gender norms are being redefined rapidly; a redoubt of veiny biceps and Rolexes and bad-faith actors, i.e. the “manosphere,” directing young men’s confusion about the world and the role they play in it toward their own wallets. In the eyes of these people, the only way to feel better is to not be at the bottom of the hierarchy. If they do not dominate, they will be dominated.

It is not just young men who are struggling with our gendered relations. A quick search through TikTok will feed you content directed at young women with a voiceover lamenting that “men used to go to war,” over videos of them enjoying charcuterie boards. Keep scrolling, and you can find a woman being ridiculed in the comments section of a video in which she explains why she splits rent with her boyfriend. Another quick scroll and the algorithm might serve you a video in which a “trad wife” explains to her audience how they can find a “high-value man.” Or a content creator bemoaning that her boyfriend’s giggle has given her the “ick.”

It is easy for young boys who undoubtedly see this content to hear that they should continue to choke off the emotional parts of their identity.

The result is a world in which men are alienated by an implicit understanding that any sign of “femininity” will render them unmanly, and therefore worthless. They are left with the impression that they must either push forward into a more equitable system that no longer pedestalizes (and thereby degrades) them, or retreat into tradition and domination. Neither is the right answer.

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I can summon a laundry list of memories in which the cracks in my own emotional armour made the women around me uncomfortable. By the time I had finished wrestling in college and made my way to New York, I had internalized that oftentimes, the only emotion that the people around me cared to assuage in men was rage. When I felt anxious, lonely, or sad – like I hated myself for my perceived failures as an (already elite) athlete; like I was not handsome enough or smart enough; like I was too fat or too stupid or too poor – what came out of the pressure cooker was rage.

In a city in which I knew not a single soul, I, like many men, leaned on romantic partners to stem the emotional tide. When I think about the rage that I subjected my early romantic partners to, I cry.

As cliché as it is, the only way forward is to cry. As Prof. Way explains, men need to put the emotional parts of ourselves on an equal playing field with the other parts of our identities. They must reject a hierarchy in which a lack of ownership means subservience, and reject a paradigm in which self worth is implicitly tied to one’s ability to control, and dominate, and win.

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“We need each other to survive,” says Prof. Way. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my research over 40 years, it’s the only thing people want, most of all, is each other.”

I would be lying if I said that there wasn’t still some small part of myself that believes that I must dominate to be loved. But should I have a son, I pray that he will never know what that feels like.

It has taken me years to accept the vulnerability required to really connect with others. But when I did, it reshaped my life and my emotional well-being in ways that I cannot properly describe. Equally as important, our counterparts across the gender aisle must meet this emotionality with open arms, to experience the emotional depth that I know masculinity can be capable of. We all deserve it.