Men like to think of themselves as independent to the point of bragging about how self-reliant they are. They tease or even shame each other for any sign of dependency as a sign of weakness, particularly if there is any hint that dependency is on a woman. If men are so self-reliant and don’t need women, why is it men so much more eager than women to remarry after divorce or death of a spouse? Men remarry much faster than women in large part because they are very uncomfortable being alone and have not developed the kind of close relationships outside their marriages that could emotionally sustain them.
Men often divorce without giving much thought to what their relationship life will be like after the divorce. Of course, they think a lot about dating and sex, but often don’t give much thought to other relationships because they often have relied on their wives to silently and seamlessly manage the couple’s social relationships and haven’t had to think much about relationships since they’ve been married. It often comes as a great shock to many men to discover how alone they feel when they divorce.
As a psychotherapist, I often ask men if they have friends, they generally tell me that they do. This can be misleading without the follow-up question, which is “Do you have friends that you talk with about the things you talk about with me,” they often look at me horror-struck. Not only is the answer clearly no, but many men have never even considered sharing that intimately with someone other than their wife/partner.
Psychologist Thomas Joiner is in the forefront in talking about the high cost of men’s loneliness. Boys and girls start out in mixed groups, playing together. At some point, the girls get more interested in playing with the girls and the boys in playing with the boys.
- The girls focus primarily on learning about relationships and learning the skills they will need to thrive in relationships.
- The boys, in contrast, focus primarily on learning about competition, learning the skills they will need to prepare them in the professional world.
In an interesting experiment, a number of preschools in Sweden created a gender neutral environment for their children, making sure the boys spent time in the play kitchen and teaching the girls how to shout “no!” They found that the children in these schools did much less gender stereotyping than other children.
Soon after puberty, young men get interested in playing with young women again, but for very different reasons. As I discussed in a previous article, One Bite is All it Takes, the boys get interested in the girls again because now the girls have something that the boys are interested in. To get what they want, the boys have to pursue the girls, but the boys soon understand that the pursuit is going to be on a turf that if very unfamiliar to them, a turf on which they are significantly disadvantaged. That turf is relationships.
Young men are generally unaccustomed to being disadvantaged and not be able to get what they want, so they turn to the skills they are most familiar with, which are aggression and competition. Those skills are not very often effective in the pursuit of a female companion, and at that point men face a critical choice. Some men who were raised without a very secure emotional attachment as children are likely to see this situation as threatening. They most often dig in their heels and see this as a power struggle that they cannot afford to lose.
Those men do very little emotional growth in their relationships, are often locked into high conflict or emotionally estranged relationships and are often very lonely.
Other young men who were raised with a more secure attachment to their parents and have more emotional maturity see the situation as a learning opportunity. They intuitively understand that if they can tolerate a bit more emotional vulnerability than they are accustomed to in their relationships with other men, they stand to grow and mature a lot emotionally and feel a lot less chronic loneliness than they have for most of their lives.
Do you want to be part of creating a kinder, more inclusive society?
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