More and more research has been done over recent years into loneliness and anxiety and how it affects men differently than it does women.
Studies carried out in 2016 revealed that 1 in 3 men describe themselves as regularly suffering from loneliness – so yeah, that’s a staggering one third! In 2016 a UK government determined that it’s a health risk and appointed Tracey Crouch Minister for Loneliness to deal with the issue!
So what’s going on? Why are so many men lonely and how can we deal with it?
A 2017 research study showed that men actually bond better through direct in-person contact as opposed to over Whatsapp threads or Facebook groups or whatever we often take to be socialising online these days. Women on the other hand, who prefer bonding through conversation, do well through online contact. Studies also suggest that men bond better in group dynamics than they do through one-to-one interactions.
Let’s talk about it
One of the main reasons that men suffer differently than women has to with the stigma attached to discussing loneliness.
One of the most thinkers on this subject is former psychology lecturer and now Cognresswoman Judy Chu, who has focused predominantly on how men are socially conditioned and trained from a young age to give up on emotional connection and replace it with emotional toughness. To admit loneliness seems like a betrayal of that most masculine of things – male emotional toughness.
Chu and other researcher’s work indicates that when men are trained out of a culture of connection it makes it harder for them to form and nurture friendships in future.
What all of these studies and initiatives like The Good Men Project point to, is to start out by discussing openly the fact that male loneliness is experienced by a lot of men, it’s normal, and needs to be dealt with by society at large – it isn’t a few isolated cases but an epidemic of male loneliness.
If you’re feeling lonely the first thing you can do is acknowledge it openly so that other men feel they can too and so that slowly we start to change the conversation.
With some studies saying that loneliness has the equivalent effect to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and another study saying that in the US 46% of men would describe themselves as feeling lonely “sometimes or always” it’s clear that soliving it is a matter of urgency.
