Why do most adult males struggle to make friends in adulthood? Richard Reeves discusses the friendship recession among men and why most men have no real friends.
Richard V. Reeves is a writer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he directs the Future of the Middle-Class Initiative and co-directs the Center on Children and Families. Publications he writes for include The Guardian, the New York Times, The Atlantic, National Affairs, and The Wall Street Journal.
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“We’re seeing a decline in friendships generally, but it’s much more acute for men, so in the US, 15% of men under the age of 30 say they don’t have a single close friend that’s up from 3% in 1990 and so almost one in seven men um you’re seeing declining number of men saying how much time they spend with friends uh shrinking social networks.”
In adulthood, men struggle more with making and maintaining friendships than women. According to Reeves, this is mostly because, for a long time, social ties and making friends for adult couples were mostly a duty left for women. For a long time, most couple friendships were maintained by the women in the circles of friendship among couples.
In the modern day, little has changed. Most women in relationships are the ones who make plans for meetups with other couples who are friends. When a man is single, he may find it hard to go out and make friendships beyond bar meetups for a game, BBQ, and beer with other men as they talk about politics and sports. For this reason, most men are lonely because they do not have friends they can talk to about intimate emotional stuff.
If you are a man interested in making real friends while supporting fellow men through different stages of life, mensgroup.com is an online men-only support forum where men come together to talk about everyday issues in men’s lives even as they foster lifelong, meaningful friendships.
