multiple things can be true and also society is keeping men lonely.

01 Jun, 2025

Get in the car, losers, we're have an old school blog conversation. I'm going to sidestep my usual writing styling to be more frank. We'll see if that helps my points be more clear for an otherwise impossible topic to write about succinctly. 2 posts, in quick succession, appeared in the Bear recent feed which is my favorite place to hang out and read about all the sordid details of small web bloggers.

• This was the first: From Nanda, The Male Loneliness Epidemic: A Side Effect of Female Wholeness
• This was the second: From Nick, Lonely Men and Lazy Takes

I found both posts super interesting to read and both make valid points. I wanted to add thoughts. This topic - male loneliness and socialization - is complicated so it will not be possible to explore everything about it, naturally, and I apologies if I get reductive.

And for the record, I am a cis-het, middled-aged white disabled man so let that color your thoughts of what I say as you see fit.

From Nanda

Real women in 2025 have their own money, their own peace, and their own direction. We’ve built lives that we actually want to wake up to, without needing a man to complete us. We’ve chosen solitude, peace, and stability over sharing space with mediocre energy that only drains and diminishes.

The result: A lot of "men" are mad about it.

Not all of them, of course. But the ones crying on the internet because women no longer want to be housewives, mommies, or emotional mules for grown boys who never learned how to self-regulate? Those men? Yeah, they’re loud and embarrassing. And frankly, they’re the symptom of a society that taught men entitlement instead of emotional intelligence.

I strongly agree with this. The core position for the "Male Loneliness Epidemic" seems to be that men are being "left behind" because feminism or some other conservative conception of loss of traditional values. It 100% does stem from a sense of entitlement. Men are socialized to believe they deserve companionship at best, and at worst a source of validation and sexual fulfillment without having to do much more than exist and hold down a job.

A little personal angst to add to the pyre

I was an incredibly angry teen and was confused why women weren't into me when i was such a nice guy. You know, I would, for example, drive the girl I was attracted to home after she got drunk at a party and needed a safe ride home. She may not have been into me but if I continued paying my good guy tokens, eventually she'd fall in love, yeah?

No. No no, not how that works. And it was, in large part, my expectations that relationships were transaction such that X number of coins put into the machine means I was owed something more than the friendship we both offered¹. I absolutely didn't have the emotional intelligence to really grok what it meant to be a real partner, not that anyone really did in their teens and early 20s.

But it still made me very, deeply angry that I was getting what I oughta. So I agree with Nanda in that so much of this is rooted in entitlement. I didn't want to figure out what it meant to be a good, desirable partner, and didn't have the tools to really do that. What has changed is that women are no longer settling for what society has said they should settle for. Namely, men doing the minimum like holding down a job and.. maybe that's about it. Lucky women would get men that actually take out the trash and ,maybe gold the laundry occasionally.

It's Society

Society teaches men that all we are is breadwinners and are otherwise should just be taken care off. It's gotten so much worse in the last decade² with the disingenuous shift to "traditional values,": which is really "strictly enforced gender roles" as defined by the patriarchal "good old days.". You know, days when women couldn't have their own bank accounts or sue for divorce³. Now that women CAN do such wildly feminist things like choose to have a job, choose to have kids, choose to have a bank account they expect more from potential partners.

And when they find those potential partners lacking, they build their own lives. As they are allowed to. People, not just women, should be whole people before getting into a relationship, ideally, because you can be a better partner when you, yourself, are a functioning, emotionally intelligent adult.

From Nick

We’re not lonely because women evolved. We’re lonely because a lot of us, queer, trans, neurodivergent men especially, were taught not to ask for help, not to show softness, not to cry or confide or lean on anyone. We were never taught where to place our anger. We’ve grown up with emotional suppression baked into us, watching peer closeness rot into competition, or worse, silence.

And when we do try to talk about it? Takes like these get platformed. Takes that aren’t about fixing it, but blaming men for their own isolation. And sure, some men absolutely need to unlearn toxic behavior and misogyny. But others are quietly dying under the weight of isolation and loneliness.

Yes. 100 percent. Men are not taught nor expected to express or even acknowledge emotion. It's a real problem that prevents many men from being emotionally healthy people.

I do want to not that both ideas were platformed essentially equally. Both posted to a Bear, showed up in the discover feed, which is how I found them. I know the sentiment is more "generally" platformed or that's the perception at least. One of my favorite stats from as study of college classroom discussion showed that men spoke 1.6 times more than women ⁴ and that when the contribution grew closer to 1:1, men thought the women were speaking unequally.

This is part of that socialization/society problem. The expectation men have is that they get to speak more so when someone else gets attention, regardless of actually view counts or text length or what have you, it feels like that someone else is getting an undue amount of attention.

So here's the thing - it 100% is a problem but the source is coming from inside the house. Society is failing men⁵.

My take?

Multiple things can be true and that does not make either of them invalid. And also these things are fuuuuucking complicated.

• Women can have higher standards because they have the actually ability to create their own lives. They deserve better than what they used to have to settle for.
• Men are absolutely conditioned not to ask for help, to internalize emotion, that the only acceptable expression is some sort of righteous anger.

Few men are flogged, publicly or otherwise,, for having high standards for their partners. Whereas women get demonized (at best) or attacked (literally) or killed for stepping out of line. These two results are not the same and we have to recognize that difference. Society is the problem, not women. Loneliness is a symptom of the larger problem, that being that men aren't taught how to be whole people or how to process emotions or how to express them and a host of other things.

What absolutely fucking sucks here is that no one is going to help men but men. Men who look like me are the ones in charge and it is our on to fix the things. in the mean time, people are entitled to live how they choose and we have to be responsible for our own self-fulfillment and growth.

So.. I'm sure I said everything just fine and there will be no controversy. So, good day! hides under the bed

Footnotes

#society