Why Men Need to Prioritize, and Celebrate, Their Friendships
Published February 8, 2022
As a psychotherapist, I meet men lost in love and recovering after love lost, attached men, and unattached men. I witness men morph into stay-at-home dads, stay-at-work dads, and juggling dads who are determined to right the wrongs of their absent dads.
So many of these diverse males share a sense of alienation from other males. I label it "malienation." While malienation is a made-up word, it's an actual inner phenomenon. It's a lesser told story buried beneath the data on men's disproportionately high suicide rates and steep declines in close friendships.
Embodied Male Bonds
Malienation isn't just about men longing for men; we make up half the population, after all. It's deeper than that. It's the estrangement from an embodied and vulnerable brotherhood. A built-in understanding of what it's like to joust with fallen tree branches, evade bullies, build forts, heave yourself atop a pileup of bodies to test the threshold between play and aggression, share secrets, and wipe away your snot but leave your tears. Malienation is mourning this love, this synergy between emotionality and physicality.
What some advantaged men have gained in family time by working from home during Covid, they've let further slip away in full-bodied, wholehearted kinships, which are such a far cry from an occasional quip on a high school group text.
Men, primarily heterosexual cisgender men in the Western world, are particularly avoidant in fostering same-sex friendships, especially those who've sunk deeper into their couches of romantic, parental, or professional commitment. While men may desire close friendships, they often loathe or feel ashamed by this want. Planting and nurturing male friendships may sound appealing but seems like an outdated privilege, unjustified with 60-hour workweeks and diaper duty.
Men need more and must power through ambivalence and trust that diversifying their portfolio of intimacy is a decent return on investment. Men must tap into boyhood wisdom to reimagine their changed, adult social worlds.
