{"id":1720,"date":"2026-07-31T13:41:03","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T13:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1720"},"modified":"2026-07-31T13:41:03","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T13:41:03","slug":"i-love-my-emotionally-stunted-friendships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1720","title":{"rendered":"I Love My Emotionally Stunted Friendships"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

This spring, a few weeks before the fishing season began in earnest, I went over to a buddy\u2019s house with a six-pack and a bucket full of beaten-up lures. We sat at his kitchen table, swapping out rusty hooks as we talked about new spots we wanted to try, gear we\u2019d bought over the winter, and the all-important question: When would the first striped bass arrive near us on their annual northward migration?<\/p>\n

Read more Anthony Fauci\u2019s Washington<\/a><\/p>\n

A few hours in, my friend mentioned something his wife had said before I came over: \u201cYou spend so much time with Tyler, but whenever I ask you about his personal life, you don\u2019t know anything about it!\u201d He\u2019d replied, \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of fishing to talk about!\u201d We both laughed as he recounted the story. Then we went back to replacing hooks and gabbing about striped bass. There was, in fact, a lot of fishing to talk about.<\/p>\n

These sorts of friendships between men\u2014ones that lack personal disclosure and frequent displays of emotion\u2014have gotten a bad rap in recent years. Some critics have made the case that they are a product of toxic masculinity and implicit homophobia. Others claim that such relationships can harm men\u2019s health. Another popular argument alleges that because men do not take responsibility for their own emotional needs, they end up placing additional burdens on the women in their lives, a phenomenon that has been termed \u201cmankeeping.\u201d By contrast, men who break from these trends have been commended for \u201cresisting masculinity,\u201d being \u201ccourageous,\u201d and curing themselves of the \u201cdisease\u201d of emotional reserve.<\/p>\n

The concern about male friendships is understandable. American men are less likely than women to enroll in and graduate from college. They are more likely to say that they have no close friends. They die from deaths of despair\u2014suicide, overdoses, alcoholism\u2014at higher rates than women. But an accurate diagnosis (men don\u2019t have enough<\/em> friendships) need not be packaged with a more contestable one (men have the wrong types<\/em> of friendships).<\/p>\n

To use myself as an example: I have male friends I speak with on the phone multiple times a week, male friends I meet regularly for drinks, male friends I play fantasy football with, and male friends I text about current events. I see my fishing partners almost every day during the season, amounting to hundreds of hours together every year. I feel socially fulfilled. I am among the fortunate 27 percent of men who have six or more close friends. Nearly all of my male friendships, however, might be considered unhealthy according to the standards of what is sometimes called the \u201cnew masculinity.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is possible that I am repressed, bottled up, too shriveled to realize that I would be better off if I spent more time talking about feelings. But it\u2019s also possible that my emotionally reticent male friendships are fine, actually\u2014and that the people telling men to open up if they want to avoid dysfunctional relationships are pathologizing perfectly normal forms of sociality. The issue, as I see it, is not so much that men need to embrace a different style of friendship, but that men need more opportunities to have the kinds of friendships that they generally gravitate toward in the first place.<\/p>\n

An undercurrent in much of the criticism of male friendship is that men should relate to one another in the same ways that women tend to. Sometimes this judgment is merely implied, but sometimes it\u2019s explicit. A recent New Yorker <\/em>review, for example, lauded the television series DTF St. Louis<\/em> for presenting a world in which \u201cstraight men could access, without shame, the kind of emotional and physical closeness that is generally the province of close female friendships.\u201d<\/p>\n

This impulse, says Geoffrey Greif, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland\u2019s School of Social Work who has studied male friendships, is misguided. \u201cMen\u2019s friendships don\u2019t need to look like women\u2019s friendships,\u201d he told me. Indeed, researchers in psychiatry and other fields have long observed meaningful\u2014but not necessarily troubling\u2014differences in male and female friendships and emotional lives. Greif has observed that many men and women construct their friendships in distinct ways, for example. Whereas female friendships are frequently \u201cface-to-face,\u201d prioritizing intimate communication, male friendships are more likely to be \u201cshoulder-to-shoulder,\u201d centered on shared labor or hobbies.<\/p>\n

Read more Something Weird Is Happening in Math<\/a><\/p>\n

Thomas Yarrow, an anthropology professor at Durham University, in England, offers a case study in these tendencies. After going through a divorce five years ago, Yarrow found that the advice he received\u2014go to therapy<\/em>, share your feelings with friends<\/em>, talk it out<\/em>\u2014didn\u2019t suit him. He ended up joining a group of male hobbyists who spent their weekends restoring heritage railways in the British countryside\u2014an experience he wrote about in an ethnographic paper published this year in the journal American Anthropologist<\/em>. The work was physical and solution-oriented but did not lend itself to revealing conversations with his fellow volunteers. \u201cLet\u2019s face it,\u201d one man told the group. \u201cWe\u2019re just not that into emotions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yarrow found that the men nevertheless had ways of supporting one another\u2014and him. He told me that at the railway, he didn\u2019t talk about his divorce. Instead, \u201cI did something that made me feel good about myself. And someone would grunt and make me a cup of tea.\u201d He suspected that the other men could tell that \u201csomething wasn\u2019t quite right,\u201d but they didn\u2019t say much to him about it. Yarrow appreciated this restraint: \u201cAt least in that period of my life,\u201d he told me, \u201cthat seemed to be what I needed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Activity-centered friendships can easily slide into a form of escapism, of course. Not all problems can be solved. Some can only be talked about, endured, mourned, and accepted. Friends can give much-needed emotional support during life\u2019s most difficult moments. Still, like Yarrow, I value my activity-oriented friendships because they allow me to immerse myself, however briefly, in a world where the central challenges I face are discrete and readily addressable. The problems I think about at work\u2014the crisis of American education, political dysfunction, the intrusion of technology into once-sacred spheres of everyday life\u2014do not admit quick fixes. At home, the ones I confront are likewise stimulating and meaningful, but also open-ended. Raising children is an 18-year proposition (at least), and what \u201csuccess\u201d looks like is nebulous.<\/p>\n

My hobbies and the friendships they sustain offer more manageable problems: Where are the striped bass tonight, and what do they want to eat?<\/em> They also provide a refuge from the therapeutic tendencies of American culture, with its focus on introspection and \u201cworking on yourself.\u201d At their best, such friendships can encourage a kind of public-spiritedness, a way of investing in a shared outer world, instead of seeing one\u2019s own private psychodramas as the center of social gravity.<\/p>\n

The challenge is that these types of friendships can require \u201csocial scaffolding,\u201d as Richard Reeves, the founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, noted in a 2023 essay. If male friendship thrives on shared interests, then opportunities to engage in those activities need to exist. Various trends in American life over the past generation, however, have limited those opportunities. Churches, clubs, civic institutions, and public spaces are in decline. Jobs that take the form of staring, alone, at computers rather than engaging collectively in physical labor are on the rise. Hobbies are getting more and more expensive, and screens are colonizing the time once taken up by IRL activities.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m very aware that my friendships are strong in part because I live in a place with relatively good social infrastructure, and I make enough money to maintain the leisure activities my friendships are organized around. This is the real crisis of American male friendship\u2014not that it\u2019s too emotionally stunted, but that too many men are deprived of access to the conditions that make it flourish. That flourishing can take many forms. In my case, it\u2019s sitting at a kitchen table, dropping spent hooks into an old plastic bucket, and discussing not feelings but fish.<\/p>\n

Read more A Tragedy in Iran Might Persuade Hegseth to Change Course<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My relationships with other men are centered on shared activities. 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