I Love My Emotionally Stunted Friendships
· The Atlantic
This spring, a few weeks before the fishing season began in earnest, I went over to a buddy’s 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’d bought over the winter, and the all-important question: When would the first striped bass arrive near us on their annual northward migration?
A few hours in, my friend mentioned something his wife had said before I came over: “You spend so much time with Tyler, but whenever I ask you about his personal life, you don’t know anything about it!” He’d replied, “There’s a lot of fishing to talk about!” 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.
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These sorts of friendships between men—ones that lack personal disclosure and frequent displays of emotion—have 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’s 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 “mankeeping.” By contrast, men who break from these trends have been commended for “resisting masculinity,” being “courageous,” and curing themselves of the “disease” of emotional reserve.
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—suicide, overdoses, alcoholism—at higher rates than women. But an accurate diagnosis (men don’t have enough friendships) need not be packaged with a more contestable one (men have the wrong types of friendships).
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 “new masculinity.”
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’s also possible that my emotionally reticent male friendships are fine, actually—and 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.
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’s explicit. A recent New Yorker review, for example, lauded the television series DTF St. Louis for presenting a world in which “straight men could access, without shame, the kind of emotional and physical closeness that is generally the province of close female friendships.”
This impulse, says Geoffrey Greif, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland’s School of Social Work who has studied male friendships, is misguided. “Men’s friendships don’t need to look like women’s friendships,” he told me. Indeed, researchers in psychiatry and other fields have long observed meaningful—but not necessarily troubling—differences 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 “face-to-face,” prioritizing intimate communication, male friendships are more likely to be “shoulder-to-shoulder,” centered on shared labor or hobbies.
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—go to therapy, share your feelings with friends, talk it out—didn’t suit him. He ended up joining a group of male hobbyists who spent their weekends restoring heritage railways in the British countryside—an experience he wrote about in an ethnographic paper published this year in the journal American Anthropologist. The work was physical and solution-oriented but did not lend itself to revealing conversations with his fellow volunteers. “Let’s face it,” one man told the group. “We’re just not that into emotions.”
Yarrow found that the men nevertheless had ways of supporting one another—and him. He told me that at the railway, he didn’t talk about his divorce. Instead, “I did something that made me feel good about myself. And someone would grunt and make me a cup of tea.” He suspected that the other men could tell that “something wasn’t quite right,” but they didn’t say much to him about it. Yarrow appreciated this restraint: “At least in that period of my life,” he told me, “that seemed to be what I needed.”
[Read: It’s your friends who break your heart]
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’s 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—the crisis of American education, political dysfunction, the intrusion of technology into once-sacred spheres of everyday life—do 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 “success” looks like is nebulous.
My hobbies and the friendships they sustain offer more manageable problems: Where are the striped bass tonight, and what do they want to eat? They also provide a refuge from the therapeutic tendencies of American culture, with its focus on introspection and “working on yourself.” 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’s own private psychodramas as the center of social gravity.
The challenge is that these types of friendships can require “social scaffolding,” 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.
I’m 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—not that it’s 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’s sitting at a kitchen table, dropping spent hooks into an old plastic bucket, and discussing not feelings but fish.