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Comment on what are the grievances with the "male loneliness epidemic"?

daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

I’m a very fluid person. So I think I have great inside in the differences between genders and sexualities in loneliness.

A lot of it have to do with “be approached”.

As a girl (pretty girl I may add) presenting person a get approached a lot, a lot of people I don’t know want to talk with me. It’s ridiculously easy to make new acquaintances and friends. Everyone wants to talk and be around you.

As a man presenting gay I also get approached a lot when I’m in “gay spaces”. Again it’s impossible to be alone unless I voluntarily would want to.

Yes, these two have the handicap that a lot of approaches are “sex related” of by people wanting sex. But not all of them, among so much approaches there’s always some that doesn’t just want sex.

Then, as a male presenting person in not gay spaces and even more so in straight spaces. I don’t get approached, never, at all. Zero people talk to me just because they want to be near me. If I want to meet somebody I always have to be the one initiating the approach.

In my experience this is the root of the issue. And the experience that most people complaining about “male loneliness” are talking about.

There are other type of loneliness. As a Queer I’m quite familiar with loneliness related to being different, and people literally hating you for what you are, or not accepting you. But that’s a different thing. The male loneliness is that feeling of having the burden of all your relationships in your shoulders, knowing that if you don’t go after people people won’t ever go after you. And that can be devastating with time. Because your self worth get tanked, specially if you are introvert and have a hard time approaching people.

I suppose it won’t end until it get normalized to approach cis men the same way it’s normalized in the other situations I talked about. The reason of why people don’t approach cis men as easy can be discussed, I get that there’s a fear/danger factor in approaching a cis male, specially after being approached by so many menacing people in your life. But still, I do think the root of the issue is that.

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TheSambassador@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

The male loneliness is that feeling of having the burden of all your relationships in your shoulders, knowing that if you don’t go after people people won’t ever go after you. And that can be devastating with time.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it put so succinctly. Maybe this isn’t everything, but it is the root of the feeling for me. I’m constantly reaching out and checking in and it’s more rare for the reverse to happen (though it’s really important to notice when it does, which is something I’m trying to do more now).

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JustARaccoon@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
After reading most of these comments I’ll have to say this comment resonated the most with me. It’s exhausting to always be the one who needs to put in effort to talk to new people, and then you need to maintain it pretty much one sidedly as well, you end up just giving up on it and looking more for good friends to rely on than romantic things.

I’ve heard from female friends that there are women also dealing with this so it’s not a uniquely male thing, but social norms have sadly made it so and it really gets to you as a guy when you’re not also being pursued by people. I’ve seen some nice clips tangential to this asking women when was the last time they bought flowers for a guy and some of them couldn’t think of an instance, it’s rough out there, and unless you’re at the top of your game it’s a huge struggle, and with the economy as it is a lot of people people rightfully are, but as you say women are usually better trained to work together on this stuff, whereas guys largely aren’t and suffer alone as a consequence. I’m lucky to have some good male and female friends I can open up to, but I definitely feel like the exception on that.

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zeropointone@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

I suppose it won’t end until it get normalized to approach cis men the same way it’s normalized in the other situations I talked about.

Never going to happen because of the function of cis men. Not only in society, not only in civilization but for mankind as a whole. It’s about our very human nature.

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- squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  No, that’s not it. You are seeing your experience (and the experience of people around you, all living in the same society at the same time) and extrapolate that to the “very human nature”.
  
  Just go back 50 years and you have all these structures making it easier for men to keep contact. You had fraternities, churches, unions, clubs, associations and so on, all designed to pick up young men, give them structure, give them contacts and help them being part of something bigger. All that failed some time in the 70s or 80s with the individualism movement that valued individualism over every kind of group.
  
  If you go back even further, social structures were even stronger, with even things like arranged marriage being commonplace in many societies. In societies where that was common, there was no expectation at all that a young cis man would have to approach women at all.
  
  Don’t extrapolate your experience to all of human-kind. It is almost never correct.
  
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  - zeropointone@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    Just go back 50 years and you have all these structures making it easier for men to keep contact.
    
    Not men in general, only certain men (See survivorship bias).
    
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    squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Certain = most. And you might have misunderstood what survivorship bias means.
    
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- Madzielle@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Human nature is evolutionary.
  
  Never say never.
  
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  - zeropointone@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Humans will go extinct before they can become something better.
    
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    TheSambassador@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Hey look at this guy! He’s met every human that’s ever existed, ignored all the times that humans have been good and caring, and has decided that we’re completely cooked!
    
    But for real, I get that misanthropes are “in” right now, but if you look for the helpers, you will generally find them. Most people in the world are not out to cause pain - actively malicious people are rare. We just focus a shit ton of our attention on them.
    
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