That’s what I’m talking about, though. You see male friendships as a method of coping with a more fundamental problem relating to women, and I totally disagree, and argue that healthy male friendships are social connections worth developing and maintaining in their own right, whether you are or aren’t in a committed relationship with a woman. Even your framing of why male friendships fall apart involves women. It’s the centrality of women in your worldview that is preventing you from seeing how male friendships are a critical thing to have in addressing male loneliness.
Put another way, married men need healthy male friendships, too. Putting all of that emotional labor into a single link with a woman is fragile and unreliable, and I’d argue inherently unhealthy. People need multiple social links and the resilience and support that comes from whole groups connected in a web, not just a bunch of isolated pairings.
And to be clear, I’m not saying that friendships are a replacement for romantic and sexual relationships. I’m saying that social fluency, empathy, and thoughtfulness necessary for being able to maintain deep friendships are important skillsets for maintaining romantic relationships as well. The lack of romantic partners, then, isn’t the “base issue,” but is a symptom of the internal state of the person and how that person interacts with the world.
So I maintain that your worldview switches cause and effect, at least compared to mine. And maybe I’m wrong, and I’m not trying to convince you that I’m right. I’m bringing all this up to share that the surprising part of this line of comments is that I was genuinely not expecting someone to treat romantic difficulties as a primary or fundamental cause of male loneliness. To show you that at least there are other people who view these issues very differently from you, and that there’s a broad diversity of thought on the topic.
Perhaps I’ve erred in framing it in heteronormative terms, but it seems that the type of problem being described does depend in part on sexual orientation, and the main point I’m making isn’t gendered at all. You’ve framed romantic partnership as the cornerstone of healthy social interaction, something that needs to be in place first in order for men to thrive socially. I see it as more of a capstone, the last thing to put in place after already building up something strong and robust.
People who are emotionally and socially healthy can find romantic partners that complement them well, without putting too much on that relationship or even straining it from over-burdening that link.
And so framing it as being a competition or ranking ignores how these things are complementary. Having strong outside friendships improves the romantic relationships and strengthens the long term commitment there. Expecting the romantic partner to be the everything is what makes people lonely, because we’re not built for drifting independent pairings untethered to the rest of society. We partner up and the web of relationships outside that relationship provides bracing support for the romantic link itself.
Toxic masculinity is the expectation that men can’t be certain things, including emotionally supportive, and that stifling effect on male relationships with others isolates those men. The loneliness that follows is part of it, almost an inevitable consequence of it.