Like, why is it so widespread, what causes it, what solutions are available, etc. I don’t really know how to ask this question so I hope I’m making sense
Like, why is it so widespread, what causes it, what solutions are available, etc. I don’t really know how to ask this question so I hope I’m making sense
Fun fact. At no point in my comments you’ll see that I referred to “male friends” or “female friends”.
Plenty of men had female friends that got away because they fell in love with some other man/woman. And I don’t think toxic masculinity would have any impact in a friendship between a woman and a non-toxic man. And those relationships also break apart anyway.
It makes no difference the gender of the friends in my theory. And if course I don’t think that woman (or men) are, as a gender, the cause of male loneliness, or that women are to blame for anything, much less for also wanting to have a romantic relationship.
The only gendered part of the issue, and the reason on why we call it “male loneliness” is that women seems to have an easier time achieving romantic relationships when they want to. While men tend to have a much harder time and their loneliness tends to be involuntary more often than not. (Again not that women, as a gender, is to blame for this situation).
The thing is that you can be the best friend in the world, a partner will always come first for the other person. It’s not a matter of lack of empathy or any other"toxic male behavior" here. It’s just people having different priorities in life. And a problem with some people being no one’s priority. And I don’t think there’s nothing wrong with feeling bad about not being anyone number one priority in life, it’s just a plain sad fact that’s normal to make people sad about it.
I’m not convinced that my theory is true. As this is an incredibly complex topic. I just think that the whole “male toxicity is to blame” is just an easy scape goat or political dogma. “Toxic masculinity and sexism is bad so it must be the cause of every gendered issue in society”, and then constructing the argument needed for that statement to maintain true. And while sexism it’s obviously bad, it does not need to be the source of any and all problems. Some problems, I think, have other sources.
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.