I agree that this is something men lack, and i would add that a lack of third spaces, a tendency towards societal atomization by long work hours, individualist culture, overemphasis of the nuclear family and other consequences of late stage capitalism greatly contribute as well, but when you look at statistics about lonelyness, there is actually very little evidence that men are more likely to be lonely than people of other genders. There is a lonelyness epidemic, but it's not specifically a male one. In fact, there is a bit of evidence that women are more likely to be lonely, even if you correct for compounding variables (like longer life expectency which means there's more old women who have outlived their husband than old men who have outlived their wifes).

And i've seen articles about the "male lonelyness epidemic" that fully acknowledge all this and then without explanation go on to say that women should show men more affection because they can't do that with each other, while not adressing female lonelyness at all, or why they think that there's an obligation of women to do unpaid emotional support labor for men to fix a societal ill. On supposedly leftist news sites. You can't make this shit up.

In my opinion, the actual reason that there is this entire male lonelyness epidemic discourse is that in our society, men's feelings are valued more than the feelings of women and people of other genders.

The culture of machismo and not letting oneself to be vulnerable and open to other men has done a lot of damage to a lot of men in america, more than "tfw no gf" ever could tbh.

I've had so many friends who bottle it all up and are so emotionally broken then treat their girlfriend like an unpaid therapist.

My guy friends do the thing where they joke about being gay whenever they're not being rageb8ing assholes towards eachother and it gets old almost as fast as the rageb8ing.

And they NEVER blame porky! Porky could admit that he knew rising rents and mass firing everyone would make people lonely, and he doesn’t care he owes white men some level of an easy mode by virtue of porky also mostly being a white man.

Sauce: got to live in a walkable city for like a month and by week two I was hanging out with friends I just met and had real chemistry with this one girl. It should be that easy, but that’s made impossible employers lost their damn minds and want a purple squirrel for everything.

But of course none of them will blame porky for not hiring and keeping 25% of the country functionally unemployed! Good luck dating, let alone having friends in that situation.

I fully agree, I typed out three other replies before I realized you had already made each of my points better than I would have.

I have a really hard time pushing back on the social isolation based insults here because the most vocal people about being isolated are awful people for other reasons, and I don't want to sound like I'm just defending them.

loneliness in general is rarely if ever the sole fault of the individual, it is a social problem with social causes.

Which should be obvious with even the slightest bit of investigation! I find that a lot of people like to moralize about people who are isolated "deserving" it, despite how isolated people are unsurprisingly more likely to come from marginalized groups (wealth and disability correlate with social isolation in exactly the ways you would expect).

Yes, blaming people for being lonely is a very neoliberal take