What We Get Wrong About Loneliness

In the following excerpt, Derek talks to Laurie Santos about gender, friendship, and the loneliness crisis.

Derek Thompson: So your upcoming season revolves around several issues that we’ve covered in this show that have completely obsessed me. This includes friendship and relationships and the way that we misunderstand loneliness, the way we underrate deep conversations, the benefits of connection versus isolation. These are some of my favorite topics to talk about, whether it’s on this show or off mic, off camera, with my friends. I want to get us started on the psychology of friendship, and let’s get rolling with the big question: Do you think that men are worse than women at maintaining friendships in adulthood?

Laurie Santos: Yeah, I think there’s lots of evidence to show that they are, unfortunately. I don’t think this is something deep-seated biological about being a guy, but if you look at the data, it seems like men are doing worse in the friendship department. I think we have to couch this in what’s happening generally in the friendship department, which is that over time, everybody’s friendships are going down. If you look at American Time Use Survey data, which has been studying people for decades now, what you find is pretty much everybody across all age groups, both genders, are spending less time in person with their friends than they did a few decades ago. But that decrease is much worse for men. One of the studies found that if you look at what’s standardly considered a good level of friendship, do you have six close friends that you could talk to? Men have shown a decrease in that number by about half in the last couple of decades. So half of men have the number of friendships that they used to have a decade ago. And if you ask how many men just say they have no close friendships at all, you see around 15 percent of American guys in midlife these days are saying, “Yeah, I have no close friends at all.” And that’s a fivefold decrease in friendship then since folks have been running this American Time Use Survey. So that’s not great. It’s not bad. And it suggests that men are not doing as well when it comes to women. And I think, I’m sure we’ll talk about it, there’s probably lots of reasons why that might be the case.

Thompson: Yeah. Let’s just get into why right now. I think you’ve already put your finger on something that’s really important, which is that there is an overall structural trend-

Santos: Correct.

Thompson: Toward aloneness and away from sociality. This is something I’ve covered a lot. I’m obsessed with it. I’ve called it the Antisocial Century. But what I’m interested to really narrow in on here is why the phenomenon of the Antisocial Century has been particularly isolating for men. And just one piece of information to bring in here is, I remember a conversation I had with Richard Reeves in this podcast a few years ago where he made this interesting comment where he said women and even children are more likely to hang out in face-to-face contexts, but adult men are more likely to hang out in what he called shoulder-to-shoulder context. That is to say, they require a kind of centralizing activity to provide an excuse for hanging out. So let’s get cocktails, let’s get martinis, not as common as let’s play golf, let’s watch the game, let’s go to the bar and see some hockey, watch the NFL playoffs.

I don’t want to overgeneralize here because of course there’s so much heterogeneity within all men, all women, but this idea that women are more likely to meet up in face-to-face context that don’t need an excuse and men are more likely to need that excuse, video game, sports, might mean that it’s harder for them to come up with the reason to hang out in the first place, which multiplied over time might hurt their long-term friendships. So that’s one sort of stylized theory for what’s going on with guys, but maybe you know the research better than I do. To what extent is this interpretation even valid? And number two, what is your interpretation for why it’s harder for men to maintain friendships through adulthood?

Santos: Yeah, I think this face-to-face versus shoulder-to-shoulder thing is really important. In fact, one of the researchers that I interviewed as part of this season, Todd Rogers, who’s a professor at Harvard Kennedy School, really interested in the loneliness crisis, he actually did this cute study where he looked at this. So he went back to that American Time Use Survey, which just looks at how do people spend their time? Are they eating? Are they cooking? Are they shopping? Are they playing video games? What are they doing? And he took all those categories, and he went to men and women, and he said, “How likely would you be to invite somebody to do one of these categories with you?” And when he looks at women, it’s like most of those categories is like, “Yeah, I could invite somebody to go shopping or sit and have coffee or come over while bullshit while I’m cooking, whatever.” 

But guys, it was basically like, watch sports, do sports. It was exactly this shoulder-to-shoulder thing where you’re not sitting face-to-face and interacting. And his idea there is like, it just seems like it’s not as culturally acceptable for guys to invite other guys to do the things that these Time Use Surveys are showing that we spend a lot of time doing. And so it’s like the kind of categories that guys feel okay inviting other guys to take part in is just much smaller. And given that you’re not spending that much time watching sports and playing sports, a lot of the rest of your day is chit-chatting or hanging out or whatever, that means that there’s a lot of missed opportunities for guys to get together with other guys to hang out in the ways that we normally hang out. I think a different thing though that we have to point to is like, why is that? 

Why is it so hard for guys to get together and chat face-to-face? And I think if this gets back to a whole set of traditional gender norms that guys are fighting these days, where for better or for worse, again, not all guys, as you said, not all guys and there’s a lot of heterogeneity here, but more guys wind up growing up with these traditional male norms about independence, self-reliance, be stoic, don’t talk about your emotions. And I think that makes it hard to have the vulnerable face-to-face chit-chats that a lot of guys tend to seem to avoid, at least in some of these data sets. And so I think it’s partly what seems like it’s socially acceptable, but it’s also driven by a set of values that we have culturally. And I think it’s worth noting a set of values that we have culturally that are relatively new. 

One of the things I learned making these episodes is that if you look back in history, dude friendships were the norm for most of human history. You rewind to classical Greece, and you’ll find the tragic bromances of Achilles and Patroclus and The Iliad, where literal warrior dudes were so into their friendships that they openly wept and freaked out when Patroclus died, no Iliad spoilers there, but this is what goes on. If you rewind to the early part of our own country’s history, you’ll find our American forefathers walking hand in hand, writing effusive poetry to one another, sharing how grateful they are for one another, how much they love one another. These norms were not always there, and I think it’s worth kind of interrogating, where did they come from and what damage are they doing to prevent guys from having these close relationships?

This excerpt has been edited and condensed. 

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Laurie Santos
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman