RWL #298
of men and boys, and male friendship (connection)
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! While I’ve made a photo from my week part of the RWL for years now, I don’t usually share a photo that has me in it. My wife snapped the photo above the other day when I had just come down to the kitchen in the morning (bed head and all). I had just sat down to put on my shoes so I could get ready to work out and the animals both came over to greet me. Despite having lived together for almost 10 years, the cat still cannot stand the dog, so this arrangement with the two of them so close was rather surprising. I’m starting this week’s letter talking about the photo rather than just making it a side note because looking at this photo made me think more about the importance of connection, one of the 3C’s of meaning that I have been talking about -
Meaning = Connection x Contribution x Competence
Pets are a lovely source of meaning. They fulfill all three components in different ways, but especially connection. Even our cat is more of a “dog-cat” - he comes to greet us when we come home, alongside the actual dog, whom he then usually hisses and bats at. Both of these guys are quite old - as I said, they’ve been together 10 years, but they were both rescues. We adopted the dog from one of my students who was going through a divorce when the dog was about 4, she is now about 13; the cat was found in a park and brought to a shelter, and was somewhere between 3 and 5 when we took him home, so we think he is about 18 now. Given their respective ages, we know their journey with us won’t be much longer, and we will miss them when they go on, but they still make us laugh and smile and they are good company, at least when the cat is not chasing the dog, or when the dog is not dumpster-diving in the trash and littering the living room with egg shells and wrappers. And of course, they always make us feel special when they come to greet us.
This past week I finished reading a new book by Richard Reeves, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, called Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About It. This is a wide-ranging discussion, but there are some bad facts. Here are a couple:
1) Some 60% of bachelor's degrees are now granted to women, which means of course that men are earning only 40% of bachelor’s degrees. Professional degrees (MD, JD, etc) are at parity, but will soon also tilt toward women if trends continue. I checked UNH’s stats and we are consistent with the national average - 56% female, 44% male. My major is 80-90% female, so I am used to a classroom full of young women - I just didn’t realize that the whole university tilted toward young women. The ratio used to be far more men than women, so one could argue we are just fixing a historical wrong, but that doesn’t change the fact that our young men today are not getting educated. Parity should be the goal, because as women are more economically independent and no longer need the institution of marriage for economic support, they want a partner who is their equal. Uneducated men face stigma in the marriage market, and there is evidence that because they have poor marriage market prospects, they are leaving the labor market.
2) As I just stated, men’s workforce participation rate has been declining - they are leaving the labor market during prime working ages. In 1950, some 87% of working-age men were in the workforce, either currently employed or looking for a job. In August of 2022 that number has collapsed to 62%. The good news is women’s participation in the labor force has grown from 33% to 57% during that same time.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=V7Cc
I think the growth of women’s participation is all for the good. The labor force participation rate is not a zero-sum game - we can have high levels for both sexes. The problem with a low male labor force participation rate is unemployed men tend to be anti-social. They aren’t out of the labor force to help with childcare or volunteering in the community; according to time-use data, they spend a lot of time watching TV and not contributing. From this Federal Reserve research report:
Data from the 2019 American Time Use Survey (ATUS) show that men without employment spend just 49 minutes more each day than full-time employed men on "household activities," and they spend even less time than full-time employed men on "caring for household members." By far the largest difference in time use between working and nonworking men is the amount of time spent on "leisure and sports." In fact, nonworking males spend over 3.6 more hours per day on these activities than men with full-time employment.
Men who aren’t employed don’t feel like they are contributing, see that they are not well-regarded by women, and they become disconnected as they lose their sense of meaning (meaning = 3Cs!). What we know from history is disconnected men without meaning are angry, dangerous men. Large numbers of disconnected men make a society dangerous.
3) Finally, a quote from Reeves: “Economically independent women can now flourish whether they are wives or not. Wifeless men, by contrast, are often a mess. Compared to married men, their health is worse, their employment rates are lower, and their social networks are weaker. Drug-related deaths among never-married men more than doubled in a decade from 2010… One of the great revelations of feminism may turn out to be that men need women more than women need men. Wives were economically dependent on their husbands, but men were emotionally dependent on their wives.” (p. 37)
Reeves is concerned about men in general. He addresses developmental, educational, social, and economic trends, and ultimately makes some policy recommendations for what we might do to help men, especially lower SES men who are suffering the most. Just because men have been dominant in history does not mean we can ignore the fact that many men are struggling today. We can care about our girls and our boys.
For the links this week, I have focused on the issue of connection, particularly for mature men - men who have passed the 18-29 age band referred to as “emerging adulthood”. Something fundamental changes in men’s relationships in their 30s and tends to get progressively worse. We (us men) don’t tend to find new, meaningful male friends. Family is a profound source of meaning, but I think it is fundamentally different from friendship. Having a friend network, I have found, is a source of resilience, especially when life events happen within the family. It is not an either/or, but rather a complementary relationship. The world has changed since the 50’s. Men need to “pull their socks up” and do some work - that is the broad theme from the articles below.
So with that, willing good for all of you, I present you with the links!
Read
What: Richard Reeves, Of Boys and Men
Why: As discussed above. If you are a man, or care about a man, or care about a future man (i.e., a boy), you might want to read this book. It’s an easy read, but packed with data and has interesting policy suggestions.
**
What: AEI, The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss
Why: Very interesting survey results. Applies to both men and women. From the article, this is all about connection:
There are massive differences in the degree to which men and women rely on friends for emotional support and are willing to share their personal feelings. Nearly half of women (48 percent) and less than one-third of men (30 percent) say they have had a private conversation with a friend during which they shared their personal feelings in the past week.
Men are also far less likely than women are to have received emotional support from a friend. Four in 10 (41 percent) women report having received emotional support from a friend within the past week, compared to 21 percent of men.
Finally, compared to men, women more regularly tell their friends they love them. About half (49 percent) of women say they have told a friend they loved them within the past week. Only one-quarter (25 percent) of men say they have done this.
**
What: The Guardian, When it comes to banter, men are in their element. But that is no foundation for lasting friendship
Why: This short article addresses why men have a shrinking circle of friends as they pass from their twenties into full adulthood. This paragraph resonated with me:
It’s pretty simple, really: women put more effort into maintaining their friendships, while men are apt to let their social circle wilt and co-opt their partner’s instead. As the American standup John Mulaney has quipped: “Men don’t have friends. They have wives whose friends have husbands.” Men treat the women in their lives like their own personal HR department. If guys were honest, they’d introduce their better half at weddings with, “This is Claudia, my wife and director of people operations at Geoff Limited.”
His prescription for fixing the lack of male friendship is more effort by men.
**
Watch
What: Vice, How To Make Friends As A Grown-Ass Man (15 min)
Why: This is a very funny, in an uncomfortably awkward sort of way, video story of a reporter setting out to try to make friends in a new city. It really highlights how difficult it is for men to make new friends as they get older. He demonstrates the “shoulder to shoulder” aspect of male friendship (literally - he joins a rugby team in an effort to make friends), and the “banter” discussed in the Guardian article above.
**
What: A Guy Friendship In 86 Seconds (86 seconds, like it says)
Why: This is cute and short, and also gets at some of the issues of male intimacy.
**
Listen
What: The Michael Shermer Show, Richard Reeves — Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It (137 min)
Why: Great interview with Richard Reeves. Skip forward about 4 minutes if you listen - they do a bunch of ads at the beginning. It’s a long conversation, but very enlightening.
**
What: The Art of Manliness Podcast, What’s Causing the Male Friendship Recession? (41 min)
https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/relationships/male-friendship-recession/
Why: An interview with the author of the AEI article The State of American Friendship cited above. In the interview, they focus on the results around men. Some notes:
Friendships matter throughout the lifespan
Men rely on their wives more than women rely on their husbands for emotional support - this puts pressure on the wife to be all things to her husband
The institutions that supported male friendship - churches, employers, etc. - need to pay attention to supporting male friendship
**
What: Life Kit, How Men Can Have Better Friendships (22 min)
Why: It comes down to being willing to do more emotional labor. Asking more questions, actually paying attention to the answers, and following up later.
**
What: Honest Chaos, Sailing in Company (1 minute)
Why: This is a poem I wrote a while back as I thought about the nature of the friends in my life. The subject of this poem is someone whom I still consider a close friend - I even texted him while I was writing this newsletter - although he lives far away and I haven’t seen him in several years. We would not have been friends had the military not randomly tossed us together. We are very different people and our circles only intersected because we happened to be at a training at the same time for an extended period. As it happens in such environments, you decide to be friends, even if you wouldn’t have chosen each other at the outset. And then you keep deciding to be friends. And that is how it works.
(the written version is here)
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
See you next week!
Mark
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picaso