No Love Story Can Cure Loneliness. Only Self-Exposure Can Do That

This morning I found a male influencer who creates content about manosphere bugbears like the male loneliness epidemic. Streetlighteyesdontdie unmasks the incel belief systems that freeze men in their loneliness. He insists that men need men, so a few weeks ago, he created a space where they could support one another.

One was caring for a parent with late-stage ALS. Several humans stepped forward to offer support.

All of them were women.

Not to worry. I was still at the top of the thread. Surely men would start showing up for each other soon.

Next came a trans man who was terrified of the US political landscape.

Then came a cis man who couldn’t find where he belonged.

On and on, the suffering grew. There was grief, unemployment, compassion fatigue, and divorce. Each comment received supportive replies.

And 99% of them came from women.

When I did find male commenters, they were rarely supportive. One of them called the entire thread embarrassing. He denigrated every man who had spoken about his suffering.

I took my own journey out of loneliness 15 years ago. Healing happened quite by accident while I was focusing on other kinds of growth. I began the work of self-exposure, and the more vulnerable I became, the less lonely I felt. This is how I learned the difference between loneliness and isolation. Loneliness has little to do with the number of friends and romantic partners in your life. You can be isolated without feeling lonely, and you can be lonely without being isolated.

Before I took that journey, I had always hidden from everyone around me, so I wasn’t showing up in my relationships. I certainly occupied the space of a friend, girlfriend, daughter, and sister, but I wasn’t really there. I was a ghost.

Ghosts can’t connect.

Sex couldn’t fix it. Love couldn’t fix it. Friends couldn’t fix it. Only I could address my loneliness. I had to learn how to be vulnerable and authentic. I had to connect.

I’ll tell you a secret. Before I healed, most of my friends were men. I was intensely uncomfortable around women, but the more I grew, the more female friendships I could support. These days, most of my friends are women.

I’m telling you this for a reason that’s perfectly distilled in streetlighteyes’ thread: women get vulnerable with one another. Women are more likely to tell one another the truth about their lives. They’re also more likely to show up for one another.

Women have been working overtime supporting the men and women in their lives for centuries. Men are leaning on women because when they get honest with other men, they’re often told their vulnerability is embarrassing, and that’s if they get a response at all. They seem to look to us for solutions by default — even so far as to resent us for not opening men’s abuse shelters for them.

Over the last decade, women have increasingly refused to fulfil that role for men because the weight of it is exhausting. We want men to show up for men. Maybe then they’ll show up in our lives whole and healed. The loneliness epidemic spans sex, gender, race, and disability, but only one of those demographics demands that women provide the sex and romance they think will fix them.

And it won’t. No love story can repair loneliness. Only self-exposure can do that.

Women tend to support one another. Men are less likely to do so, so cis men have gotten into the habit of looking to us when they should really be changing the way their entire sex engages with the world. Now that women have opted out of the entire debacle, men have two options:

1. Stay lonely.
2. Start connecting with each other.

Only one of those options has the power to heal.