Why men need more friends—for their own wellbeing and their partner’s

Published on Psychology Today

“According to studies, many men say they have no close friendships. And three in four report receiving all their emotional support from their wife or girlfriend. Often the moment they come home from work.” Sounds like the opening line to one of my blog posts, but it is actually the opening of 2021 Saturday Night Live sketch called “Man Park.” The sketch features women taking their boyfriends or husbands to a park where they can make friends with other men, and so that they ultimately have a social outlet outside of their girlfriends and wives. The joke is that a man park shares similar features to a dog park, but for adult men to network and make friends. On the one hand, it’s funny, and although it might be a little degrading to men (“It’s like a dog park, but for guys in relationships!”), it receives laughs from both my male and female friends. But on the other, it hints at some serious issues about the state of male relationships in our society (“It’s not their fault masculinity makes intimacy so hard”).

SNL makes an important point with this skit that is now being echoed by research. And according to this research, men do indeed experience a friendship drought when compared to women, and it is far from a laughing matter.

First, loneliness is not uncommon—for men and for women. And in fact, in 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called loneliness a public health epidemic. Although it is not clear from research exactly how many people experience extreme loneliness and for how long (see Luhmann et al., 2023), several studies have indeed shown that loneliness is a serious health concern. In an analysis of 70 studies on over 3 million participants, researchers reported that individuals who are lonely or socially isolated are at a 26% to 32% increased risk of premature death when compared to individuals who do not feel lonely or isolated (Holt-Lunstad, et al., 2015). This means that obesity and smoking, which get constant media attention, lead to the very same risk for premature death as loneliness. So there is definitely a reason to be concerned.

But when it comes to loneliness, there is also a reason to be more concerned about men than women. One recent study that analyzed the frequency of loneliness from over 46,000 adults living across 237 countries, islands, and territories reported that men experience more loneliness than do women, particularly in Western countries like the US that generally value individual autonomy (Barreto et al., 2021). Further, recent research suggests that men have significantly fewer friendships than do women, they are less likely to use other men as a source of social support, their social networks are smaller and more likely to include their spouse and family members (instead of friends), and when couples split up, men are more likely to lose more of their social network than are women (Ferrara & Vergara, 2024).

On top of that, there are recent reports that the male friendship drought has been negatively affecting female partners, so much so that the term “mankeeping” was recently coined by Stanford researchers. Mankeeping refers to the “resulting labor that women take on in order to shore up losses in men’s social networks and reduce the burden of men’s isolation on families, the heterosexual bond, and on men themselves” (Ferrera & Vergara, 2024). Mankeeping, as researchers define it, could include acting as your male partner’s sole confidant, frequently checking in on your partner’s emotional state, or arranging for social interactions on your partner’s behalf, which seems to be exactly what SNL had in mind when the writers penned “Man Park.”

Why is this stressful for women? Research on this topic is fairly new, but there is already a significant amount of research on emotional labor, or the activities that make a relationship or family work, and how it disproportionately gets assigned to women. This can include listening to a family member’s problems, organizing a child’s birthday party, or keeping track of a family’s social calendar. Unfortunately, societal norms, at least in the US, tends to classify this type of “work” as predominantly female, which means women end up doing more of it. However, there is evidence that inequality in emotional labor can have negative effects on women’s physical and mental health, so the same might ultimately be true for mankeeping (Ferrara & Vergara, 2024).

The bottom line is we all need social support, and while women report that they get most of their social support from their friends, men are more likely to get it from their spouse—and for some men, from only their spouse. This puts an undue burden on women in relationships to take on their partner’s emotional ups and downs. So even though SNL’s “Man Park” is a joke, we really need to pay more attention to the health and wellbeing of men’s social relationships, or lack thereof. The reality is, we all need more than one person in our lives who can provide us with love and support. Indeed, we all get by with a little help from our friends, so let’s all get out there and make some new ones.

Photograph by: pxhere/public domain

References

Barreto, M., Victor, C., Hammond, C., Eccles, A., Richins, M. T., & Qualter, P. (2021). Loneliness around the world: Age, gender, and cultural differences in loneliness. Personality and individual differences, 169, 110066.

Ferrara, A. P., & Vergara, D. P. (2024). Theorizing mankeeping: The male friendship recession and women’s associated labor as a structural component of gender inequality. Psychology of Men & Masculinities, 25(4), 391.

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: a meta-analytic review. Perspectives on psychological science, 10(2), 227-237.

Luhmann, M., Buecker, S., & Rüsberg, M. (2023). Loneliness across time and space. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2(1), 9-23.