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Tuesday, October 03, 2023

Being There — The Cure For The Male Loneliness Epidemic


Sunday, October 1, 2023

NY Times Op-Ed: Being There — The Cure For The Male Loneliness Epidemic

By Paul Caron

New York Times Op-Ed:  Being There, by David French (Author, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation (2020)):


Last week I read a poignant piece arguing that the male loneliness epidemic was afflicting a surprising group: American fathers. In one sense, these were men who were surrounded by love. They were typically married. They had children. Yet they still felt alone. They struggled to make friends.

The longer we march through these anxious, sad and divided times, the more I’m convinced that the bigger story, the story behind the story of our bitter divisions and furious conflicts, is our loss of belonging, our escalating loneliness. And one of the markers is the extraordinary decline of friendship.

According to an American Perspectives Survey, between 1990 and 2021, the percentage of Americans reporting that they had no close friends at all quadrupled. For men, the number had risen to 15 percent. Almost half of all Americans surveyed reported having three close friends or fewer.

The statistics raise the question: Why? ... Ever since I’ve started thinking and writing about America’s loss of belonging, I’ve been asking people what virtue they value most in a friend. I’ve asked people who are religious and secular, white-collar and blue-collar, men and women, Black and white. And it’s remarkable how often the answer boils down to the single virtue I mentioned above, of presence, of being there.

Time and again I hear versions of this answer, one that grows more salient the longer you live and the greater the headwinds you face: “A friend is there when you need him.” “A friend picks up the phone when you call at 2 a.m.” “A friend stands with you.” ...

During the early pandemic, when Zoom calls were a brand-new thing to many of us, I received an unusual invitation from a reader, who wrote that he and his old college friends all read me and would I mind joining one of their weekly Zooms? It sounded fun, so I said yes. When I joined I was struck by the obvious joy of their friendship — the inside jokes, the easy camaraderie. They were much younger than me, in their 30s, and before we signed off, they asked if I had any last thoughts.

Stay together, I said. It’s going to get hard. Your kids are young. Your careers are just starting to take off. But stay together. Be there, even when it’s hard. Even when it’s inconvenient. After I got off the call, I kicked myself for not remembering a quote by C.S. Lewis: “Friendship is unnecessary,” he wrote, “like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

That single quote says so much. Compared with the competing demands of family and work, in any given moment friendship can feel unnecessary. But as the years roll on, and countless justifiable individual absences wear down our relationships, there will come a time when we will feel their loss. But it need not be that way, especially when our simplest and highest command is merely being there.

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Other op-eds by David French:

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