A take on male loneliness - Looking back on decades of social struggles and successes

I made a similar post as a comment and it was suggested I give this a post of its own.

As a former lonely male and now married and very socially comfortable 35 year old trans woman I've long asked the question: Why did I struggle in my past, and what would have helped me then / what did help me the most?

I've come to the conclusion that there's two foundational root causes. Now this is based on my persoanal experience, so I'm prefacing this by saying, while this might not be applicable to everyone, I think it is widely applicable to most with this issue.

The first root cause is that if you get behind in social development during your formative years (like up to age 12-14), whether (and I assume often) due to being neurodivergent, or not, playing catchup takes a lot of work, and many of us did not get what we needed in order to catch up. We didn't get things like extracurriculars, birthday parties, family and sibling friendships, etc. in order to integrate socially.

The older you get, the less tolerance people have for the socially stunted / difference in general.

By high school age, kids are like a pack of lions, looking for the weakest who they can pick off to benefit themselves. They're literally seeking out your differences to use against you, because it becomes a bully or be bullied environment for most kids.

This makes people who were already socially stunted fall further behind, because now they develop trauma and anxiety on top of being socially poorly adopted, so now they're socially maladapted.

It's not just that they can't make friends or have positive social interactions, they're also being attacked for their differences, solely experiencing cruel, negative and traumatizing social interactions.

By the time they leave highschool, this trauma has taken root and fundamentally changed their understanding of socialization.

Their understanding is, "I am different, people can tell I am different, it's not okay that I am different, people will be looking for these differences so they can use them against me."

This changes their behavior. They're no longer comfortable even with themselves. Now they're defensive, on edge, self loathing. They lose any sense of confidence, joy and comfort in social situations.

And when the confidence does come through, they are reminded that they are still socially stunted, because it often results in the same thing; they make people uncomfortable and lack the experience to know why or how, and they can't get that experience because they're still being denied the social atmosphere they need to foster those skills. They leave the social interaction knowing it went poorly but not how or how to change that in the future. They remember saying things that were dumb, or just that the thing was poorly received and being unsure why. They ruminate on these embarassing situations but are unable to grow from them.

It becomes a cycle of:

You need social exposure to play catch up > social exposure goes poorly and causes trauma > you regress and need to unlearn the trauma, but still need social exposure to grow.

I frequently see folks come here and say they're struggling, they had a bad interaction. or many, and they ask questions, but they're asking all the wrong questions which tells me they're in need of some serious help getting back on track. They're so focused on what women want, their personal appearance, style, income, when they haven't even mastered the basics of conversation, self confidence and authenticity which are the main things for getting another person comfortable with you.

The second factor which makes this more specific and unique to male loneliness is that there is low public trust in men.

There are many sources of this but it's largely that many women (and even many men) have had bad experiences with men, either socially or physically, and due to the fact men are more often stronger / larger, they're also more afraid of the potential of physical confrontation, not just verbal, so they're more defensive than they would be with a woman who makes them uncomfortable.

Whether you like it or not, we all carry the burdens of our peers. I think people who are in the more dominant social classes of their locality are less used to this, but if you're a racial minority you're likely VERY familiar with this. Someone who looks like you does something bad, it is not good for you, even though you had nothing to do with it.

You bear the sins of your peers.

This means men are expected to have a higher burden to prove their trustworthiness before people will be comfortable with them.

This is a compounding issue, because someone who is socially stunted and / or neurodivergent will usualy display atypical behavior which makes people uncomfortable, making the threshold of trust harder to reach with the average person. If they can't read your behavior because it is not "normal," then they will take longer to trust you.

So you're struggling socially AND people don't trust you from the get go because you're a man.

At the end of the day, when we wrap it all up, the question is, what are you going to do about it?

And this is a case of "It's not your fault, but it is your responsibility" because the world isn't going to change for you, unfortunately. You can get really bitter about it and go black pill and be miserable, or you can decide that you want to take the long treck up the mountain of slow and gradual change to see if there's a light at the top.

Black pill offers you guaranteed misery, it just offers you company with that misery, but make no mistake, it is not happiness. It is a bucket full of crabs.

If you decide to work on changing, you have an uphill battle to try to understand how to interact with others while in a hostile landscape where people don't want to interact with those who are not good at socializing from the get go.

It's unfair, yes.

It's totally unfair, because it's not your fault, this was the hand you were dealt.

But we cannot ask people to be friends with others who they are uncomfortable with in order to benefit those people any more than someone can ask you to be friends with someone whose company doesn't bring you joy.

So the key to unlocking the social world is to understand others and to understand yourself.

What is, unfortunately, happening, is a lot of people who are victims of being socially left behind and searching for answers often take away the message, "I am fundamentally broken and need to fix myself" while lacking the tools to understand what they need to work on and come up with all the wrong answers.

This is compounded by the fact that there's a lot of people out there trying to explain people and social issues who do not have your best interests in mind. They want to sell you an idea of how people work, and who you have to become to engage with them that is toxic, and will backfire, and furthermore, is asking you to not be true to yourself.

They want to project the idea that people are selfish, objective driven and shallow; that others expect you to be a certain kind of man, you need to talk and act a certain way, be muscular, tall, have a square jaw and thick wrists. Or I hear them saying that skinny is in, or that you're too skinny and women love fat guys, it's really funny how many contradictions there are when people are telling you how to look.

The problem is there is no prescriptive way of being that will make you friends with all men or attractive to all girls.

Your goal need to be to learn who the genuine version of you is and how to integrate that version of you in a normative world to find your people.

And to stop idealizing being a certain type of person or being around a certain type of person who isn't you.

If you aren't the gym / fitness type and dont want to be and don't want to hang out with fitbros / girls, then you will not find success or happiness trying to be one.

If you aren't a raver, you won't find happiness there.

If you're not into bar hopping, or getting drunk at the club and partying, you don't need to learn to be that person and you're not missing out, because that isn't going to bring you joy.

Find out what brings you joy.

Find people who share that joy.

Find out how to bond with them.

You will find your happiness grow and your loneliness fades.

Teaching you social skills is beyond the scope of this post but maybe I could think of some things in the future. I know what I did to help was basically hang out in places like work break rooms and listen and just try to deconstruct how people interact so that I could mimic it with a decent understanding of how and why. You don't need to be a natural at socializing if you can logic your way through it. Everything starts with listening more than you talk.

Good luck, I hope you can find your path.