Thats a really wide range too.
By 90 it is increasingly likely your spouse and close friends are mostly dead.
My emotional support network consists of two people, my long-term partner and my parent(s). My long term partner loves me conditionally (and don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that this is abnormal).
Only your parents might love you unconditionally, and they have a pretty decent head start with their mortality.
> My long term partner loves me conditionally (and don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that this is abnormal).
I haven't told anyone but a therapist the abuse I've been facing from a partner because it would break my parents heart. I've been back-stabbed now 3 times from different people I was closest with relationship or friendship-wise over the past decade (because you're right it's conditional).
I honestly don't see how informing friends and family around me that I've been physically attacked many times, forced to wipe all evidence, hunted down, de-escalated 20 bloodcurdling screaming panic attack episodes, stop 2 of their suicide attempts, lied to at every turn, was cheated on, and then abandoned (BPD & drug abuse). I should make the people around me share in how awful I feel? That won't resolve anything, just like the therapist that can't change it.
Being open about it helps each of you spot the other amidst the crowd, provide a sense of community and comraderie that it sounds like you might be lacking. Not only do you both (et al) get helped by it, the experience of helping them can often provide yet another inspiration for feeling less burdened and alone.
Maybe look up some intimate group talk opportunities. These could be informal men's groups, therapy- or church- mediated groups, or 12-step groups (like maybe CODA, in your case). These are almost always private opportunities to achieve what I mention above, where nobody outside the group is going to hear a whiff of what you share, and many of them are free or reasonably priced. And they're lurking all over the place. If you're feeling as defeated and hopeless as you sound, it could make a difference.
Sounds right, relationships require effort to stay healthy. It's not always an easy dance, as veterans of marriage will attest.
No healthy relationship should be a cage containing 2 or more martyrs. If people are accumulating resentment, it's time to seek help or dialogue or renegotiation.
That said, it's a mark of mature introspection and humility to be able to ask for help and support. It's also a mark of maturity and kindness to give help and support.
I've come to learn the only unconditional love is that between parent-child
It could also be the parent is too much of a mess(drug addict, etc) that they can't love their child.
That's not bad though. If I stop talking to my partner, I suspect at some point they wouldn't want to stay with me anymore. If I attacked my parents repeatedly, same goes for them
>Only your parents might love you unconditionally
I may be nitpicking here, but I find all love is conditional. The difference lies in how easy or difficult it is to meet those conditions.
Being loved conditional has a very thin line to coercive control, though, and this gets easily into abusive territory.
Like privacy, people can come up with nice catch-alls like “nothing to hide”, but the default is not abuse.
You can leave someone you still love, if they did not meet what you desire out of the relationship. That would still be unconditional love.
But with unconditional love, leaving someone is to heal yourself, not to punish the other person.
Or, to rephrase,
"Men grow up with an average of two emotional support providers and lose one in mid to late adulthood"
Or, men have a parent they are close with plus a spouse, and then the parent dies?
The form of this study was specific to men and very long-running, so I don't know where you'd get comparable data. Still, it would be interesting to take a stab at it. Is it 2? 1? 10?
I wouldn't even necessarily say I'm that close with most of them. It's sort of just... table stakes?
For example, I estimate that my own emotional support network quadrupled from about 1-2 before the age of 30 to 5-8 after the age of 40.
What this really seems to be saying is more like "men generally don't have emotional support networks".
They excluded everyone that had a large support network from the study.
I was sitting here wondering how anyone has only two to begin with.
Your dismissal of people with small emotional support networks angers me if I'm being honest.
They might have zero for that matter since they might have a wife and 2.5 kids and living parents and the necessary number of close friends but be emotionally closed off to all of those. Does that explain things for you?
I vented my inter-personal frustration once to a friend and he dismissed it as just normal behavior on the part of the other person. The problem then is that the cat is out of the bag. It’s just left hanging there. Wishing it never got out.
I had a woman colleague. She started venting about the work to the point that it felt like it was crossing into “emotional support”. I reciprocated a bit. Then I felt like she left me hanging a bit too much. But again: cat was out of the bag, no way to take it back now. I quit 1.5 years ago but I still feel annoyed by that.
I don’t have an emotionally rich interpersonal life so there isn’t many anecdotes.
Consider that many men (among others) don't consciously experience regular or frequent need for verbal or tactile emotional support as such, so they don't get a lot of practice culturing it as a skill, either as a giver or receiver, and don't often get to feel out which people in their network are going to be well-suited for it anyway.
Infrequent needs are hard to "work on" and often benefit from institutional support rather than ad hoc support: therapists, churches/etc, discussion groups, etc
It's sort of like changing tires, in that way. Now that manually changing a car tire is rare, because tires are more durable and crises can generally be remediated by calling some number on the cell phone you're certainly carrying, fewer and fewer people have actually done it and have a working, practiced familiarity with how to do it. But thankfully, roadside assistance and tow trucks are widely available and there's mostly no shame to using them now.
Supporting instutitonal access for emotional support would go along way towards helping the many people who just don't have an opportunity to "work on" building support networks the way you suggest.
It's particularly hard to bootstrap. You can take the plunge, attempt to open up to dozens of different guy-"friends", and repeatedly run into replies like "sucks, bro" or even "man up".
I have a hobby which exposes me regularly to men of different ages, backgrounds, financial circumstances, etc. This seems to be the case for all of them.
Or you know, they do, and get used and cast aside enough times and stop.
Even the idea repulses me.
I've known my best friend for 50 years now, literally since kindergarten. One person. I probably wouldn't talk about my top 5% of private feelings with him, not sure why. I've been married 28 years now. She doesn't understand me at all, and doesn't want to see or hear any "weakness" from me. So what the f@#$ is an emotional support network? Science fiction, I'd say.
Pets - fine; but rejecting generalized plural responses might mean rejecting cases where people genuinely had more emotional support providers.
So: we don’t know if it’s just men, we don’t know if it’s true for all ethnicities or just white men, it’s a reduction from two to one, I don’t mean to be dismissive, but someone got funding for this?
More telling, "This study utilized a unique longitudinal dataset drawn from a sample of 235 men who were originally recruited as Harvard University students between 1939 and 1942."
So, the ones that commit suicide at the highest rate. But I agree, this is not a good study and little if any meaningful information comes from it. Perhaps its failure can bolster some actual research into the issue?
This line of thinking has also nearly convinced my to go to some kind of church, but growing up with zealots as parents has pretty much nullified that. I only wish that universities took on the roll of a third place community center, offering/advertising free lectures to locals.
I really think the automobile and television are more to blame for the loneliness epidemic than we give credit for.
I'm 24, I don't go to anyone for help pretty much ever, I just follow my own goals. That's gotten me way farther than most people I know
I don't think this talk about "male emotional support networks" is actually intended to help men, it's meant to infantilize them. They'd be better off just buying into the nietzschean "support yourself" type of worldview
The most heartbreaking experience I've had was my 88 year old neighbor ringing the door, and informing me that his wife of 60 years had just died. He managed to say three words. Before the fourth, he broke down in tears.
My wife has died.
Such a simple sentence, but a sentence that had 60 years of unconditional love behind it. And an entire family. Their life. His wife was lovely. I miss her, and cannot even pretend to imagine what this was, and still is, like, for him.
Behind him, at my door, was my other neighbor. He was the first to have been told. He just stood there, silently, while I gave the husband a long hug. He never said a word, his mere presence saying everything that needed to be said.
You are not alone.
You might be offended by my comment, but you won’t as you get older.
As you get older you might look at your teens as still being a baby, twenties as still being a kid, early thirties as starting to learn a thing or two, mid-thirties with some life lessons, and forties as finally knowing some things.
everyone processes grief differently
> You develop a potentially terminal illness?
I mean, I'm probably going to die anyway. At least if you're alone you don't have to worry about the trade off between extreme medical bills and a few more months of life vs leaving family more money
> A partner betrays you?
I don't really plan on marrying so I'd just replace them with someone else
In all of these situations, you can figure out ways to get through them alone
> Once you're an adult, do you even need one in the first place?
Yes adults need it. Humans are animals like that.
>I'm 24
No offense, but you're barely an adult. Life is hard, everyone needs help at some point. This is not a new concept.
I have never wanted to externalize my emotions and the idea of talking to my friends about my feelings seems utterly bizarre.
There are a few assumptions embedded within this statement.
Firstly, you assume that 'they' have an intent other than the stated one, without explaining who 'they' may be, why 'they' would want to do this, and that 'they' have managed to be the only large group of humans to ever keep a secret successfully.
Secondly, you imply that 'being infantalized' would somehow be harmful to you, and that it might reduce your ability to care for yourself.
I suspect that as a relatively young person you've realized that you are an adult, but not what that actually means yet. It means that YOU get to help decide what being an adult means, and how other adults should be judged.
If living an isolated life brings you joy somehow, that's fine. We aren't all wired the same. However, the rest of us are starting to realize it doesn't have to be that way, and as your fellow adults we don't have to do it the same way our largely miserable, broken, and frightened grandparents did.
The point of those beliefs is simple: that's what it takes to get results in this economic system. It's toxic fuel. Whether or not it makes sense is irrelevant
In this economic system, everyone is a free agent trying to maximize their own wealth, but at the same time we have a need for support. People can simultaneously be wolves and sheep
I'm not saying that people shouldn't confide in each other. I'm saying that in this fucked up world, you need both. One side comes naturally because we don't come out of the womb scheming, the other is a hard truth that we all have to make peace with. If you want to keep your stuff, you have to fight for it. Toxic masculinity isn't some pointless evolutionary quirk, it's solving a specific problem in the circle of life
That doesn't mean relationships and support aren't helpful, for many reasons. I just don't see a need for them for emotional support.
But people are different, and we all develop unique inner mechanisms. So I don't think other men should be criticized as infantile for needing or wanting support, just as you wouldn't criticize women for the same; it's just a difference in how the individual processes their emotions.
'generalized responses, such as “family” or “friends,”..., were excluded from formal analyses.'
Sadly, I think very few men have such a relationship that would survive an extended job loss, or getting seriously ill. There's plenty of anecdata of men opening up emotionally, only to have their partner recoil in disgust.
1. Men often suck at providing emotional support, as is a common complaint from women. So are men expected to rely on men for emotional support, or extramarital female relationships?
2. Men are typically limited access to female peers when they get married. For example, my first wife told me flat out which of my friends were too attractive for me to maintain friendships with. Reiterating that men are pretty lousy at providing emotional support so women who don’t have the weight of marriage forcing them to maintain the relationship are going to feel an imbalance and stop offering the uncompensated labor means we can’t rely on other women either.
Until men are raised to give emotional support, we’re not going to be effective at or equitable about obtaining it, either.
Literally had no IRL friends since half my life, and am mostly single. Not uncommon among my coder friends, either.
Pseudo-science is dressing up a few true facts as a vehicle for opinion. It’s typically relatively harmless, except perhaps when it happens to reflect a regressive zeitgeist.
My own experience suggests all men take a lot more care on this point, but the effect of that been mostly overwhelmed by increased competition.
