Men's Liberation

As a married cis man moving towards his 40s, I can only confirm from my perspective that the male-to-male friendship experience seems broken.

First of all, in college I learned about the performative nature of gender and that gave me the tools I needed to push back against social pressure. I wear what's comfortable, I try to be considate towards others, I talk about emotions, and I do what sounds fun without a care about whether it makes me "feminine" or "gay". I feel that pushing against gender performance expectations has made me a better and fulfilled person.

But male-male friendships are still really hard, and I don't get it. I've lost all of mine, for various reasons. Some of us got busy with careers, families, or whatever other reason. I've reached out now, multiple times, over the last few years, to old male friends and coworkers that I worked with for 5+ years.

The conversation starts with a list of accomplishments. I congratulate them, so glad they're doing well. We're both pretty happy in careers too.

I ask how they're doing, what do they do for fun, you still with that same girl? Fine. Same old. Uh huh.

I suggest that maybe we should do something sometime. Play disc golf. Play some games. Hang out. Meet somewhere. Bring your kids if you want, I'd love to meet them.....and at this point they get distant and eventually ghost me.

After a few instances of this, I started to wonder if there's something wrong with me. Maybe they didn't like me. Maybe I said something wrong. But there was one other instance. A woman I worked with for like 9 months. I called her once to ask for a job reference. And we ended up talking for an hour about our lives, our SOs, life goals etc. Before I could ask, she ended up suggesting that hang out and bring our SOs.

The only male friends I have right now are the male SOs of female friends or my wife's girl friends.

Some of the most fulfilling friend groups we've had since were groups with LGBT and NB folks. And I think that's because, even though gender performance is absolutely an important thing in these groups, there's less pressure for us, a cis couple, to "perform" in a certain way. Our conversations are more real and liberated. It's less anxious and competitive. But at the same time, those friendships eventually end because I don't they can really connect with us - like, we're still outsiders and so there's a bit of a block. I understand, but it sucks.

Because we try to connect with cis men, or even couples, in our area, we either get standoffishness or competitions. Like, we're getting evaluated for our performance of gender / society / life expectations. My wife and I have careers, no kids, and we're fine, but we're also trying to explore who we are outside that. And new cis friendships at our age seems to be less about connecting and doing fun things and more about bragging about accomplishments or complaining about the lack of them over coffee.

And its so hard to find any cis men that are just fucking chill and maybe tired of all the anxiety and social pressure around masculinity and just willing to be a person rather than a "man".

I believe that's why the suicide rate in men is so much higher. I recently saw that men are four times more likely to commit suicide than women.

That's accurate, but doesn't convey they entire picture accurately.

Women attempt suicide at a significantly higher rate than men. The ways women tend to attempt suicide are the ways that are least likely to leave a significant mess; overdosing, hanging, drowning, cutting wrists in a bathtub, etc. Men that attempt suicide are more likely to use methods with a high probability of success, like jumping or firearms. At one time, women's incomplete attempts were deemed to be a "cry for help" rather sincere suicide attempts, but this is not correct.

I wonder if this is one of the reasons why MTF vastly outnumber FTM transitions

It's very interesting to have the view of a women that has transitioned to a men on the feeling side of things. I wonder how the transition is actually affecting his current relationship.

My experience as a man does look like what he talks about however, it's not as crazy as he is saying. His depiction of manhood feels almost satire to me. Almost all of my interaction with men, I feel safe enough to talk about my problems, my feelings and my opinions on things, both personal or not.

Although, I am me and I do not represent all other men, It's not untrue that men are lead to believe that they must be the one to shut up and provide for their community/family. Shut up and die for your family, you country. Shut up and do what you have to do. If you really do that, I think you just end up lonely, sad and probably really suicidal.

The comments at the bottom of the article though... I really hate people sometimes.

well, women also get more attention therefor they are less lonely. Just look at dating apps: women get flooded with likes and messages, but men... good luck getting a like and if you get one, good luck getting a conversation where you are not the only one putting some effort.

I'm mtf, being a woman made my life much much easier