Emotional support across adulthood: A 60-year study of men’s social networks

Only half?<p>Thats a really wide range too.<p>By 90 it is increasingly likely your spouse and close friends are mostly dead.<p>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).<p>Only your parents might love you unconditionally, and they have a pretty decent head start with their mortality.

&quot;Emotional support networks among men shrink by 50% between the ages of 30 and 90, reflecting an average decrease from two to one emotional support providers&quot;<p>Or, to rephrase,<p>&quot;Men grow up with an average of two emotional support providers and lose one in mid to late adulthood&quot;

&gt; reflecting an average decrease from two to one<p>What this really seems to be saying is more like &quot;men generally don&#x27;t have emotional support networks&quot;.

&quot;However, generalized responses, such as “family” or “friends,” as well as mentions of non-human sources like pets, were excluded from formal analyses.&quot;<p>They excluded everyone that had a large support network from the study.

I am doing my PhD and occasionally my supervisor and I come across papers that don&#x27;t have any meaningful results&#x2F;statistics but you gotta publish somehow. Like, they conclude with &quot;We observed that the latency can be reduced by 2x-300x.&quot; I feel like the group that did this research spent a decade, and their supervisor was like, well, we gotta publish something. Choose an age interval that fits the whole data. 30-90.

As a teenager I would confide in my mom. Then sometimes she would just tell random people about it. Oh, I was not supposed to do that?<p>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.<p>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.<p>I don’t have an emotionally rich interpersonal life so there isn’t many anecdotes.

We get an emotional support network? Nobody told me.

There are programs&#x2F;orgs that try to address that. In Australia for example there&#x27;s <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mensshed.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mensshed.org&#x2F;</a> , <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dadlan.au&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dadlan.au&#x2F;</a> and probably a few others I&#x27;m not familiar with. If someone&#x27;s aware of the US equivalents this may be a good place to link them.

While the average is 1, a strikingly high number will have 0. The loneliness epidemic is a very real thing, and impacts men to a brutal degree.

I attend a church and it’s large enough that you would generally not get to know people very well. But they offer “small group” connection and about 3 years ago I connected with 3 other men. We meet every couple of weeks. We have different backgrounds but all of us have leadership responsibilities. We have step by step deepened the trust and confidence in each other. At some point over the past year each of us was in some type of ultra stressful situation - losing sleep -etc. But when we came to our group we could say as much or as little as we wished but the entire group was supportive. I could get into more detail but I know that many on HN don’t care for church. What I wanted to share is that we all have found this to be the highlight of our week - when we get together. Personally, it has been the most connected I have been with men in 20 years. So it’s not a law of nature that men won’t or can’t see their masculine support network grow. It takes time to build trust but it is worth the investment

Imagine having someone, anyone, that you felt comfortable sharing your feelings with. Amazing.<p>I&#x27;ve known my best friend for 50 years now, literally since kindergarten. One person. I probably wouldn&#x27;t talk about my top 5% of private feelings with him, not sure why. I&#x27;ve been married 28 years now. She doesn&#x27;t understand me at all, and doesn&#x27;t want to see or hear any &quot;weakness&quot; from me. So what the f@#$ is an emotional support network? Science fiction, I&#x27;d say.

&gt; However, generalized responses, such as “family” or “friends,” as well as mentions of non-human sources like pets, were excluded from formal analyses.<p>Pets - fine; but rejecting generalized plural responses might mean rejecting cases where people genuinely had more emotional support providers.

Incredible findings. Apparently your mom dies sometime when you are between age 30-90.

&gt; This research was limited by its all-male, predominantly White sample and its reliance on self-reported data. Additionally, the quality of emotional support and its impacts on well-being were not assessed.<p>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 like by 40. My relationship with even my best buds from school became empty or non existent after years of marriage and kids.

I will never stop being a regular at the local bar. I may switch to NA beers as I get older, but it is entirely important to me to engage in the rituals that predate history. Having a local bar&#x2F;pub, generally walking distance away from a residence, where people gather and know each other (even if they are not friends) seems important to me.<p>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&#x2F;advertising free lectures to locals.

That&#x27;s a wide range, isn&#x27;t it?

Men have emotional support networks?

Once you&#x27;re an adult, do you even need one in the first place?<p>I&#x27;m 24, I don&#x27;t go to anyone for help pretty much ever, I just follow my own goals. That&#x27;s gotten me way farther than most people I know<p>I don&#x27;t think this talk about &quot;male emotional support networks&quot; is actually intended to help men, it&#x27;s meant to infantilize them. They&#x27;d be better off just buying into the nietzschean &quot;support yourself&quot; type of worldview

Useless.<p>&#x27;generalized responses, such as “family” or “friends,”..., were excluded from formal analyses.&#x27;

well good thing today they often dont even aquire one in the first place. good thing they would vote ever more radical to end that torture..

Men typically rely on their wives as their sole emotional support, and then people are surprised when 70% of divorces are initiated by women.

This is AI emotional support come in

Yeah. Prob 90% of mine went away between 36-40 years old.

You guys are getting emotional support???

293 Harvard men, last sampled in 2010, with “network” sizes of 2…<p>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.<p>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.