It was Gavin Rossdale of the British rock band Bush who somewhat presciently penned the lyrics “I’m never alone, I’m alone all the time” as the start of the second verse of their hit song Glycerine (the fourth single from Bush’s multi-platinum 1994 debut album, Sixteen Stone), and boy let me tell you he was on to something. That line could easily be adopted as the official motto of modern-day fatherhood.

Ladies, if you have a lad in your life, please check on him because I guarantee he’s on the struggle bus and he doesn’t know how to get off. Honestly, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody, after all it’s not like I’m the one who coined the term “the male loneliness epidemic”.

Loneliness, however that may be tracked, has risen exponentially amongst everyone in recent years, partially due to global health crises keeping us home and isolated, partially due to the internet, partially due to how media is currently produced and consumed – with content algorithmically designed and presented to intentionally separate and silo consumers, and with on demand and streaming shows allowing individuals to watch whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want, on however many screens they want, instead of being forced to sit together with their family in one central location in their home to partake in the communal consumption of one Unified Unit of Media, and partially due to economic factors effecting work/life balance to the detriment of us laboring poor.

All of those factors impact men and women more or less equally, so why then is there specifically a MALE loneliness epidemic?

Basically, it’s because us guys are worse at loneliness. Or, to put it another way, compared to women, we’re amateurs. Mere dabblers. We merely adopted the loneliness.

Women on the other hand were born to it. Molded by it. For generations. What I am talking about, of course, is motherhood.

Look, at the end of the day, parenting a child is incredibly isolating. You need to put the needs of another ahead of your own, all day, every day, for years on end. That is a burden. The emotional damage that lack of agency and independence has on a psyche can be catastrophic, and historically, for good or ill, most of that burden has been placed on women. While men for the most part traditionally worked outside the home to provide financial support for their families, women stayed home with the kids. Although going to work outside the home can obviously be stressful and difficult, it usually involves interacting with coworkers, or clients, or the general public, even if only superficially, so it wouldn’t necessarily be isolating. Taking on the lion’s share of child-rearing, however? That can get you feeling alone real quick. So why, if women have been bearing that burden for generations, are we not talking about the women’s loneliness epidemic? Why is male loneliness the topic du jour?

The reasons, I believe, are twofold. The first, unfortunately, is that, generally speaking, women’s issues are often downplayed or ignored altogether. So even though women may have been languishing in loneliness for centuries, the response has simply been apathy. It’s not like actual people were suffering, they’re only women after all. But now that this issue is affecting real people (men), it deserves some recognition.

The second reason is because women have experienced this issue for so long, that they’ve learned how to deal with it. There are cultural and social constructs in place to help alleviate their isolation. This is the idea of the “village”. Many women have other women that they can share their burdens with, and a burden shared is a burden lightened. Men generally have no such support systems in place. From boyhood, men are usually taught to hide, suppress, ignore, or otherwise minimalize their own feelings, which results in emotionally stunted automatons who are woefully ill-equipped to process Big Emotions. But why does this matter? Men have successfully stumbled through life with the emotional maturity of a moderately socialized inanimate carbon rod for generations after all. Why is it only an issue now?

I would argue that it has always been an issue, but it is MORE of an issue now because, well, times, they are a-changing.

Basically, thanks in part to some long overdue cultural progress, but mostly due to the slow collapse of the Great American Experiment, which has resulted in a rigged economy designed to benefit only the top few percent at the expense of the great majority of the American citizenry so that it is now almost impossible to support a family from a single source of income, destroying the old socio-economic pattern of one provider (usually male) and one stay-at-home parent (usually female), the responsibilities of parenting are now much more evenly split, which, to be fair is a good thing! (the equal parenting thing, not the devastating financial situation) Dads, they be a’dadding these days, creating much healthier and more equitable relationships with their children, and their partners, but with these new more progressive parenting arrangements come a more equal share of the burdens, hardships, and isolation of parenting, and wooh boy, us guys are not equipped to handle them.

Parenthood is hard. It just is. Parenthood is that Bush lyric I mentioned earlier. You’re never alone, and yet paradoxically you’re alone all the time. Parenthood is being isolated from your family and friends, and even your own partner, while being subservient to the fickle whims of a miniature sociopath. It’s feeling deep, crushing, devastating loneliness, but without a moment of privacy or relaxing solitude. It’s constantly being needed, and never being wanted. Always required, never desired. Mistress and I have one adorable, well-behaved, pleasant child, just one, and we’re hanging on to our sanity by a thread. By the end of every day spent keeping our little bundle of expenses alive and well, we don’t have the mental, physical, or emotional capacity to devote any effort into ourselves or each other. Like wounded animals we just scurry off to our own dark isolated corners to lick our wounds and stare listlessly at the wall. After a full day of parenting, Mistress is generally so over-stimulated and touched out that she would rather set herself on fire than snuggle with me, whereas I am so starved for adult companionship that I would happily get into a windowless van driven by a blood-covered stranger if they pulled up onto my front lawn and asked me if I wanted to hang out.

Of course, when the going gets tough, Mistress can and does at least commiserate with her girlfriends about the trials and tribulations of parenting. She has a robust support system of female friends and family who understand exactly what she is going through, and who are ready to lend a shoulder to lean on and an ear to vent to.

Me? I’ve got several close guy friends who are also new dads that I assume feel a lot of the same feelings and think a lot of the same thoughts I have about parenthood, but I don’t know for sure because we have never once had a conversation about our parenting experiences.

Guy friendships just aren’t like that. Generally, they are very topic dependent, in that the friendship, such as it is, will revolve around one or a few specific topics, and that will be the extent of the relationship. A guy may have a few golf buddies, or a few cards buddies, or a few bike buddies, or a few work buddies, and their conversations will remain centered around those shared themes. This leads to very shallow, but very safe relationships, without drama or stress, but also without a deep connection, and without that deeper connection it is incredibly hard to open up about any real issues, concerns, or difficulties that the guy may be wrestling with, so those issues remain bottled up and unresolved. If the guy is lucky enough to have deep, meaningful, close friendships with other guys, this learned avoidance of taboo or uncomfortable topics still remains. So ladies, that is why if your man was out with his friends and he mentions to you that his buddy said his wife has cancer, or that they just had a child, or something of that nature, he will almost never have any additional follow up information. What type of cancer? We don’t know. How bad is it? We don’t know. How was the labor? We don’t know. What is the child’s name or gender? We don’t know. We have not been trained to deal socially with heavy topics or heavy feelings, so we don’t. We just dissociate in the moment and wrestle alone with our thoughts and emotions in solitude.

And that is why involved coparenting feels especially isolating for men. We don’t have centuries of experience with this situation to fall back on. We don’t have “the village” that many lucky women do. Hells, in many cases we can’t even ask our own fathers for advice, because they were the last generation who experienced fatherhood/child-rearing in the old way, aka they relied entirely on their wife to handle it while they pounded lunchtime bourbon and flirted with their young secretaries. So even though guys are now experiencing all of the isolation of parenthood, like the emotionally obtuse idiots that we are, we’re just not talking about it. Every man an island and all that.

Fuck that.

Change may be hard, but stasis means stagnation. Adapt or die, right? Eventually, men will have to learn to reach out, and connect with each other, and talk about their feelings. That, or I guess we’ll just evolve to have longer and more dexterous toes, to better manipulate a shotgun trigger. You don’t want that. I don’t want that. So change it is. Guys, let’s talk about how lonely we are. Let’s talk about how difficult fatherhood can be. Boys, let’s build a village.