Written by Emma Seppala.
About a month ago, a group of about 20 men—all fathers in their 30s and 40s—gathered at a home in Oakland, California to talk fatherhood. Alarmingly, when asked how many of them had “real friends”—the kind of confidantes with whom they could talk honestly and vulnerably about life on a regular basis, through good times and bad—only two people raised their hands.
It might be tempting to interpret this sense of isolation as a crisis of masculinity in the US. But the available research suggests that loneliness is a problem that supersedes gender. In a revealing sociological study, 25% of Americans report having no one with whom to share a personal problem. The rest of us are not that far off: the average American has only one close confidante, the same study showed. And the leading reason people seek out counseling is loneliness.
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