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Emotional support across adulthood: A 60-year study of men’s social networks
- keybored 2y agoAs 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? 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.
- ajolly 2y agoYeah. Prob 90% of mine went away between 36-40 years old.
- readthenotes1 2y agoUseless. 'generalized responses, such as “family” or “friends,”..., were excluded from formal analyses.'
- execat 2y agoThat's a wide range, isn't it?
- creinhardt 2y agoYeah, you could also say "Most men die between 30 and 90".
- marssaxman 2y ago> reflecting an average decrease from two to one What this really seems to be saying is more like "men generally don't have emotional support networks".
- bombcar 2y agoThis is why there’s the joke that the miracle wasn’t Christ rising from the dead, it was having 12 close personal friends in his 30s.
- goodpoint 2y agoThat so bleak.
- OldGuyInTheClub 2y agoWere they friends or his downline?
- mmastrac 2y ago"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" Or, to rephrase, "Men grow up with an average of two emotional support providers and lose one in mid to late adulthood"
- jasoneckert 2y agoAnd with such a small sample size, the variance will be high. 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.
- jfengel 2y agoAny idea how many women have? 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?
- bitwize 2y agoUnlike men, women tend seek out emotional support networks as a matter of course. There's probably some reduction as they age, but it's probably from like, the entire glee club to their husband, kids, five or six girls they keep up with from high school and the neighbor lady. A particularly gregarious woman like my wife can grow her support network. This is definitely an area meriting more research.
- kelseyfrog 2y agoAs a trans women, I have a unique perspective on how gender impacts social relations having lived life in each of the two worlds. Like commenters above mention, emotional support is table stakes in friendship among women. It is a kinder, gentler world - the kind of world you perhaps remember growing up in. That world still exists, but it's typically not accessible to men once they reach adulthood. How could men access the world of emotional support? By disassociating the idea of gender and emotional support. Growing up in the 90s and 2000s, I remember emotional vulnerability being associated with homosexuality - it was "gay" for men to be emotionally vulnerable with eachother, typically leaving men with women[spouses] or family members as their only source of emotional support. The way out is decouple these two things, to un-"gay" emotional vulnerability between men. What does it look like? Checking in on friends, learning to open up yourself, increasing emotional intelligence, learning how to hold space and reflectively listen. Not trying to solve people's problems when what they want is to be heard. All of these skills and norms exist within feminine spaces as a matter of course and when folks say "putting in the work" it means learning to employ these things. It means that being emotionally vulnerable doesn't imply a sexual advancement. It means enforcing that as a reality.
- _qbxi 2y agoMen typically rely on their wives as their sole emotional support, and then people are surprised when 70% of divorces are initiated by women.
- wryoak 2y agoWell, let’s look at two things here: 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.
- avidiax 2y agoI've heard it said that romance for a man is that she still loves you even if you can no longer provide. 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.
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- dijit 2y agoOnly half? 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.
- treecrypto 2y ago>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 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.
- LiKao 2y agoBeing loved conditionally by your partner is OK, as long at the conditions are those that you are willing to fulfill out of free choice. Being loved conditional has a very thin line to coercive control, though, and this gets easily into abusive territory.
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- passwordoops 2y ago> My long term partner loves me conditionally I've come to learn the only unconditional love is that between parent-child
- zie 2y agoEven that can be conditional. Parents deliberately remove themselves from their children's lives sometimes for various reasons. Child is gay/trans or othered in some other way. Child commits some serious crime, etc. It could also be the parent is too much of a mess(drug addict, etc) that they can't love their child.
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- m3kw9 2y agoThis is AI emotional support come in
- stevenAthompson 2y ago"However, generalized responses, such as “family” or “friends,” as well as mentions of non-human sources like pets, were excluded from formal analyses." They excluded everyone that had a large support network from the study.
- some_furry 2y agoOh, that explains it. I was sitting here wondering how anyone has only two to begin with.
- keybored 2y ago> I was sitting here wondering how anyone has only two to begin with. 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?
- some_furry 2y agoNo, it doesn't explain shit. You've only provided answers to "what?" questions, not "why?" questions. Next question.
- keybored 2y agoYou were the one with the question.
- some_furry 2y ago> Does that explain things for you? Not the only one.
- keybored 2y agoMy rhetorical question was no a question.
- cultofmetatron 2y agoYou guys are getting emotional support???
- rufus_foreman 2y agoIt has declined by 50% since one of the two local liquor stores closed.
- SoftTalker 2y ago[flagged]
- wryoak 2y agoNeed? Perhaps not. But outcomes improve, as explained by the article: “Emotional support, defined as providing comfort and understanding, is essential for well-being, particularly in older adults, where it predicts better cognitive health, emotional stability, and life expectancy” Sometimes there are good reasons for things beyond necessity.
- treyd 2y agoThis attitude is why so many men report suffering from chronic loneliness.
- jamespo 2y agoYou're on Hacker News, you're not a Lumberjack fella
- rufus_foreman 2y agoHe's OK.
- swatcoder 2y agoYou're likely to get dog-piled for that comment because it perpetuates a contemporary myth of "traditional men" rather than a historically grounded one. While there have always been dudes living out in the bush alone, the "traditional" norm is that people spend most of their lives in a settled or roving community of some kind, and that community usually included some kind of sufficient support structure to help men (and others) make sense of their experiences and stay in tune with the community norms instead of just going feral. The shape of that support would vary, and may not always have been what we think of today as "friends", and certainly wouldn't have involved direct analogs to the emotion and psychology language we use today. But elders or shamans or pastors or imams or rabbis or parents or cousins or witchdoctors or etc etc etc were there and part of everyday life. Trying to live without that support now is charting a path into a dark unknown, not embodying some ancient rite of masculinity.
- d1sxeyes 2y ago> 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. 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?
- OldGuyInTheClub 2y agoOf course, "Further research is required." ;-) 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."
- standardUser 2y agoMiddle-aged white men have long had the highest suicide rates, so that may explain the narrow focus.
- swatcoder 2y agoThat's basically the critique that some weigh against huge swathes of psychology-adjacent research (among other domains), but is quite hard to overcome in practice, so money keeps flowing because its the established norm and because many people would rather have low-confidence pseudoscientific insights than no "scientific" insights at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias
- notjoemama 2y ago> predominantly White 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?
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- supportengineer 2y agoWe get an emotional support network? Nobody told me.
- formerly_proven 2y agoI know it's supposed to be a joke but it actually encapsulates one of the core issues about this already on the language level, men thinking they'd "get" something out of thin air. Do you think women have 31.41x larger emotional support networks out of thin air? Of course not, they put the effort in. Men don't.
- constantcrying 2y ago>Men don't. Even the idea repulses me.
- exe34 2y ago> they put the effort in. Men don't. Or you know, they do, and get used and cast aside enough times and stop.
- swatcoder 2y agoCompassion is helpful here. 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.
- SJC_Hacker 2y agoMen have emotional support networks?
- thelastparadise 2y agoI had two, then only one once the liquor store down road closed up shop.
- thih9 2y ago> However, generalized responses, such as “family” or “friends,” as well as mentions of non-human sources like pets, were excluded from formal analyses. Pets - fine; but rejecting generalized plural responses might mean rejecting cases where people genuinely had more emotional support providers.
- ashoeafoot 2y agowell 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..
- seneca 2y agoWhile 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.
- viraptor 2y agoThere are programs/orgs that try to address that. In Australia for example there's https://mensshed.org/ https://mensshed.org/ , https://dadlan.au/ https://dadlan.au/ and probably a few others I'm not familiar with. If someone's aware of the US equivalents this may be a good place to link them.
- mrxd 2y agoIncredible findings. Apparently your mom dies sometime when you are between age 30-90.
- w10-1 2y ago293 Harvard men, last sampled in 2010, with “network” sizes of 2… 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.
- wayoverthecloud 2y agoI am doing my PhD and occasionally my supervisor and I come across papers that don't have any meaningful results/statistics but you gotta publish somehow. Like, they conclude with "We observed that the latency can be reduced by 2x-300x." 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.
- citizenpaul 2y agoExactly what I thought put into words. There is not even a comparison to the obvious first question. Do women have the same effects or is it limited to men?
- OldGuyInTheClub 2y agoAgreed. They followed this cohort for decades and this was the conclusion? It reads like an update from the pitch drop experiment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment
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- matrix87 2y agoOnce you're an adult, do you even need one in the first place? 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
- kbelder 2y agoI feel similarly, personally. I can't imagine needing emotional support... emotions are tools of my psyche, and needing another's help would mean that something was broken within myself that I needed to fix. 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.
- 1shooner 2y ago>Once you're an adult, do you even need one in the first place? >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.
- drdec 2y agoYou don't think you will want some support when a tragedy befalls you? A child or partner is hospitalized or dies? You develop a potentially terminal illness? A partner betrays you? Are you just going to "follow your goals" in these situations?
- constantcrying 2y agoHow is "emotional support" going to help with any of that?
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- kevwil 2y agoImagine having someone, anyone, that you felt comfortable sharing your feelings with. Amazing. 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.
- obruchez 2y agoIsn't it perfectly normal/healthy to keep some of your private feelings totally private? Your best friends/spouses shouldn't necessarily be your psychotherapists.
- kkoncevicius 2y agoYour comment mirrors my experience with both close friends and a spouse. One time my now ex-wife asked why I don't share my feelings more. When I did she said she felt unsafe and we started talking about her instead. In my anecdotal experience men are routinely trained not to talk about their troubles and emotions. Even if I had some form of emotional support I am not sure I would know how to open up. And I am not sure I would want to.
- pizzadog 2y agoYeah... it's strange. Every partner I've had has been someone very aware (to the point of reading books about it in a few cases) of gender issues and the issues with our social norms. But all of them still followed this same trend. Dealing with their emotions was priced in - I was expected to do it. Dealing with my emotions was too scary, too burdensome, there was always some excuse to recenter it on her instead. And the horrifying thing would be when they bring it up later as ammunition for some petty argument. It gives you the sense that they hear these things and hold them like grudges. It makes you never want to open up ever again.
- scoofy 2y agoI 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/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. 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.
- matrix87 2y agoI kind of wish coffee houses had more of this role like how they were in Vienna
- scoofy 2y agoI think people attended those as sort of a nightly news service. Where intellectuals would talk about the days events. Now, with modern tech, people can do that from their own how with experts just by watching the news or youtube. I really think the automobile and television are more to blame for the loneliness epidemic than we give credit for.
- sawmurai 2y agoYes, I notice the benefit of having the same faces around regularly at the $sport I do few times per week. You don’t say much more than hello and goodbye, but after a while you appreciate each other's company and really miss it when you can’t go.
- thdhhghgbhy 2y agoMore like by 40. My relationship with even my best buds from school became empty or non existent after years of marriage and kids.
- asimpleusecase 2y agoI 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
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