Many Men Are in Crisis. Here's How to Keep Them There.

Tell the same stories, over and over again.

I originally published this article at Medium on March 30, 2023. Given what’s transpired in American culture and politics since then, it’s even more relevant now.

I’m a citizen of the United States, and I love my country and am very grateful for the opportunities it’s given me. I’m a firm believer in what former president Barack Obama often called the “promise of America” – that, while far from perfect and always a work in progress, our ideals of personal liberty, equality, and justice for all are what guide us toward a better future.

I’m also acutely aware of the toll American society takes on my fellow citizens – women, children, and, yes, men. Many American men are in a constant state of crisis. The rates of so-called deaths of despair – from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol abuse – is one of the most alarming indicators of the poor mental health tragically afflicting men in all corners of the country.

Yet at the same time, I detest the “masculinity crisis.” This term is often used when describing the state of American men, yet in my estimation only serves as the locking door of this prison of despair, rage, and helplessness in three easy steps. First, discussions of the “masculinity crisis” start with a rigidly ideological and simplistic definition of manhood. Second, homage is paid to the era when this definition of manhood was in its heyday (ever hear the one about how great life was after World War II?) Finally, the list of everything taken from men since that heyday is recited as a reminder of just how powerless they’ve become.

Enter this 10-minute segment aired on CNN in February. In it, host Michael Smerconish discusses his take on the issue, followed by an interview with Scott Galloway, an author and professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business.

CNN - Why the rate of single men in the US looking for dates has declined

First, I want to point out a few things Smerconish and Galloway got right. Smerconish was right for even raising the topic in the first place, given the politically fraught nature of conversations around men’s suffering. And Galloway indicates that is not entirely unjustified, considering huge amounts of “pro-men” content online is nothing but misogyny flavored with, I would add, serious authoritarian let’s-kill-democracy vibes. Galloway was also right in bringing up the economic barriers that are facing Americans today, in part due to a federal government that has let economic inequality run rampant over the past several decades.

But overall, watching this segment as a man was by turns heartbreaking and infuriating, and not even because of the data presented. It was how the logic and conclusions applied to that data, so common in discussions about men, all but assures that men in crisis stay in crisis. Here are four ways I saw that happening.

1. Catastrophizing Singlehood

Smerconish opens the segment with data on men and dating. Yes, men are dating less. This is because many single men, like many single women, have discovered that a rich life does not require dating. That, of course, gets no mention. The subtext here is the same subtext that has existed around men for centuries: the surest way to connect a man to society is to connect him to a woman. Singles scholar Bella DePaulo illustrates this in her book “Singled Out,” using the stereotype that single men are “horny, slovenly, and irresponsible” and framing their rehabilitation through marriage as the “adopt-a-barbarian” program. The CNN story falls into this same logical trap: of course so many men are miserable – look at how many of them are single.

It’s something else Smerconish mentions that makes this bias against singles even more obvious. He reports that the number of friends men have has fallen in recent years, presumably among both single and partnered men. Funny enough, research has consistently shown that single people have more friends than married people. Couple that research with easy to find anecdotes of women describing the burden of their male partners having no friends, and one would think that marriage would also come under the microscope in this story.

But of course it didn’t. Instead, throughout much of the segment, the words SINGLE AND LONELY appear below Smerconish and Galloway. Because, as we all “know,” married men are safe from distress, so this crisis can’t possibly involve them in any way.

How does this catastrophizing of singlehood keep men in crisis? Single women always get the message that they are not worthy or valid unless chosen by a man. Single men get the message that they can barely function unless supported by a woman. If one of the main engines that makes a man functional is out of reach, even trying to have a better life becomes futile, as no amount of trying can ever bridge the gap of not having that support.

Marinate that desperation in the aforementioned “pro-men” online misogyny, and a subset of these men become not only desperate but dangerous. That’s why Smerconish and Galloway were playing with fire with this next one.

2. Implicating Women’s Standards

Smerconish says that women have become choosier. Galloway makes the argument that things today have returned to their natural order, whereby most women chase a tiny subset of the most economically viable men. Bending the knee before the truest of Gods, the 1950’s, he argues that massive government investment in the middle class made a much larger pool of men economically viable and therefore attractive partners.

I want to be clear that neither Smerconish nor Galloway argue that women having greater choices is a bad thing. But it’s the context in which these comments are made. And in the context of a discussion of men in crisis, I have two things to say about women’s ability to be more “choosy:” A) Good for them. B) It’s not relevant.

About that not relevant part. In the US, we have a saying that “freedom isn’t free.” This is most often said in honor of those who serve in the miliary, but I take a much broader approach with the term. Every adult in a free society needs to contend with one simple fact: others may do with their freedom things we don’t like. The price we pay for freedom is accepting that and resisting our baser urges to take away the freedoms of others because we’ve taken offence.

That includes taking offence at people’s decisions around partnering. Being all in on this freedom thing means allowing everyone to set their own standards and follow their own conscience. It also means not having to be forced into associations with others who wreck your self-worth and extinguish the gifts you were meant to share with the world.

This brings me to a glaring hole at the center of Galloway’s economic viability argument. Would an increase in economically viable men decrease the number of single men? I don’t know. But here’s what I do know. The flocking of women to economically viable men post World War II was driven in large part out of pure social, legal, and financial necessity. Women were kicked en masse out of wartime factory jobs, and social norms, laws, and policies left many of them with no choice but to partner. Funny how quickly social harmony appears when a corset is thrown around the human rights of half the population.

Telling men that the choices of other free people – choices over which they have no control – is robbing them of a critical part of their life’s experience is a sure way to keep a crisis going. Galloway was right in one sense – telling men just to “level up” isn’t going to accomplish anything. No one – man or woman – has a responsibility to dimmish themselves by chasing someone else’s standards. Instead, all people need to burrow down into the bedrock of their self-worth and strengths to stand firm in the rough and tumble of a free society where we only have control over our own actions, beliefs, and attitudes.

3. Life (And Love) Only Happens Online

No discussion of men in crisis can be complete without mentioning the payday lenders of love – dating apps. Like payday lenders, dating apps often leave their customers worse off for their use, and “horror stories” are a dime a dozen. Do I know that some find meaningful relationships on apps, just like some pay off a 300% interest loan within the agreed-upon time frame? Sure, just like I know that a broken clock is still right twice a day.

Galloway talks about the nature of Tinder specifically, and notes the value of in-person interactions. That’s a good point to make, and I probably would not have even included this section had it not been for a comment by Smerconish. He claims that “relationships today don’t come from...happenstance and mingling, they come from swiping.”

This, my friends, is some of the purest, uncut horseshit around human relations on the market today. People meet though happenstance (and their real-world connections) literally every day – and not just as romantic partners, but as life-affirming friends, too. Further, this does not require the frantic “put yourself out there” energy we’re all familiar with. Trust me, I’m one of the most introverted, make a new friend every 5 years, home alone on Saturday night motherfuckers you’re ever going to meet, yet over nearly 40 years people have come into my life that I’m blessed to know.

Guess what? All those relationships started, in-person, through nothing other than happenstance. It’s still very possible. What starts to feel impossible, and what fuels the perpetual crisis machine, is being told that having to constantly trawl the World’s Shittiest Rolodex is just “the way things are today.” If I may, fuck “the way things are today.” I’ll be spending my time focusing on making my life an emblem of the way I’d like them to be, starting with a firm rejection of the idea that Match Group has hidden the key to my manhood and happiness somewhere deep in their algorithms.

4. Insinuate That Purpose Is Out of Reach

One of the final statements Galloway makes is ultimately what lit a fire under me to write this article. He says that “The happiest, most prosperous, most purposeful people in America are middle class families.” If you want to find out why, in detail, this claim is wrong, the work of DePaulo is a great place to start. As it relates to men in crisis, I’m going to focus on that last word: “purposeful.”

It was Friedrich Nietzsche who said “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” In this way, happiness and prosperity pale in comparison to purpose in making life worthwhile. In its broadest interpretation, there are almost infinite possibilities for purpose, both big and small, in one’s life. Every person has an inherent right to purpose, and cultivating those purposes is the work of a lifetime.

In its narrowest interpretation, societies define capital-P “Purpose” as the one or two things every person must do in order to not spend life suspended in the Existential Vacuum of Nothingness (I think it’s a Hoover.) This is the Purpose whose lack of completion makes people believe at a fundamental level that they’ve “done life wrong.”

In America, family is almost to a feverish degree that number one Purpose. Politicians of all stripes repeat the term “working families” like lemmings running off a cliff. Picture anyone (especially a woman) dare saying that anything other than their family is most important to them. And despite my country’s fixation on individual liberty, the smallest divisible unit of human life that exists in our culture is two. The one-person households across the land nary get a mention and have been conditioned into meekness, because, after all, “it’s just us” behind the door of nearly 38 million residences.

And this is the knock-out punch to assure men stay in crisis: the message that Purpose is now out of reach, and in its place is…nothing. You couldn’t do the one thing, and now you’re fucked. I can say with certainty that one of my purposes as a man is to engage with my life and the world in a way that makes the narrative, logic, and general vibe of the 10-minute conversation between these two men seem as foreign to me as the surface of Mars.

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Yet another purpose I have is to advocate for this much more expansive view of life, and I believe government and institutions play an important role. So does Galloway, who makes an impassioned plea at the end for government to take even more action to encourage household formation and childbirth (while also revealing himself to be a straight-up population decline alarmist.)

I don’t believe that prying open exclusionary social arrangements to let more people in solves a fucking thing. What would help is carrying our passion for individual liberty even further, and guaranteeing a basic menu of human rights to every person upon birth. What would help is having an economy that maintains its agility and entrepreneurial spirit without feeling like earning a living and finding housing is a daily re-make of The Hunger Games. What would help is not attaching a higher measure of worth and dignity to middle-class families in the first place.

Staking SO MUCH of a human being’s purpose and overall ability to function in society on whether or not they form a romantic attachment and then a household? It’s absolute insanity, made even more insane by the fact that it’s questioned so infrequently, especially by those in power. Pointing out that insanity is a purpose that drives me every day.