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.
Well for me, half of 0 is still 0 and I'm not even 30 yet.
> My long term partner loves me conditionally (and don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that this is abnormal).
I haven't told anyone but a therapist the abuse I've been facing from a partner because it would break my parents heart. I've been back-stabbed now 3 times from different people I was closest with relationship or friendship-wise over the past decade (because you're right it's conditional).
I honestly don't see how informing friends and family around me that I've been physically attacked many times, forced to wipe all evidence, hunted down, de-escalated 20 bloodcurdling screaming panic attack episodes, stop 2 of their suicide attempts, lied to at every turn, was cheated on, and then abandoned (BPD & drug abuse). I should make the people around me share in how awful I feel? That won't resolve anything, just like the therapist that can't change it.
Sounds right, relationships require effort to stay healthy. It's not always an easy dance, as veterans of marriage will attest.
No healthy relationship should be a cage containing 2 or more martyrs. If people are accumulating resentment, it's time to seek help or dialogue or renegotiation.
That said, it's a mark of mature introspection and humility to be able to ask for help and support. It's also a mark of maturity and kindness to give help and support.
I think parents love you conditionally true. In the end if you turn into a really bad person, they might not love you anymore.
That's not bad though. If I stop talking to my partner, I suspect at some point they wouldn't want to stay with me anymore. If I attacked my parents repeatedly, same goes for them
Why would you even want unconditional love? Are you planning on abusing and taking advantage of your spouse? People who want this are not ready for marriage.
"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"
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?
"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.
I 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.
Exactly 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?
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?
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.
I 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.
There are programs/orgs that try to address that. In Australia for example there's https://mensshed.org/ , 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.
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.
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.
Your 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.
Isn't it perfectly normal/healthy to keep some of your private feelings totally private? Your best friends/spouses shouldn't necessarily be your psychotherapists.
> 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.
> 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?
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."
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?
That'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.
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/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.
Yes, 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.
Once 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
I don't know you, but respectfully, people didn't start dying in my life until I was in my mid-30s.
The most heartbreaking experience I've had was my 88 year old neighbor ringing the door, and informing me that his wife of 60 years had just died. He managed to say three words. Before the fourth, he broke down in tears.
My wife has died.
Such a simple sentence, but a sentence that had 60 years of unconditional love behind it. And an entire family. Their life. His wife was lovely. I miss her, and cannot even pretend to imagine what this was, and still is, like, for him.
Behind him, at my door, was my other neighbor. He was the first to have been told. He just stood there, silently, while I gave the husband a long hug. He never said a word, his mere presence saying everything that needed to be said.
At 24 you’re simply too young and have been lucky to not realize that life throws your curveballs.
You might be offended by my comment, but you won’t as you get older.
As you get older you might look at your teens as still being a baby, twenties as still being a kid, early thirties as starting to learn a thing or two, mid-thirties with some life lessons, and forties as finally knowing some things.
You 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?
As a man in my mid-40s who has gradually become more aware of my emotions and the need I have for connection, I disagree. Of course I can't make claims about anyone else's needs or happiness, but for myself my life has been a lot better as I have built supportive friendships. I don't feel infantilized, I feel more able to have my needs met, be happier, work through blocks that are triggered by old wounds, etc. I feel more capable of living a satisfying life.
I think that this ideology is one of reasons why men get less emotional support and why many cant provide it. They cant provided because they don't want to, because they look down on people who want or need it. And consequently they cant really talk openly with other men, because they will look down at them.
> Once you're an adult, do you even need one in the first place?
There are a few assumptions embedded within this statement.
Firstly, you assume that 'they' have an intent other than the stated one, without explaining who 'they' may be, why 'they' would want to do this, and that 'they' have managed to be the only large group of humans to ever keep a secret successfully.
Secondly, you imply that 'being infantalized' would somehow be harmful to you, and that it might reduce your ability to care for yourself.
I suspect that as a relatively young person you've realized that you are an adult, but not what that actually means yet. It means that YOU get to help decide what being an adult means, and how other adults should be judged.
If living an isolated life brings you joy somehow, that's fine. We aren't all wired the same. However, the rest of us are starting to realize it doesn't have to be that way, and as your fellow adults we don't have to do it the same way our largely miserable, broken, and frightened grandparents did.
I 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.
I'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.
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.
293 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.
dijit|1 year ago
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.
purple-leafy|1 year ago
thrwaway223|1 year ago
> My long term partner loves me conditionally (and don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that this is abnormal).
I haven't told anyone but a therapist the abuse I've been facing from a partner because it would break my parents heart. I've been back-stabbed now 3 times from different people I was closest with relationship or friendship-wise over the past decade (because you're right it's conditional).
I honestly don't see how informing friends and family around me that I've been physically attacked many times, forced to wipe all evidence, hunted down, de-escalated 20 bloodcurdling screaming panic attack episodes, stop 2 of their suicide attempts, lied to at every turn, was cheated on, and then abandoned (BPD & drug abuse). I should make the people around me share in how awful I feel? That won't resolve anything, just like the therapist that can't change it.
heresie-dabord|1 year ago
Sounds right, relationships require effort to stay healthy. It's not always an easy dance, as veterans of marriage will attest.
No healthy relationship should be a cage containing 2 or more martyrs. If people are accumulating resentment, it's time to seek help or dialogue or renegotiation.
That said, it's a mark of mature introspection and humility to be able to ask for help and support. It's also a mark of maturity and kindness to give help and support.
passwordoops|1 year ago
I've come to learn the only unconditional love is that between parent-child
Rhapso|1 year ago
Fire-Dragon-DoL|1 year ago
That's not bad though. If I stop talking to my partner, I suspect at some point they wouldn't want to stay with me anymore. If I attacked my parents repeatedly, same goes for them
treecrypto|1 year ago
>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|1 year ago
Being loved conditional has a very thin line to coercive control, though, and this gets easily into abusive territory.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
horrible-hilde|1 year ago
mmastrac|1 year ago
Or, to rephrase,
"Men grow up with an average of two emotional support providers and lose one in mid to late adulthood"
cauliflower2718|1 year ago
Or, men have a parent they are close with plus a spouse, and then the parent dies?
jfengel|1 year ago
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?
jasoneckert|1 year ago
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.
marssaxman|1 year ago
What this really seems to be saying is more like "men generally don't have emotional support networks".
bombcar|1 year ago
stevenAthompson|1 year ago
They excluded everyone that had a large support network from the study.
some_furry|1 year ago
I was sitting here wondering how anyone has only two to begin with.
wayoverthecloud|1 year ago
citizenpaul|1 year ago
OldGuyInTheClub|1 year ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment
keybored|1 year ago
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.
supportengineer|1 year ago
formerly_proven|1 year ago
viraptor|1 year ago
seneca|1 year ago
asimpleusecase|1 year ago
kevwil|1 year ago
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.
kkoncevicius|1 year ago
obruchez|1 year ago
thih9|1 year ago
Pets - fine; but rejecting generalized plural responses might mean rejecting cases where people genuinely had more emotional support providers.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
mrxd|1 year ago
d1sxeyes|1 year ago
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|1 year ago
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|1 year ago
notjoemama|1 year ago
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?
swatcoder|1 year ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias
thdhhghgbhy|1 year ago
scoofy|1 year ago
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|1 year ago
sawmurai|1 year ago
execat|1 year ago
creinhardt|1 year ago
SJC_Hacker|1 year ago
thelastparadise|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
matrix87|1 year ago
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
tommiegannert|1 year ago
The most heartbreaking experience I've had was my 88 year old neighbor ringing the door, and informing me that his wife of 60 years had just died. He managed to say three words. Before the fourth, he broke down in tears.
My wife has died.
Such a simple sentence, but a sentence that had 60 years of unconditional love behind it. And an entire family. Their life. His wife was lovely. I miss her, and cannot even pretend to imagine what this was, and still is, like, for him.
Behind him, at my door, was my other neighbor. He was the first to have been told. He just stood there, silently, while I gave the husband a long hug. He never said a word, his mere presence saying everything that needed to be said.
You are not alone.
iJohnDoe|1 year ago
You might be offended by my comment, but you won’t as you get older.
As you get older you might look at your teens as still being a baby, twenties as still being a kid, early thirties as starting to learn a thing or two, mid-thirties with some life lessons, and forties as finally knowing some things.
drdec|1 year ago
jrgoff|1 year ago
watwut|1 year ago
> Once you're an adult, do you even need one in the first place?
Yes adults need it. Humans are animals like that.
1shooner|1 year ago
>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.
constantcrying|1 year ago
I have never wanted to externalize my emotions and the idea of talking to my friends about my feelings seems utterly bizarre.
stevenAthompson|1 year ago
There are a few assumptions embedded within this statement.
Firstly, you assume that 'they' have an intent other than the stated one, without explaining who 'they' may be, why 'they' would want to do this, and that 'they' have managed to be the only large group of humans to ever keep a secret successfully.
Secondly, you imply that 'being infantalized' would somehow be harmful to you, and that it might reduce your ability to care for yourself.
I suspect that as a relatively young person you've realized that you are an adult, but not what that actually means yet. It means that YOU get to help decide what being an adult means, and how other adults should be judged.
If living an isolated life brings you joy somehow, that's fine. We aren't all wired the same. However, the rest of us are starting to realize it doesn't have to be that way, and as your fellow adults we don't have to do it the same way our largely miserable, broken, and frightened grandparents did.
kbelder|1 year ago
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.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
readthenotes1|1 year ago
'generalized responses, such as “family” or “friends,”..., were excluded from formal analyses.'
ashoeafoot|1 year ago
_qbxi|1 year ago
avidiax|1 year ago
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.
wryoak|1 year ago
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.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
m3kw9|1 year ago
ajolly|1 year ago
cultofmetatron|1 year ago
pixelpoet|1 year ago
Literally had no IRL friends since half my life, and am mostly single. Not uncommon among my coder friends, either.
rufus_foreman|1 year ago
matrix87|1 year ago
SoftTalker|1 year ago
[deleted]
Babairjfjf|1 year ago
[deleted]
w10-1|1 year ago
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.