Holding It Together: Why Many Men Experience Loneliness Without Talking About It

Loneliness is associated with depression, cardiovascular disease, substance misuse, and increased mortality risk

Most men today are doing what is expected of them. They wake up, go to work, manage responsibilities, and keep moving. They show up for families, colleagues, and communities. On the surface, this looks like stability. Yet beneath this functional exterior, many men carry a quiet sense of disconnection-one that rarely announces itself, but steadily shapes behaviour, health, and relationships.

Missed Signs of Disconnection

This disconnection does not always appear as sadness or withdrawal. Often, it surfaces in everyday reactions that seem ordinary, even understandable. The argument at a traffic signal, the hostility during a political debate, or the intensity of loyalty to sports teams or public figures are easy to dismiss as temperament or personality. The same can be seen in snapping at a customer service executive after a long day, reacting sharply to a supervisor’s feedback, or feeling an unexpected surge of irritation when plans change without warning.

It shows up in impatience at slow-moving queues, heaviness after returning to an empty room, or restlessness that leads to endless late-night scrolling. Even quieter habits—like over analyzing a casual remark, withdrawing into silence during family gatherings, or finding relief only in noise, alcohol, or constant activity-often point to something more than mood. These are everyday moments where emotional strain looks for release, shaped less by individual character and more by how few spaces exist where men can pause, reflect, and regulate what they feel before it spills outward.

What Does It Even Mean to Be Lonely?

From hostel canteens to workplace break rooms, a familiar rhythm repeats itself. Men gather easily around tasks, humour, sports, or shared routines. Conversations are lively within these boundaries, yet rarely travel beyond them. When the workday ends or life becomes complicated—a breakup, a professional setback, health concerns, or a sense of being stuck-most of men’s connections thin out. There are people around, but few places where uncertainty, fear, or self-doubt can be spoken aloud without discomfort or judgement.

This experience is often described as loneliness, but not in the way the word is commonly understood. Loneliness is not about being alone, single, or unsociable. It is the gap between the relationships one hopes for and the relationships one actually has (Perlman & Peplau, 1981). A man can be socially active and still feel isolated if none of his relationships allow for emotional honesty or reciprocity.

The Roots of Loneliness

To understand how this gap forms, it helps to look early. Across cultures, boys are emotionally and socially shaped in indirect ways. Formal emotional education is rare. Instead, boys learn how to feel and relate through playground hierarchies, films, television, school and college seniors, and peer approval. Emotional lessons arrive through heroes who endure silently, rivals who assert dominance, and stories where masculinity is proven through sacrifice rather than self-understanding. These are powerful but uncertain teachers. They offer imitation, not guidance.

Psychological traditions have long observed the effects of this pattern. Carl Jung’s idea of the puer aeternus, or “eternal child,” was not a comment on immaturity, but on emotional development left incomplete when responsibility arrives early and inner exploration is postponed (Jung, 1959). Many men enter adulthood having learned how to perform roles efficiently, without learning how to interpret or integrate their emotional lives. Feelings exist, but without vocabulary, mentorship, or rehearsal.

Education and career pathways often deepen this divide. In many societies, including India, young men are guided toward income-oriented objectives from childhood—professional security is prioritised long before curiosity, values, or intellectual inclination are explored (Jeffrey et al., 2008). The advice is practical and well-intentioned: earning comes first. Yet this can quietly produce intellectual loneliness. When men spend years pursuing goals they did not meaningfully choose, their inner questions, doubts, and reflections have little place to go. Thinking becomes private, even guarded.

This intellectual isolation compounds emotional distance. Without spaces to discuss uncertainty, contradiction, or purpose, men often learn to contain rather than explore their inner lives. Over time, containment can feel like maturity, even as unresolved questions persist (Sen, 1999).

How Loneliness Builds

Friendships formed under these conditions tend to organise around shared activity rather than shared interiority. Competition becomes a safe language—who performs better, earns more, drinks more, knows more. Weekend socialising may revolve around alcohol or constant stimulation, offering relief without integration. Over time, this can leave men socially surrounded yet emotionally undernourished (Mushtaq et al., 2014).

This structure becomes especially visible later in life. Consider a retired clerk in a tier-2 city: decades spent working, raising children, and anchoring a household. When retirement arrives, children move away, routines dissolve, and the phone rings less often—not because relationships were absent, but because they were organised around responsibility rather than companionship. Days stretch long. There is no crisis, only an unfamiliar quiet.

Many men spend years orienting their identity around providing for family. When partners fall ill or pass on, and professional roles recede, the organising purpose of life reduces sharply. The same society that once relied on their steadiness offers little guidance for what follows. Older men in both rural and urban settings often find themselves at their most vulnerable point-not due to fragility, but because the role that sustained them has quietly dissolved.

After retirement, social networks shrink. Emotional dependence once absorbed by work and family has nowhere to land. This form of loneliness is rarely discussed, yet it shapes mental health outcomes among ageing men, contributing to withdrawal, declining physical health, and silent despair.

The Brunt of Carrying It Alone

The health implications across the lifespan are well established. Loneliness is associated with depression, cardiovascular disease, substance misuse, and increased mortality risk (Hawkley & Cacioppo, 2010; Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015). Men consistently show lower rates of help-seeking for psychological distress—not because they experience fewer challenges, but because they are less likely to interpret emotional strain as something that can be shared (Addis & Mahalik, 2003). In India, men account for the majority of suicide deaths, often linked to economic pressure, relational loss, and untreated mental health concerns (Fathima & Kava, 2024; NCRB, 2023).

When emotional pressure has no relational outlet, it often finds symbolic ones. Arguments over politics, sports, or public figures become spaces where intensity is permitted and identity feels protected. Online communities offer quick belonging-sometimes supportive, often polarising. These spaces can feel easier than offline relationships because they require alignment, not vulnerability (Ging, 2019).

This pattern is often misunderstood as an individual problem. In reality, it reflects how emotional life has been structured for men across the lifespan. Many men have learned to carry their inner worlds privately, assuming that this is what adulthood requires.

Authors: Prof. Moitrayee Das, Faculty of Psychology, FLAME University; Muskan Shah, FLAME Alumna; and Prof. Shrirang Chaudhari, MIT World Peace University.