"And while men’s loneliness certainly requires intervention, the real question is who, exactly, is expected to carry the load of care? ILLUSTRATION BY UNDREY/GETTY IMAGES
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In 2017, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy penned an essay for the Harvard Business Review, where he named loneliness a growing health epidemic. This loneliness was so dire, Dr. Murthy argued, it could shorten a lifespan by as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. This wasn’t the first time loneliness had been framed as a public health issue. The New Republic, for instance, published “The Lethality of Loneliness” back in 2013, and the article began adding new colors to the canvas of men: loneliness, isolation, and disconnection.
Only six months later, Billy Baker’s Boston Globe article went viral, titled, “The Biggest Threat Facing Middle-Age Men Isn’t Smoking or Obesity. It’s Loneliness.” Since then, the men’s loneliness epidemic has become a touchstone for understanding how, and to what extent, men are struggling.
But no matter who wrote what, the implicit takeaway is clear: Everyone should care! Women should care! No man left behind! But caring is a tricky word for many women, as it brims with gendered expectations of labor, open availability, and mental load. For many women—especially those who are sexually and romantically involved with men—the burden of investing in men and their problems often blurs the line between care and caretaking.
And while men’s loneliness certainly requires intervention, the real question is who, exactly, is expected to carry the load of care?
“Women have enough problems of their own to deal with. They don’t also have to be responsible for men’s problems,” says Richard V. Reeves, author of the recent book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.
Reeves is more or less the authority on the state of boys and men in the United States, and recently announced the launch of the American Institute for Boys and Men, which he hopes will be the first research-based, nonideological organization vested in improving the lives of men. But when addressing my suspicions—that women are too often tasked with the emotional rescue of men, rather than invited into mutual solidarity—Reeves thinks it isn’t so simple. On the one hand, he agrees that men are often emotionally dependent on women, a dynamic that arose in part from the “patriarchal economic structures [that] held women down economically, but propped men up emotionally.” And now, as women gain greater economic independence, “a lot of men are falling emotionally,” says Reeves. But it gets more complicated when considering how institutions neglect men and create a vacuum women are left to fill.
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