Hidden Brain - The Lonely American Man

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

Boys get the message at a young age: don't show your feelings. Don't rely on anyone. This week, we bring you a favorite 2018 episode about misguided notions of masculinity in the United States. We explore how these notions create stressed-out romantic relationships, physical health problems, and a growing epidemic of loneliness. Plus, we consider how we might begin to tell a different story about what it means to be a man.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. It's a Friday evening at an apartment in Lower Manhattan. Two friends are looking forward to unwinding after a long week. Their names are Ansel Shoal and Mateas Corona. And they can teach us all something about friendship. They've been friends for half their lives. Like seven years. No, because of its second grade, third grade, fourth grade,

fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, six years. Yeah, six years, sorry. Doing the math? That means they're now 12. And like ever since second grade, we've been close friends. By fourth grade.

I mean, I knew that this is gonna be my best friend. Their best friendship has involved doing lots of homework together. Video games. We FaceTime. We help each other. He helps me. my best friend. Their best friendship has involved doing lots of homework together, video games, sleepovers like the one they're going to have tonight and legos. When they're not doing homework or playing together, the two friends are supporting each other. So my great-great-for-the-died, like a few weeks ago, he really helped me like, sort of like get through that. I came up and I'm so sorry to hug them.

I don't know if I did it again, but I do recall saying it sometimes, not trying to be braggier, showing like, oh, so amazing, but yes, I remember being there for him. Ansel and Matthias don't think their friendship will change when they get to high school. I'm pretty sure we'll stay. Best friends. Yeah, as long as it's like, neither of us move high schools, I think we will. And why would they think differently? They have the kind of friendship that most kids, or adults for that matter, would want. But for many young men just a few years older than Ansel and Mateus, friendships like this

are a distant memory. Some of the boys go into, sort of, I don't care, it doesn't matter, but they say I don't care so many times that you sense exactly that they do very much care. By the time boys become men, they may not have any friends around, clothes or otherwise. It was just the sense of isolation, but the end of the day it was just me. Many men find there's no one around them at the end of the day, and they find they have become trapped by a series of unspoken rules. If you're a man, you're supposed to be strong and independent. If you connect deeply, especially with other men, it's probably because you're gay.

If you crave deep, emotional bonds, well, that's just unmannedly. Today on Hidden Brain we take a closer look at misguided notions of masculinity in the United States and we explore new research that studies the consequences, stressed out romantic relationships, physical health problems, and a growing epidemic of loneliness. To understand what's going on today we need to step back 80 years and tell a story that's been passed down and even mythologized. In the late 1930s, a retail store magnet named WT Grand had a question. Can you predict who's going to become a good department store manager? To find out, he teamed up with a Harvard professor named Arley Bach and gave him $60,000 to run a study.

Dr. Arley Bach thought that medical research focused too much on what made people sick. He wanted to know what made people healthy. To answer that question, and presumably WT Grants question about department store managers, he and his colleagues picked a group of Harvard students to track closely over time. After that question, and presumably WT Grant's question about department store managers, he and his colleagues picked a group of Harvard students to track closely over time. They chose 268 students, mostly from the classes of 1942, 43, and 44. The researchers thought the study would run a decade or so. All the volunteers were men.

Harvard didn't admit women at the time. All were men. Harvard didn't admit women at the time. All were white. Some students went on to have distinguished careers beyond department store management. One became a swashbuckling newspaper editor. Ben Bradley not only helped the Washington Post break news, he was the news. Any story about the post must begin with Benjamin Crown and Shield Bradley.

52. It's fast-talking,ing chain-smoking cocky executive editor. Another began president. We choose to go to the moon and disdicate and do the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Others had hard lives and struggled with mental illness or alcoholism. As part of the study, these men were put through all kinds of tests. Researchers measured everything from the size of their moles to the lactic acid their bodies released after 5 minutes on a treadmill.

The men were asked to interpret raw shark inkplots. Their handwriting was analyzed. Examiners took detailed measurements of their skulls. At the time, researchers thought the size and shape of a head could tell you a great deal about a person's character and abilities. So we now have a whole set of elaborate skull measurements that we have no idea what to do with. This is Robert Waldinger. He's the current director of the project.

It's now called a Harvard study of adult development. It's lasted far longer than Arleigh Bach and WT Grant imagine. It's now been running for eight decades. The length of the study isn't the only thing that's unusual. Its aims were hazy. Sure, it was supposed to look broadly at who does well. But research studies are often designed

to test one or two specific questions. The aims of this study were nebulous and they changed repeatedly over the years. Sometimes we've been called the biggest fishing expedition in the history of research. As the years went by the studies agenda changed as new funders swept in and science evolved. The links between mind and body became more of a concern in the 1980s and 90s. One thing the study paid attention to from the very start was the volunteer social and emotional lives.

Arleigh Bach was prescient in that way. He had a psychiatrist on his team and there were extensive interviews about the young men's emotional lives. Also, some personality assessments and some assessments of their emotional reactivity. So, all the way along, emotional well-being and personality characteristics were a subject of interest. From the studies earlier days, all the men were asked a deceptively simple question, who would you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or afraid? Who would you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or afraid?

It turned out that men who had someone to turn to were happier with their lives and their marriages. There were also connections between the men's answers to that question and their physical health. Very strong connections. That was one of the surprising things that began to emerge in our data in the 80s. We found that people who had warmer, closer connections lived longer, developed the diseases of middle age, those chronic diseases less soon and had better

health longer on average than people who didn't have warm close relationships. Warm close relationships. Now, it's easy to see why social ties might be important to happiness, but hard disease, Robert was skeptical. At first, we didn't believe our data. Then he discovered other studies were finding the same thing. This relationship between physical health

and social connections is an obvious to most of us. When we think about how to keep ourselves healthy, we might think about eating right and getting exercise. We don't ask whether we've set aside enough time for friendships. And yet you could notice it in moment to moment interactions during the day. Think about how coming into work and seeing people you like being with is energizing. Think about the experience of being upset about something and then talking to a friend or a family member who listens well and you can feel

your body literally calm down. And so I think that if we actually take the time to notice at a microscopic level, you can notice how relationships can be both energizing in a positive way and calming when we're stressed. The study also found that bad relationships can magnify physical pain and that close relationships buffer us from the physical problems we face as we age. The researchers found that the happiest people in retirement are those who actively work to replace colleagues

with friends. Today, the study focuses on this question. How is it that the quality of your relationships with your coworkers, with your friends, your family could get into your body? By today's standards, the demographics of the study were wildly imbalanced. As I said, the volunteers were all white, all men. Not just that. Most students came from well-to-do families. The research became a little more representative in the 1970s when the study of Harvard men was paired with a separate study happening in Boston.

That research focused on boys from some of the poorest, toughest areas of the city. Together, these studies provide a vivid picture of men's health over the course of their lives. Now, you could say this research is obviously incomplete because it leaves out more than half the population. But it does tell a striking story about a phenomenon that has many researchers worried. Social isolation among men. I really don't think I dealt with it. I think I viewed it as sort of a circumstance

rather than a problem, but there was also a part of me that realized I was alone. When we come back, we look at the profound loneliness of American men. Stay with us. stay with us. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vidantam. In recent decades there have been pervasive worries that Americans are spending less time with one another and that the ties that one's bound communities together have started to fray.

Back in 2000, the political scientistuthnum wrote about this idea in his book Bowling Alone. He described how many Americans were opting out of the civic and community organizations that their parents once joined. More recently, researchers have watched with growing concern as many of us spend increasing amounts of time hunched over our phones while ignoring those sitting across from us. There's another form of social isolation that's less talked about, one that disproportionately affects men. Men like Paul Kugelman. When Paul was a kid growing up in Union City, New Jersey, his parents had a simple rule. Go outside and play, come home with street lights, come on.

Each weekday, Paul walked two and come home when the street lights come on. Each weekday, Paul walked two and from school with other kids in his neighborhood. Don and George and Joanne and Henry, John. When the kids got home, they dropped off their books and ran outside to play. We'd do whatever. It was a tag, a green leave you, a cafe to flag, football, whatever. It was just, it was friendship. You had people you could talk to, you were part of a community of your peers.

It was nice. It was all so easy. Paul played pickup football in the vacant lot across the street from his home. He ran into his aunt Marie at the library. You just run into people all the time when you kind of knew everybody in the neighborhood. Then, when Paul was nine, he and his family moved 500 miles south to Martinsville, Virginia. Rural, Virginia didn't have all the amenities he was used to in New Jersey. Like the black and white cookies and coffee cake, he used to get at an iconic bakery.

Not only was this such thing as entenements, it was like, what do you mean by bagel? Paul missed his comfort foods, but that wasn't the only thing that gave him culture shock. It was my first few days in school and the teacher had a thick southern accent, and she was giving a spelling test. What I heard was Alpo, but she said Apple. But I heard Alpo, so I wrote Alpo, and these people concluded that I was a screaming idiot because I didn't understand how to spell Apple, and I was supposed to be this great student. And it kind of went downhill from there for a while.

Paul's father was frequently relocated for work, after Virginia, to Delaware, then South Carolina. Each time the family moved, Paul had to navigate a new school and a new social world. Even though he didn't realize it at the time, he was gradually developing a strategy to cope with all the moves. I didn't really interact a whole lot with folks, because it just was like we're going to move again, so I didn't want the pain, I guess. Paul eventually went off to study at the Citadel,

a military college in South Carolina. When he arrived, he was told that his classmates would become lifelong friends. But after they graduated, Paul found his former classmates were not very eager to stay in touch. Paul's life took its own trajectory. He got married, had a child, he got divorced. took its own trajectory. He got married, had a child, he got divorced. In his 30s, Paul went to law school and remarried. Just like before, he made acquaintances, but... I was in this place where, in my mind, everything was kind of transient. He didn't quite realize it, but his social world was shrinking. The acquaintances he made stayed acquaintances. He didn't have the time to develop these into real friendships. Family and work felt all-consuming.

In his mid-40s, Paul's second marriage fell apart. His ex-wife took the kids and moved several hours away. His mother had died young and Paul was estranged from his father. He talked to his daughter every day, but that routine ended too. Even though he was doing meaningful work as a lawyer, it wasn't enough. I guess lonely is the right word, it was a very lonely time. I don't remember specific triggers, it was just the sense of absolute isolation. I absolutely, it's too strong a word, I did go to work and I did have interactions at work and I cherished those.

But, you know, at the end of the day, it was just me. He drank heavily for a while. Then, he got into exercise. He eventually completed an Iron Man triathlon. But these distractions couldn't quite stamp out the fact that he was desperate for friendship for connection. So desperate that he turned to an inanimate object for comfort. I was in my apartment and one of the fixtures in the apartment was a post that runs Florida

ceiling and a banister runs out of that. And the post became my friend, I would hug the post. I would hug the post for all it was worth because I was getting some kind of feedback physically. It was at that point I realized I have got to do something because when you get to the place where you need to hug a post to feel something that you need, that's not a wake-up call, nothing is. Paul's childhood offered a model of a close-knit community. His life in his 40s was nothing like that model. Looking back, Paul says he ignored the warning signs that his social world was shrinking. I really don't think I dealt with it candidly. I think I've viewed it as sort of a circumstance

rather than a problem, it's kind of like gravity. But there is also a part of me that realized I was alone. Even when Paul got the courage to reach out to other people, he found himself budding up against social rules. He went to introduce himself to neighbors in his apartment building, but found them more bewildered than friendly. It's not like anything they said in particular, it's kind of the look, the countenance. Like, you're an odd dude. Why is a 51-year-old guy knocking on our door to tell us he lives next door?

Right, part of it is I think there's a stigma to being viewed as being alone or lonely. The irony was Paul himself wasn't very forgiving to people who were in the same boat that he was. It's funny like when I got out into the dating realm again, you know, I'm this middleaged alone person, but I'm very wary of people who are in the same group as I am because, you know, what are you doing at this age alone?

Over and over, Paul was reminded that it was hard for a middle-aged man to form meaningful new friendships. After he started dating, he noticed how his girlfriend Kim easily struck up conversations and made new connections. She can make friends anywhere she goes, and nobody bats an eye about a woman going up and just chatting either a guy or girl up. It wasn't just Kim. It felt like there was a difference between men and women.

At one point, they were at a festival. Seemingly out of nowhere, Kim's friend Polly gathered together seven or eight people to hang out. And I had this feeling if I tried to do that, it would be like, okay, who's the creepy old dude? You know? But I don't, I think there is, I think there is a stigma for guys. And I don't know if it's just a, you know, a self-imposed thing or actually society views it that way. From my experience, I think society views it that way from my experience I think society views it that way, but I can't say for sure

He now recognizes that even though it's hard reaching out to other people is essential a rejection of The extension of an offer of friendship or acquaintance hood isn't a rejection. It's just that that person's not ready Paul's story is echoed by many other men who reached out to us in recent months. Although each story is different in the details, the same themes run through many of them. These men felt they didn't have enough friends. Even when they wanted to make new friends, they didn't know how to do it. I really look back on the last 15 or 20 years of my life and I just see such a dirt of close friendships and just don't have the kind of friendships that I once did. I am married and when my wife and I are together there are things to do and not enough time in the day

to do them with our friends. When she and I are apart from more than a day or two, I turn into a hermit. Many married men reported that their wives organized their social activities. In a recent episode of Hidden Brain, psychologist Eli Finkl explained how such over-aliance on one person is a new phenomenon. There was a time not long ago in the United States when people didn't expect their spouse to be partner and lover and best friend combined. Marriage for a long time served a set and relatively limited array of different functions for us, and over time we've piled more and more of these emotional and psychological functions, so instead of turning to our close friends

and other relatives for nights out on the town, for deep intimate disclosure, to a larger and larger extent, our spouse has replaced a lot of what we used to look to our broader social network to help us do. If many men in heterosexual relationships count on wives to be their sole providers of social connection, this places enormous pressure on women in those relationships too.

To be sure, there are exceptions to all of this. But overall, researchers are worried about increasing social isolation among men and where this might lead. Some men cope not by running an iron man or drinking or hugging an inanimate object. They take more drastic measures. I spoke to Julie Phillips about this. She's a sociology professor at Rutgers University. Which figure are you looking at here? Uh, figure two.

She walked me through a couple of graphs that show the rate of suicide among men of different age groups. Those rates vary widely from the young to the very old. Increasingly, however, middle-aged men appear to be at growing risk. We saw a fairly sharp increase in suicide rates among men, beginning in 1999. So for example among men aged 50 to 54, we saw an increase of almost 50% in their suicide rate. The increase in the suicide rate among middle-aged men is troubling. It's also a reversal of historical patterns. Compared to earlier generations, the uptick in suicide seems to be starting earlier

and earlier, especially for men. One common interpretation of this trend is that it's driven by economic problems. Julie thinks it's more complicated. The trend of rising suicide rates among middle-aged men began in the late 1990s, well before the Great Recession that started in 2007. Actually, from 1999 to 2005, the increases among the middle age were really confined to those boomers who did not have a college education. But since 2005, it has now subordinate out, it's really been across the board, we don't see these differences by education. Julie has other ideas about what might be driving these changes.

People have fewer social supports. They're more likely to live far away from family. Many are opting out of marriage. Many are getting divorced. Even when we choose to connect with others, we're often not doing it in person. I also wanted to just about the ways in which we interact and how that has changed. Certainly over the past 15, 20 years or so, I knew the rise of social media, less face-to-face contact, entertainment has become more private.

We watch a movie at home, rather than going to a theater, for example. That may also be having it, maybe contributing to feelings of isolation, social isolation that could also be producing some of these rising rates. Again, the toll of social isolation is ingest emotional. An analysis of nearly 150 studies has found that people with strong social relationships had about a 50% lower mortality risk than those with weaker ties. Julian Holtlunstad and her co-authors concluded that those with weaker social relationships

had a greater risk of death than people who were physically inactive or obese. Let me put that another way. Spending time, time building and nurturing your friendships might be just as important to your health as eating right and exercising. When we come back, we look at the cultural roots of this problem. These are, you know, human beings with unbelievable, emotional and social capacity, and we as a culture just completely try to zip it out of them, and we ignore it.

Stay with us. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. We're exploring the effects of social isolation over the course of our lives. In particular, we're looking at men who tend to have a harder time than women when it comes to making and maintaining friendships. Economic forces certainly play a role in eroding social ties, but psychologists, Nairobi, Wei, thinks that the roots of loneliness among men go deeper. She thinks they are primarily cultural, embedded,

and twisted ideas of what it takes to be a man. In the late 1980s, Nairobi worked as a counselor at a high school in Boston. She expected the boys in her school to talk about their classes, difficulties with family, violence, and the neighborhood. What they were mostly talking about is their friendships and trying to find good friendships and feeling hurt by other boys in the school. At first, she was surprised. When I started to hear boys, it was at first wondering why they weren't sounding like the boys I thought they were going to sound like.

And so essentially, it was why didn't they sound like the stereotypes that I had of them, whether as boys or as working class boys it's boys of color, etc. I was thinking they were talking a lot about, you know, friendships, they sounded like quote unquote in my head in the late 80s, like girls. She wanted to know what was wrong with the boys, not what was wrong with a stereotype. That's how stereotypes work. We know that they're not true for ourselves, but we somehow think they're true for other people. As Nairobi studied the issue, she discovered that men in other cultures and American men in other times had no problem developing clothes, intimate friendships, well into adulthood. And the men she knew, at least at one point in

their lives, had no problem being deeply and openly emotional. I actually had very, very clear memories of my brothers having similar kinds of friendships. Nairobi remembers a time when she was sitting upstairs in her parents' house, and she could hear her younger brother and his friends outside. He was out in the backyard talking with his basketball teammates. One of the guys had said something mean to one of the other guys in the group. And the four of them were processing their feelings around this mean behavior by one of the boys, towards the other boys.

And these were four tough looking basketball players, athletic, cool kids in the high school. And they were all sitting there for about an hour processing these feelings with each other. Then she remembered how her other brother had a falling out with his best friend when he was a preteen. I remember the enormous sadness of my brother around that sort of immediate sort of dramatic departure of a friendship. All this started to change how Niobe listened. I realized it was all around me that lots of boys, my brothers, my friends, my all sorts of boys and young men were talking about this desire or having these close friendships or desiring it. Nairobi took these observations with her as she went out to get a PhD.

She eventually became a developmental psychologist at NYU. She's interviewed hundreds of boys since then, often circling back to the same kids year after year. The overwhelming majority have told her things like this, which she heard from a 15-year-old named Justin. We had teenage actors read the quotes. My best friend and I love each other. That's it. You have this thing that is so deep it's within you. You can't explain it. It's just a thing that, you know, that that person is that person. And that's all that should be important in our friendship. I guess in life sometimes, two people can really, really understand each other and really

have a trust respect and love for each other. It just happens. It's like human nature. She heard this about the importance of close friends from a 16 year old. I mean, if you just have your mother and your parents to talk to, then you're just gonna have all these ideas bottled up

and you're just gonna go wacko because you can't express yourself. But as a boy's called older, something happened. It became harder for them to express tenderness and vulnerability. Boys who had talked about how they loved their best friend, or would go wacko without them, began to sound more like a stereotype of teenage boys. The ones who didn't want to have anything to do were touchy-feely stuff. Some of the boys go into sort of, I don't care, it doesn't matter, you know, whatever. But they say, I don't care so many times that you sense exactly that they do very much care. Some of the older boys did talk to Nairobi about the sadness

they felt at disappearing friendships. A high school senior described how his friendships have changed since freshman year. My friendship with my best friend is fading, but I'm saying it's still there. So I mean, it's still there because we still do stuff together, but only once in a while. It's sad because he lives only one block away from me, and I get to do stuff with him less than I get to do stuff for people who are way further. So I'm like, it's like a DJ, you just cross-fader and started fading it slowly and slowly, and now I'm like halfway through the cross-fade. This is the language of boys.

I mean, this is just remarkably beautiful language about talking about how they're feeling and what's happening in the relational world around them. So the idea is that boys aren't just being emotional. They're actually reading the world in a beautiful, you know, articulate way, which is exactly how their stereotype not to be able to do. The stereotype that boys are less emotional than girls doesn't hold up when Nairobi interviews boys. These are human beings with unbelievable emotional and social capacity and we as a culture just completely try to zip it out of them,

and we ignore it. NIOB has an explanation for why boys have trouble maintaining close bonds with one another. The reason for that struggle really is quite simple, which is that it's American masculinity, and masculine norms, and masculine expectations, that make close friendships into a girly gay thing rather than simply a human thing. So as boys grow older and and enter manhood

they begin to be overwhelmed with this expectation that somehow they have to be you know on their own. They can't depend on others they have to be on their own, they can't depend on others, they have to be fully independent, that somehow the desire for intimacy with other boys is problematic in a culture that's very hyper-masculine. This hyper-masculinity, boys pick it up quickly and unconsciously. There's one comment that Niobe can't forget. You know, it might be nice to be a girl because I wouldn't have to be so emotionalist. There's one comment that Niobe can't forget. That one quote just captured so many of the boys I've spoken with. Even parents buy into the idea that there's something to be concerned about if their teenage boys appear sensitive and vulnerable.

I think parents sometimes even get anxious when their boys sound like this. So even when you hear parents talking about their kids being very sensitive, it's often times with with their sons there's oftentimes an embarrassment about it. And parents certainly aren't you know judging their sons in the same ways but parents are part of the culture just like everybody else. Niobe has had parents come to her and say you know I think my son is gay and I'll say, oh, okay, so, you know, what makes you think that? And they'll say, well, you know, he's very sensitive. And, you know, that to me is, as depressing as the comment about it might be nice to be a girl, because then,

you know, you wouldn't have to be emotionless, because the idea is that, first of all, of course, being gay is as glorious as wonderful as being straight, but you know, the fact that they're equating sexuality with being sensitive has nothing to do with sexuality. Naomi doesn't ask the boys she interviews about their sexual orientation. Some of them might, indeed, be gay, but she thinks that boys of all sexual orientations find themselves in straight jackets that tell them that they's something wrong if they appear excessively emotional. To put this another way, the problem of hypermasculinity doesn't just affect straight boys who are worried about appearing gay.

The model of the tough guy who doesn't need others who can move through the world without being bruised by it. This model affects all boys. When boys lose their close friendships, there's more at stake than sleepovers and having someone to sit next to on the way to school. Niobe thinks there are consequences for mental health. I just don't think it's just coincidental that at the very time you hear their language, the love in their language, the emotional attunement in their language, diminish and the anger, the frustration, the I don't care of voice comes into their stories is the exact same time that the suicide rate increases.

There is no hard evidence that the decline of friendships among adolescent boys is responsible for suicide, but Nairobi is worried by a correlation. As boys' friendships start to weaken, their diary entries start to reveal mental health problems. Nairobi's concern led her to team up with another professor and a middle school teacher. The idea was to help boys connect more deeply with people they cared about. How? Asking them to conduct in-depth interviews with their loved ones. They started the program at an all-boys school and have since expanded it to other schools. At the top of the show, we heard from two 12-year-olds

at one school. My producer, Raina Cohen, talked to their classmates. So as you get older, it kind of seems like the girls drift closer to the girls and the boys drift closer to the boys Because you're going through something that's very similar as the other boys in your grade and the girls are going through something very similar Has the girls in their grades? So you kind of group up with someone you have someone in common So friendships as we get older and we hit puberty friendships, especially with the other opposite gender They can get altered in a way.

They can become more intimate or romantic. To me, it's kind of scary, because I'm not really ready for that yet. In some cases, like boys can just be friends with boys and not talk about emotional things. But if you're closer friends with that boy, then I think you feel more comfortable talking about what's going on emotionally with you. Then you would be with one of your not-as-close friends. So I think it's not true that boys don't talk to their friends about personal things.

It's actually easier to talk about personal things with your friends and your parents because they fully or mostly understand what you're going through because they're probably going through something similar like that too. But you wouldn't know that based on the way that boys are portrayed in TV shows and movies. There's more of a depth to a real relationship between friends in my age. The boys themselves have theories about what's going on. I mean, I think boys can be emotional if they want to,

but I don't think they do. I think they've just been influenced by the past of the society before that boys don't share emotions and I think that's just because they've been influenced. Already some of these kids can see what's ahead. The only acceptable place to express emotion isn't the context of a romantic relationship and you're supposed to allow those relationships to suck up all the oxygen you once gave to your friendships. When you get a girlfriend, like you have to spend a lot of time with her or if you get a boyfriend you have to spend a lot of time with him.

So like you kind of spend more time with them than you do with your best friends and then they might get jealous and react. Of course this is exactly the kind of thinking that, in 30 or 40 years, leaves middle-aged men bereft of social connection when their marriages fall apart or spouse dies. Reina asked two boys about their friendship. Do you ever say anything like, I love you or you're important to me or you're looking at me dumbfounded. I don't say I love you in well a gay way I maybe I say oh man I love you bro like a you're my you're my

dude you're important to me but now romance romance I think yes. Um yeah um he knows that he's very important to me. So we don't like... I mean, not really. Or sometimes we say, you're my man or like, I got you. And I love you bro, like we hug, but we don't go on full on holding hands. The boys we heard from in New York are already learning the lesson that there are certain kinds of friendship between men

that society deems acceptable. One is the bromance. Men can say, I love you, they can hug each other. But the bromance plot, at least as Hollywood shows it, involves supercharged testosterone, not intimacy. If there's any flash of tenderness, it comes after 90 minutes of hijinks, binge drinking, and sexual conquest.

Like in the movie, Superman. After a wild party, two teenage friends open up to each other. They're exhausted and cold up in sleeping bags. I keep late. I owe you so... I'm cared. I love you. I love you, man. I love you. I love you. I'm not you and embarrassed to say I just... I love you. I'm not even embarrassed to say. I just... I love you. I'm not embarrassed. I love you. I love you.

Bromances are not evidence that men have transcended homophobia. They're away from men to dabble in emotional connection while telegraphing to the world that they're absolutely not, not even a little bit, gay. Nairobi says some big changes need to happen for emotional 12-year-old boys to grow into emotional 42-year-olds. How do we as a culture change the culture to normalize, to humanize this fundamental human need and capacity of reading the human world and engaging with it and having quality relationships. We can change it because we already know that through gay marriage, we now accept gay marriage

as a culture. We can change anything we want to change. Men's fear of appearing gay or feminine isn't the only reason many of us end up lonely. Both men and women are plagued by a bias that pushes us towards isolation rather than connection. Nick Eppley regularly writes the Chicago Metro system. He was on the train one day when he noticed something puzzling. We happen to be one of the most social species on the planet who seems to get a lot of happiness and satisfaction from our connections with others and yet

every morning on the train and over and over again in public spaces where I'd be out and about, I would see people standing cheek to jaw well next to each other or sitting cheek to jaw well next to each other and ignoring each other. Nick is a behavioral science professor at the University of Chicago Boots School of Business. He started thinking about this odd behavior. Why do we ignore one another? One possibility is that strangers in fact are unpleasant. We don't know them and striking up a conversation would be less pleasant than sitting there in solitude so people are maximizing their well-being by sitting on the train or maybe in a cab or on a

bus or in a waiting room and ignoring each other. That's possible. The other possibility is that we actually underestimate the benefits that come from social engagement. That we think we'd be happier sitting in solitude and in fact we're just wrong about that. Nick and his co-author, Julianna Schroder, decided to figure out what was going on. They ran an experiment that involved commuters. Volunteers were assigned to one of three conditions, engage with the people around them, sit in solitude, or act as they normally would on their commute. People predicted that they would be the least happy if they had to engage with other people on the train. They were sure that what would make them happy was to be simply left alone.

But that's not what the study found. People reported being happier, less sad, and having a more pleasant commute when they connected with the person sitting next to them, than when we randomly assigned them to a condition where they were asked to sit in solitude. People's perception that their fellow commuters wanted to be left alone didn't match reality. What was happening was that volunteers thought People's perception that their fellow commuters wanted to be left alone didn't match reality. What was happening was that volunteers thought that others were less interested in talking to them than they actually were.

In one study, volunteers were asked, what percentage of people on the train would be interested in talking to you, or would be willing to talk to you if you tried. They estimated fewer than 50% of people would. As far as we can tell, the actual percentage of people who would be willing to talk to you is much closer to 100%. This distorted belief keeps us and the strangers around us from connecting with one another,

opening a conversation, making small talk. Hey, I like those pants, those are good-looking shoes. What do you think of the weather today? How long have you been riding this train? Nick says there are two steps to having a pleasant conversation, getting it started and keeping it going. And what we find in our data is that the barrier seems to be in the first of those things. It's not that people anticipate that having a conversation once it gets going will be unpleasant.

They think that'll be okay. Instead, the barrier seems to come earlier. There's anxiety about actually starting the conversation, engaging in the conversation. And that's what seems to lead people to predict that it's going to be unpleasant. Nick has an analogy. It's like climbing up a steep hill.

You've got to get over that initial speed bump at the top and then after that it seems to go pretty smoothly but if you don't get over that first initial bump you'll never get started. Of course not everyone has the same freedom to chat with strangers in the way Nick suggests. Agenda, race, appearance and many other factors affect how people view us. In some context it can be dangerous to start a conversation with a stranger. But what's clear from many of the messages we receive from hidden brain listeners is that the desire for connection is deep and in many cases, unfulfilled. Loneliness and social isolation has become more and more part of my daily life.

It's harder to make friends, it's harder to find situations that I enjoy being in. I have two or three friends that I've known since we were all teenagers. And other than that, if my wife were in a round, I would be hard pressed to have close friends other than those from a long time ago. We have perhaps more of a reason to turn to people and to wean on those friendships and those relationships to give us strength, but they're often not there in the way that they are for women or they were, you know, when we were hanging out with our friends and our friends. Think how much better life could be if we could just admit these things to someone we care about, not just to a voicemail inbox. If we could be okay with being vulnerable, with being dependent on someone who's not a spouse, if we didn't look suspiciously at older men who are friendly, or shame boys who talk about their love for their friends,

if we expected friendships to endure, even as our lives change, so they don't have to fade to silence. This episode was produced by Raina Cohen and edited by Tara Boyer. Our staff includes Jenny Schmidt, Path Shal, Laura Correll and Thomas Liu. We had original music composed by Ramteen Arableui. Special thanks to Emil and Finn Bobean who read the quotes you heard in the show. A run song here or this week is Gina Voskov. She's a teacher at the United Nations International School. She helped us arrange interviews with a group of seventh and eighth grade boys. She kindly managed a long string of emails as she coordinated between our producer, the students, and their parents.

Thank you, Gina. If you like this show, here's an important thing you can do for us, and an important thing you can do for yourself. Tell one friend about our show and consider striking up a conversation with a stranger this week. If you can't think of anything else to say, ask them, hey, do you listen to Hidden Brain? Tell us what happens next on Facebook or Twitter. I'm Shankar Vedantam, and this is NPR. you you