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I wonder how these might look. Building relationships is really hard and ultimately that's what's needed. To build relationships, you need repeated exposure and

I wonder how these might look. Building relationships is really hard and ultimately that's what's needed. To build relationships, you need repeated exposure and need to overcome an initial barrier of familiarity to get to the point where you can have meaningful interactions and not just smalltalk. Given men are also bad at maintaining relationships, I wonder if something like different, more communal living arrangements would be beneficial. I am thinking something like a dorm, but more luxurious with the common areas being more of a focus. An idea that might accelerate overcoming the initial familiarity barrier might be something like the "question to fall in love" that made their rounds a few years back. I've seen a speed-dating version of similar, increasingly intimate questions build enormous feeling of trust within ~30 minutes as an icebreaker at a T-Group.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
seydor 4y ago
Transactional but also intentional. Nothing more or less. Men are not bad at maintaining relationships, that is a falsehood. Historically, men built all the hierarchical structures we have today. Antrhopologists used to say that men build a large and shallow network of relationships (while women prefer small but more intimate groups or pairs). It doesn't have to involve communal living, but instead regular gatherings. Basically what traditional groups like church or brotherhoods like the freemasons did. Currently, however, there is a stigma against those things which has to be overcome
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  I'm not sure if the shallow, mostly transactional relations men build help in the context of loneliness. Non-religious versions of "churches" seem to fail due to a lack of regular attendance. Free Masons seem to have solved this by building some kinds of pressure to attend. I genuinely wonder why they fell out of favor. Did they just become uncool?
  - foobarian 4y ago
    I think so. I've been around some of the amvet/freemason/rotary clubs and there is an age group that mostly dominates that might turn away newcomers. Could be it's like how younger people shied away from Facebook to Instagram, and then the even younger people hopped onto Tiktok.
  - seydor 4y ago
    You can also look at other communities that sprang up, like e.g. the gay community, who faced marginalization as well. Gatherings like pride parades are creating a sense of community which supports people
  - motohagiography 4y ago
    Guys who drop out of freemasonry tend to do so because their girlfriends/wives disapprove (or would) of the social status of the other men involved. I'm in the middle of this issue now, and I can say it's because a generation of men (boomer/X) grew up depending on their girlfriends/wives to manage their social lives. There are actually guys who bring their wives/girlfriends to meet new male friends to vet the guys for approval. It's a generation of men who lack normal adult boundaries with the women in their lives. GenX men are largely codependent and needy owing to pressure to be "sensitive," being largely raised in broken homes, so their ideal relationship now resembles what is effectively sexual cannibalism elsewhere in nature. They don't identify as men because they think men are who hurt their mothers, the source of their belief in a perfect infant self. They're unweaned. The knock on effects to millenials make forming male friendships really fraught. Add the hyper-mainstreaming of gay culture, and suddenly male friendships have all the absurdity of how badly boys cling to women and hang around as "friends" hoping for more, but now they're doing it to straight male friends, and it undermines the trust in the fabric of male social networks. Can gay men have close straight male friends without holding out hope for more? Some, not all etc, but I would say the confluence of straight men codependently outsourcing their social lives to their wives/girlfriends because once they have one of those they're somehow made, and the complexities of normalized gay culture where boys-being-boys, they're hanging on for hope has really frayed the fabric. We're all still trying to navigate a radically new (and arguably, devastated) landscape without a lot of ground rules.
pastacacioepepe 4y ago
We've lived communally for a long time and across many different cultures and ethnicities. You just have to look at the past to know how that would look. Any barrier you might see right now is the consequence of the cultural switch to individualism, and that again is a direct consequence of the transition to market based economies.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

seydor 4y ago

Transactional but also intentional. Nothing more or less. Men are not bad at maintaining relationships, that is a falsehood. Historically, men built all the hierarchical structures we have today. Antrhopologists used to say that men build a large and shallow network of relationships (while women prefer small but more intimate groups or pairs). It doesn't have to involve communal living, but instead regular gatherings. Basically what traditional groups like church or brotherhoods like the freemasons did. Currently, however, there is a stigma against those things which has to be overcome

ajmurmann 4y ago
I'm not sure if the shallow, mostly transactional relations men build help in the context of loneliness. Non-religious versions of "churches" seem to fail due to a lack of regular attendance. Free Masons seem to have solved this by building some kinds of pressure to attend. I genuinely wonder why they fell out of favor. Did they just become uncool?
- foobarian 4y ago
  I think so. I've been around some of the amvet/freemason/rotary clubs and there is an age group that mostly dominates that might turn away newcomers. Could be it's like how younger people shied away from Facebook to Instagram, and then the even younger people hopped onto Tiktok.
- seydor 4y ago
  You can also look at other communities that sprang up, like e.g. the gay community, who faced marginalization as well. Gatherings like pride parades are creating a sense of community which supports people
- motohagiography 4y ago
  Guys who drop out of freemasonry tend to do so because their girlfriends/wives disapprove (or would) of the social status of the other men involved. I'm in the middle of this issue now, and I can say it's because a generation of men (boomer/X) grew up depending on their girlfriends/wives to manage their social lives. There are actually guys who bring their wives/girlfriends to meet new male friends to vet the guys for approval. It's a generation of men who lack normal adult boundaries with the women in their lives. GenX men are largely codependent and needy owing to pressure to be "sensitive," being largely raised in broken homes, so their ideal relationship now resembles what is effectively sexual cannibalism elsewhere in nature. They don't identify as men because they think men are who hurt their mothers, the source of their belief in a perfect infant self. They're unweaned. The knock on effects to millenials make forming male friendships really fraught. Add the hyper-mainstreaming of gay culture, and suddenly male friendships have all the absurdity of how badly boys cling to women and hang around as "friends" hoping for more, but now they're doing it to straight male friends, and it undermines the trust in the fabric of male social networks. Can gay men have close straight male friends without holding out hope for more? Some, not all etc, but I would say the confluence of straight men codependently outsourcing their social lives to their wives/girlfriends because once they have one of those they're somehow made, and the complexities of normalized gay culture where boys-being-boys, they're hanging on for hope has really frayed the fabric. We're all still trying to navigate a radically new (and arguably, devastated) landscape without a lot of ground rules.

pastacacioepepe 4y ago

We've lived communally for a long time and across many different cultures and ethnicities. You just have to look at the past to know how that would look. Any barrier you might see right now is the consequence of the cultural switch to individualism, and that again is a direct consequence of the transition to market based economies.