You may be one of the six million viewers on YouTube who watched the Saturday Night Live skit about the “Man Park,” where the lonely boyfriends of successful Manhattan women are taken to make friends. It’s funny because it captures something real: many men do struggle to make and maintain friendships. But it also gets something important wrong, as I discuss with Sam Pressler and Soren Duggan: The men likely to be disconnected are not, for the most part, college-educated boyfriends and husbands of successful urban women. They are men and women without college degrees. So why is this a gender issue? Because fewer men are enrolling in higher education (a trend AIBM aims to address through the Higher Education Male Achievement Collaborative). Sam and Soren walk us through their recent report, Nobody to Call: An exploration of friendship, community, and purpose among men without college degrees. It does something that much of the public conversation about men fails to do: it listens. We’re talking about men without listening to them Nobody to Call emerged from Sam and Soren’s frustration with elite discussions about working-class men. Journalists, academics, and policymakers often have strong opinions about non-college-educated men despite having little direct contact with them. As a result, these disconnected men become villains, victims, voters, and problems to be solved. Their complex lives are flattened into stereotypes. But if you listen, a different picture emerges. Throughout the 30 in-depth interviews, these men are craving connection and contribution. They want friends. They want mentors. They want to be useful. They want someone to call, and they want to be the kind of person someone else can call. Are friendships really so important? Friendship is more than fun; it is a social safety net. It protects health, buffers stress, expands opportunity, and gives people a sense of being needed. Beyond emotional and practical support, friends introduce us to job leads, romantic partners, financial tips, and other friends. They often motivate us to exercise, read a book, and take our medicine. They help us live longer and healthier lives. Without strong social relationships, our bodies protest, creating more stress hormones, inflammation, and poorer sleep and cognitive function. And yet, for many of the men in Nobody to Call, friendship had become fragile, distant, or absent. More disconnected than was expected Sam and Soren expected roughly one-quarter of the men to report having no close friends based on their original survey responses. Instead, about half said they lacked close friendships. Even those men who claimed to have close friends described relationships that appeared fragile or distant. Some of the men had one meaningful connection—a friend, relative, partner, or coworker—but if that relationship disappeared through death, incarceration, conflict, or relocation, their entire social life would collapse over a single point of failure. The friendship cliff and the slow drift Most of the men had friends in high school. School provides proximity, shared experience, and repeated low-stakes interactions. Work might seem like the obvious successor. But for many of the men Sam and Soren interviewed, work did not provide durable friendship. Some worked unstable schedules. Some moved between jobs. Others avoided becoming too attached because they had learned that workplace relationships could disappear quickly. Work gave income, but it rarely gave belonging. Into their 30s, many men experienced slow social atrophy. Friends drifted away. People got busy. Someone moved. Someone stopped texting. Eventually, there’s nobody to call. Family remains the strongest source of meaning If friendship was often absent, family frequently served as the most common source of connection and purpose. Fatherhood especially stood out. Many men described becoming fathers as a profound turning point that gave structure and meaning to their lives. Others found a similar sense of purpose as uncles, brothers, and caregivers. However, caregiving responsibilities could easily become overwhelming. Some men felt so consumed by work and family obligations that they had little capacity left to build friendships or community outside of the home. The biggest obstacle may be shame Many of the men blamed themselves for their isolation. They described lacking confidence, social skills, self-esteem, or initiative. They felt they needed to “fix themselves” before they could build relationships. Clearly, confidence and social skills matter, but Sam and Soren arrived at a different conclusion: disconnection is a societal failure. The burden should not rest entirely on isolated individuals to solve a problem created by the erosion of community institutions. Men are more emotionally open than stereotypes suggest The participants were often remarkably candid, vulnerable, and emotionally articulate. They spoke openly about loneliness, grief, regret, and longing. Soren notes the stark contrast between what he heard in interviews and the common image of emotionally closed-off men. The issue isn’t an unwillingness to talk. Rather, it is a shortage of opportunities to be heard. Building emotional and social skills into basic education could certainly help. But especially for men, we must also rebuild the institutions, rituals, spaces, and relationships that make connection possible in the first place. Technology is not the whole story, or enough Given our work on boys, men, and online life, I expected technology to come up more often in the interviews. So too did Sam and Soren. It did come up, occasionally. Some men played video games with others. Some had online friends. Some followed influencers who served as substitute mentors, especially when fathers or other role models were absent. But technology did not dominate the interviews in the same way it tends to dominate media and podcast discourse about loneliness and disconnection. The more important finding was that online connection rarely translated into in-person community. This does not mean online friendships are necessarily superficial. I have meaningful online relationships that I value deeply, and, likely, you do too. But online connection by itself is not enough. The men in this report wanted to be seen, known, and needed in the places where they actually live. So far, our social technologies have been designed to capture attention more than build belonging. Calling men in Calling men in means building spaces and rituals where connection is easier to find and harder to lose. That could include: * Mentorship built into vocational programs, apprenticeships, community colleges, and workforce training. * Local rites of passage that help young men understand what adulthood asks of them and what their community offers in return. * Low-cost spaces where men can contribute, repair, coach, build, teach, serve, and be useful. * Stronger support for fathers, uncles, caregivers, and men who find purpose through family. * More attention to the transition after high school as a period of social risk, not just educational or economic risk. * Public or national service models that give young people shared responsibility, cross-class relationships, and a role in something larger than themselves. * Technology designed to introduce neighbors, support mutual aid, and move people toward local relationships rather than endless passive consumption about distant celebrities. There is no single solution, as Sam emphasizes toward the end of our conversation. Social infrastructure is the accumulation of many places, rituals, habits, institutions, and invitations that cultivate belonging. The male loneliness discourse often asks: What is wrong with men? Nobody to Call asks a better question: How do we rebuild and renew the structures that once helped men build connected lives? For more coverage of Nobody to Call, see: The Social Wealth Men Without College Degrees Need by Bruno V. Manno Disclosure: Funding for Nobody to Call was provided by Rise Together, a donor-advised fund sponsored and administered by National Philanthropic Trust and established by Richard Reeves, President of the American Institute for Boys and Men. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.menonline.org
