I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic (wave3.social)
The other day I saw a post here on HN that featured a NYT article called "Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44098369) and it definitely hit home. As a guy in my early 30s, it made me realize how I've let many of my most meaningful friendships fade. I have a good group of friends - and my wife - but it doesn't feel like when I was in college and hung out with a crew of 10+ people on a weekly basis.
So, I decided to do something about it. I’ve launched wave3.social - a platform to help guys build in-person social circles with actual depth. Think parlor.social or timeleft for guys: curated events and meaningful connections for men who don’t want their friendships to atrophy post-college.
It started as a Boston-based idea (where I live), but I built it with flexibility in mind so it could scale to other cities if there’s interest. It’s intentionally not on Meetup or Facebook - I wanted something that feels more intentional, with a better UX and less noise.
Right now, I'm in the “see if this resonates with anyone” stage. If this sounds interesting to you and you're in Boston or another city where this type of thing might be needed, drop a comment or shot me an email. I'd love to hear any feedback on the site and ideas on how we can fix the male loneliness epidemic in the work-from-home era.
727 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 318 ms ] thread1. You can't ever be real, if you are real, you are likely to be recorded doing something someone somewhere on the largest stage in the world (the public web) that someone will disapprove of, and someone else will raise their own profile by mining your impiety to prove their own concern and moral superiority.
2. Everyone is so mobile and connected online, they never have to break the ice and talk to those around them in the breakroom or geographical space, so all of our social skills have atrophied at best, or were never learned at worst. We know just enough civility to not get in fights, but we don't know how to easily break the ice or become acquaintances.
3. All the people that live in the cities are not close with each other, they didn't grow up together and don't go to church / rotary club / male-only spaces any longer because we are all supposed to pretend to be cool liberated yuppies in a hookup culture. Can't have real ties or any strongly held beliefs, that would make you religious (or worse, Religious on an actual religion), those people are bad. So I'm okay, you're okay, and we all smile. And inside, no real connections are ever made.
Not to mention testosterone levels dropping, schools being geared towards women, always co-ed spaces, and a breakup of younger and older generations because of cultural differences there too...not that the old people are always nice.
It just takes too much self-discipline to break out of the internet consistently enough to build meaningful relationships without someone / something taking the initiative. I am sort of trying to replicate that at a larger scale by removing any friction to making plans.
Would love to hear your thoughts on if / what you think the solution is.
https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
Gun ranges?
one of the unexpected consequences of social media is that people have been conflating being informed with being connected.
asking "what have you been up to?" was to be a nice easy opening into a conversation that lead to connection.
but thanks to broadcast updates on social media, your friends already know what have you've been up to, so they can delude themselves into thinking that they've maintained a relationship because they know superficial details.
but a relationship isn't built on updating a list of superficial facts. it's built by having a conversation
This is a huge reason (possibly the top reason) why I quit Facebook. I wasn't getting value from my "connections", and I figured everyone knew, more or less, what I was doing (& I knew what they were doing), so we didn't actually interact. I figured if I was no longer going to be friends with these people, I didn't want a facade. So I quit it, and I don't use the other usual suspects (Instagram, Snapchat, tiktok, etc.)
It's great. I actually have some honest to goodness friends IRL that I hug, with whom I talk about real things, etc.
I don't think this is really a big deal. "hey I saw you posted pictures from your trip. How was it" there, conversation started. Social media posts are basically all conversation starters.
Assuming you can even remember. I pretty quickly forget people's posts and updates.
Do you know ignore your friends because you think your caught up?
I lived under all of this, plus two immigrant parents with no community / role modeling, isolated in suburbia as a kid with a chronically online 20s.
Yeah that nurturing left its mark. Yet I learned to see it, and learn new patterns. In my 30s I have deep friendships. Younger, older, men, women, nb. Most are still shallow, my energy is limited, but even there sometimes we touch into depth when it comes to relationship or existential stuff.
Rewrite your programming.
It’s pop-sci, gate-keeping, always be hustling zeitgeist obfuscated by high minded toxic positivity.
Media post says there’s an epidemic. Academics come up with a theory of social science in a world where the Executive branch is blatantly manipulating the market. Fed and Congress manipulate employment options, COL through rates and tax code.
Predictions of 10-12 billion people by 2100 do not line up with real birth trends.
So much of our social truisms are made up cable TV hype that zapped the elders brains into anxious compliance. Narratives propagated in service to a random researchers rent and food money search.
Fatalistic towards a social concept is not the same as “launch the nukes, humans suck.” Non-Christians can not believe without going about shooting Christians. Not accepting someone’s dissertation is the same thing.
> Not to mention testosterone levels dropping
Why should declining testosterone levels prevent men from socializing and making friends? Logically, it should be the other way around, right?
I'm real all the time. What am I missing here?
Speaking of Gorillas, have you ever read the book Chimpanzee Politics? Crazy how at the end the other two chimps break into the one chimps cage and literally rip his nuts off. Crazy huh?
Oh wait... I'm doing that thing again, aren't I?
This is particularly egregious among single men who only want connections to women.
"Friends" who prioritize being angry and spiteful online over their meatspace relationships, sounds like.
For what it’s worth, I remember being a closeted teenager, I remember feeling like I “couldn’t” be real - but that feeling was wrong. I just hadn’t figured that out yet at the time. It seemed too scary, too risky to be real. That’s probably one of the only pieces of advice I would have given my younger self if I could go back in time - come out sooner, come out before you’re ready, come out as bi before you know you’re gay, come out as curious/questioning before that even.
Force other people to deal with you as you are, instead of constantly working to make yourself into something that you think will be more acceptable to them. Take the risk of being real.
"they never have to break the ice and talk to those around them in the breakroom or geographical space" -> I've always talked to people at work and also I joined the most socially awkward hobby I've ever seen (historical sword fencing) and people are still very chatty. I also recently started volunteering at a wildlife rehabilitator and find myself just constantly chatting.
"Can't have real ties or any strongly held beliefs, that would make you religious (or worse, Religious on an actual religion), those people are bad" -> I've been friends with a lot of religious people but also non-religious people have strongly held beliefs (I hang out with a lot of vegans and I cannot imagine claiming they are afraid to publicly hold strong beliefs).
I think your post just goes to show how different mens' experiences can be because, while I'm sure a lot of men probably can connect with this, my personal experiences could not be more opposite. I think it depends a ton on the sorts of crowds you run in, it almost sounds to me like the people you meet are generally judgy and antisocial but I've found people I'm around to be generally friendly (though I've found many people are happy to chat but are often hard to actually organize to otherwise hang out since people in their 30s are busy and some of my friends have kids now).
Not for me, I have been to plenty of meetups in my city. If you're not liked or don't get along with the others, the worst that can happen is that you'll be politely ostracized. The paranoia about being publicly "cancelled" seems very overblown.
For what it is worth, I didn't think the complainers went out of their way just to complain, they did have a genuine interest in the events. They just also liked to complain about the demographics and steer the groups towards things that would make us "more inclusive"
It always ended the same way: the group mostly dissolved
My approach is: If some group doesn't want me in their midst because we are weird in too different ways, then the feeling is mutual and I move on.
You DO, however, control your own words and actions, and generally those have a strong correlation with how you're perceived. Food for thought.
I unfortunately have known people that have died in car crashes, which is very tragic, but I don’t refuse to drive anywhere as a result. There’s no data on this but I suspect we have far more car deaths than we do individuals who have been socially ostracized as a result of someone spinning their comments as racist/misogynistic/etc…
Basically, it seems like a bad way to run your life. “I might get hit by lightning, better not go outside.”
Even if someone films you saying something, unless it's something that's offensive to enough people for it getting out to actually impact your life... what are they going to do with it? Real life is not infested by these hyper-politically-correct boogeymen people seem to fear. Nobody really cares.
Don't go around saying stuff that would disgust your grandma/boss/etc in such a way that they'd feel the need to distance themselves from you, and what power does anyone really hold here?
The only way I can really take this as a legitimate worry is someone asking for a space where they can say overtly [racist/sexist/bigoted/etc] things without consequence in which case... yeah, there might be consequences. But then at least be honest and just say "I want to start a racism club." instead of trying to convince us all the boogeyman is real.
And hell, even if someone catches you calling an autistic 5 year old black kid racist names... just start a GiveSendGo and apparently people will just give you almost a million dollars for your trouble.
Yes, I talk to an older guy, probably mid-50s, at my gym. He completely stopped helping women at the gym or even giving advise. To my knowledge, no one ever accused him of anything, but he acknowledge that he absolutely have no experience talking to or otherwise interacting with younger women. He is terrified of doing or saying something wrong and lose access to the only gym in town, so he simply avoided women at the gym. He helps out the men, young and old, just not women.
A sad fact of life, but at 50, most men aren't attractive to women 10 years younger than them, and it becomes pretty awkward and socially unacceptable to do anything that could be interpreted as flirting.
Now I don't know about the situation in gyms in the US, maybe the situation is extreme there. But generally speaking, I don't find it particularly sad if people mind their own business in the gym.
But that is part of the whole loneliness issue isn't it. I can certainly understand people wanting to just do their workout, but it's one less source of interaction between people. We don't talk to be people at the supermarket, we don't talk to people waiting for the bus, we'd rather listen to a podcast during our workout, than talk to the guy sitting on the next bench.
Very anecdotally: I'm fairly introvert, but have issues not talking, so I'll fairly regularly talk to random people. Some people will clearly prefer to be left alone, but frequently people smile and light up and start talking about all sorts of random stuff.
I'm exceedingly grateful I'm already married and don't have to put up with this minefield anymore!
There’s next to zero room for random events because travel becomes such a deliberate action. I can’t just pop into a cafe - first I need to find it and drive there.
Also our social signals are completely fucked up. Headphones and phones means that most interactions are off-limits. Probably a lot of these people do want to talk, but they’re not signaling it. And I’m not gonna be the one to bother a stranger.
If you are driving 15 minutes to 30 minutes, especially if you get on a highway for any amount of time, you could be anywhere in a 15+ mile radius. Your grocery store and your preferred bar could be 20 miles away from each other, so not likely you will run into Jim from the bar in the cereal aisle.
In the US, in VHCOL places like NYC filled with upper middle class striver / PMC types.. everything is so fleeting & ephemeral you just don't have "regulars". You just feel anonymous. Everything is moving/changing all the time, expectations and trust are low. There is a lot of classism.
I lived in buildings 8 years & had neighbors on my floor who re-introduced themselves to me many times, somehow forgetting we've met. I knew their dogs names.
The shops I go 2x/week have 50-150% annual staff turnover and even the staff that somehow last 5 years barely acknowledge recognizing me. The staff who work in my building disappear without a trace one day. My condo board president introduced herself to me for the third time recently. We stopped having package pickup for a couple years because allegedly our staff & mail woman didn't get along.
Meanwhile in the small town I spend more time, I drive, but I am a regular at some restaurants that I go maybe monthly or less. Regular to the point of waiters sending us free drinks, or knowing the same waiter from 3 different restaurants he's worked over the years, being on a first name basis. I knew my last mailman by name and sent him a retirement card. I bump into the postal clerk at my vet. The guy who cleaned my chimney gave me a great greenhouse recommendation recently.
Philadelphia, Chicago, and Seattle are extremely walkable for a large part of the city proper, in my experience. Whereas places like Phoenix, Orlando, and Dallas are sprawls where almost none of the city is walkable.
In a small town, it is easy to become a regular when there are only 5 restaurants and one vet. But in a proper "city" walkability is a major factor in community level.
I live near New York now, and while I hear from friends that they find that kind of community in some faraway boroughs of NYC, everyone in Manhattan reports your profound and deep sense of alienation from their fellow man, though some with a positive spin.
I have not seen this alienating anonymity in any other part of the country, though I have felt it whenever I'm there. As there is no other place in this country even remotely as dense or with faster turnover (not even SF), I'm fairly confident Manhattan is unique (in this country).
I think I'm just pointing out the urbanist utopia walkable American city NYC kind of already fails the claim.
I think there's a goldilocks zone of walkable, at least for the purposes of this "urbanist-I-know-everyone-utopia" feeling – you could have perfectly walkable places that aren't dense enough (people wise), so they won't work. I'm thinking of Gorham's Bluff, Alabama, which is an attempted New Urbanist project. Or, you could have Manhattan, which is also walkable but frankly mind-boggling in its density.
No offense to New York. I sometimes find myself in wordless awe of its sheer power.
People earn good money playing video games now (that wasn't the case in the 1980's) or streaming video games.
The sports heros children had while growing up used performance enhancing drugs in the 1990's.
> Not to mention testosterone levels dropping, schools being geared towards women, always co-ed spaces ...
If your childhood heros take the lazy way to success, why do we need to blame it on the other things? Using your brain is hard, as it turns out.
I've always detested parents who saw sports as the only path of success for their children. So often they were disappointed. If the parents spent time and sucked up and learned the math/science/etc their kids were learning, it may have been a better outcome for all involved.
Maybe I’m totally misinterpreting your comment but it kinda just seems like a diatribe unrelated to the comment you’re responding to.
That's not to say nobody takes pics but they do it in a quiet corner so they don't catch anyone by mistake. It makes it very respectful. The stickers are just a reminder so you don't just start flicking away when you're drunk. It makes everyone feel safer and more genuine.
2) I guess but nothing some quick ice breaking games won't fix
3) In a small town there's much more familiarity yes. But also a much deeper sense of being watched and judged. I can't live with that. Even the small city I lived in was too small for me. Everyone knows everyone's business and constantly gossip behind your back.
The nice thing in a big city is meeting new people and finding new places. And the variety. In a small town there's a lot of pressure to conform, eg often you're an outcast if you're not religious. I don't think they're bad but there's little acceptance of people who are different. So what do you do? Pretend. That's not real connection.
In a big city you can really be yourself because there's always others that are like you and you can meet them in like-minded places or events. And you can make real ties there. And even find out about other communities you might fit in.
I really hate going to male-exclusive places by the way. There's very few men I have a deep connection with (I'm male) because the whole BS thing that it's frowned upon to talk about feelings. "Men's weekends" just end up with too much beer, macho talk, shooting the shit and hanging in front of the TV watching boring sports or crappy porn. Nothing serious, fun or enlightening. That's my experience with those anyway. I find that exhausting and I always excuse myself from them now. I used to try to fit in but the others would know I hated it anyway so it was awkward.
I have much deeper relationships with lady friends. They're more open and less judgemental in general. I feel safer around them. So mixed events are a must for me.
This is a massive assumption, but maybe 'yourself' is limited to a standard deviation from the accepted mean.
That's why you have to pick the communities you engage in so you fit. You don't have to change yourself but you pick the community to suit.
It's not an assumption though. I live in a city of millions and I'm in some communities of only hundreds of people. Which thrive and even have their own places. That's the nice thing, in a city it's easy to have enough scale even to make niche communities thrive.
In my experience social settings work a lot better when they're a bit more specific. Like, about something. And there's not really one majority that fits all. In the US even the two major parties are extremely polarised and yet they are about equal in size.
Some parties I occasionally go to in London have a “we really really don’t want you to use your phone on the dance floor and will tell you off” policy.
Not necessarily as extreme as Berghain mind you. But just places and events where people are encouraged to dress or behave less typical.
Even the cosplay community now has signs to always ask before photographing a cosplayer as they might not want to be photographed without their knowledge.
In fact the really 'weird shit' places usually don't permit phones at all.
How many situations are you in where group consumption of pornography is normal? I've been in very few.
I have nothing against pornography at all but I do have a minimum quality :) I like the more stylish stuff.
Though I prefer watching people in real life, I'm lucky to have some other friends who are into that too.
Like, not that that's a bad thing- live your lice how you want- but complaints of "my complaint with all-male gatherings is that the collectively viewed pornography is of insufficiently high quality" are not necessarily the most relatable.
What my friends don't know is that I'm pretty 'liberal'. And I don't have this pent up need for horseplay. I get enough of the more real kind of play :) I just felt so out of sync. It's just so senseless and not enjoyable at all.
The kind of event is pretty common in Holland. It's a pretty typical thing for male friends to go off for a weekend once a year or so in a cabin somewhere. I've done it with several different groups.
The only way to establish relationships is to be real - so of course if you believe you can’t be real, that’ll be a problem.
Relationships kick off and grow and solidify via socializing - so of course if you’ve let your social skills atrophy and believe you have no chance to practice and improve them, that’ll be a problem.
Your third point sounds like it’s really just a combination of your first two points, discomfort with being open and honest with others, and discomfort with intentionally socializing with strangers. Of course if you avoid those things to spare yourself the discomfort, you’re also avoiding the opportunity to make friends.
The rest of it (testosterone? Co-ed?) sounds like bullshit to me.
What I hear you being concerned about is: people don’t see the value in leaving their comfort zone in order to pursue what they want. Those fears you mention about not being real, and not knowing how to socialize, and not being around others, and being forced to go to schools for women (??) just sound like irrational fears to me. None of that stuff will kill you.
If being a man is anything, then surely, being a man is facing those kinds of situations and saying “this makes me uncomfortable but it has to be done, I am afraid but I will do it anyway.”
For me, that is the male loneliness epidemic, if such a thing even exists - it’s the unwillingness of some men to face their fears and do what needs to be done to make a connection with another human being.
> The only way to establish relationships is to be real
Personally, I found emotional dissonance when people tell me this phrase. For a long time, acting like myself has ostracized me from other people and built shallow relationships. It's only when I didn't act like myself and faked it until it became a habit did I build deeper friendships.
It's emotionally difficult when your natural way of acting is not accepted.
1. I've never worried about this.
2. I regularly chat with strangers and acquaintances IRL, though I don't feel it does much to relieve loneliness or cultivate deep friendships.
3. I'm an atheist, but I don't think I've ever worried about being "religious" about something nor judged someone for being so.
I would analyze my own life as follows: friendship requires time spent together. I'm a parent with a full time job in a car centric city, which keeps me pretty busy. I may get one day or night a week to go be social or do hobbies or go to a rotary club or whatever. That's a limited amount of time, so there's a corresponding limit on how many friendships I can realistically maintain. Let alone start new friendships.
So I feel like "having it all" is not realistic. Everything takes time: working out, eating healthy, having friends, having a family, having a job, having a community, writing hacker news comments, and on and on. Most data shows that Dads now spend significantly more time with their kids than those of previous generations. So I think for people of my cohort (millennial dads) its just a case where we traded time with friends for time with family.
Well said. This is a massive problem.
Here's the thing -- by making it a 'club', and making prospective 'members' pass muster, you're just replicating HR at a big corporation. Friendship isn't so much about matching activities and interests as it is about finding someone whose sense of humor matches yours, or going through the same experience together. No matter how lonely I was, I would never audition for a 'club'. I'd much rather meet someone by just doing the activities I like, and noticing who else is around.
That consistent, shared experience what I'm trying to build. But I can appreciate the feedback that it comes across as "auditioning" as that's not the point. The goal is to get people in the same place on a consistent basis. I also believe that consistently hanging out with people who are generally interesting / agreeable is a lot more important than matching humor or hobbies.
How would you position this with that goal in mind, especially considering that some filtering needs to take place since many people won't necessarily click like you say. I'm not going to find someone whose humor matches mine by dumb luck.
Maybe I just have a weird outcast complex, but I stay away from clubs that make you get “sponsorship” by shmoozing with existing members first (country clubs, yacht clubs). That really triggers some repulsion in me for some reason.
Instead, I’ve found a few friends from shared experiences and hobbies like my local cycling club, book club, and every now and again, car meets. (Even, weirdly enough, parents of people I grew up with and connected with later on in life.)
Even when I play golf, I do it at a public club rather than a private one.
Maybe fatherhood. I’ve had some of that experience with friends I’ve made through my kid’s preschool.
This week I read an article about a local club for new fathers in Chicago. Kinda of a similar concept, friendship through shared experience.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment-culture/2025/05/2...
Given it's Meetup, there's no "auditioning". The hardest part of that is that the demographic is so enormously wide wrt age, gender, cultural and educational background, profession... it's tough for real connections to grow for people just expecting to drop in just once. But come/host consistently, and eventually clumps of people do start to gel. So you're right, consistency is key.
Also - the more simple we keep it, happy hour, dinner, the more people seem to enjoy it. Honestly, it's just an excuse to leave the house and booze at this point.
I'm thinking "auditioning" may not be a bad thing if you want to avoid some of the dragnet effects of just being open like Meetup. Explicitly going for the yuppie crowd is just a hard thing to advertise on an open platform. ie. nobody's going to show up at the "26 to 38 creatives and dev adjacent telecommuters that live in the cool neighborhood, doctors allowed if they leave their attitudes at home"-Meetup, although that was I was originally hoping for. But on closed platform you'll be able to curate better.
Good luck dude!
back in the long-long ago when i was online dating, the biggest boon it provided was that it gave you a space where you knew that it was okay flirt and that your intentions would not be misunderstood. you never had to guess if it would be a creepy time/place to flirt. you never had to worry about your intentions being misunderstood as "just being friendly". if somebody was on this app/website, they were looking to flirt and if you approached them everybody was clear that you were flirting.
doing something similar with friendship could be great.
Then do the more unique events on a different day (and let members suggest/ organise events too).
Friendship is repetition with the same group. Make it easy on people by meeting at the same time, maybe changing venue within a small area.
A group chat can be the clubhouse these days provided everyone meets regularly. I'd revoke membership from frequent no-shows. You want to limit groups to around 70 people too. Some research says above that cliques form.
I'm sure other groups have that kind of rule too, but the mandatory part is what makes it special.
Those all still exist, right? Or did they die off with the WWII generation?
I sometimes wonder how my grandparents' generation, who were generally hard-working farmers and tradesmen, and who raised large families relative to today, found the time to maintain all those groups along with their churches. Different priorities, I guess, and that was not only before the Internet, but before TV really took over.
If they really want new members, they need to self-reflect on antiquated requirements that might turn off younger people from joining their organization.
>I've let many of my most meaningful friendships fade.
At least you acknowledge that part and aren't bitter at your friends that it is somehow their fault.
>but it doesn't feel like when I was in college and hung out with a crew of 10+ people on a weekly basis
And it won't, ever again. They'll get married, move away, have kids, whatever. Just like if you played a sport in high school, or were in the band, that same group of people will never be together doing that same activity again after the last time.
>curated events and meaningful connections for men who don’t want their friendships to atrophy post-college
Except you acknowledge above your role in the "atrophying" and while you can say you didn't/don't want that to happen, you still allowed it to didn't you?
>The goal is to get people in the same place on a consistent basis.
Isn't that called the gym, the range, the golf course, softball/kickball/pickle ball team, bar, etc? I've struggled (still?) with exactly this thing as well and don't have any good advice. I will say it feels related to the notion of wanting to have a significant other but never leaving the house, you gotta put the effort in. On the bright side I read an article about a couple that missed neighborhood connections so started having coffee on their porch on Saturday mornings (or some consistent day of the week) and eventually neighbors walking by started saying hello, then stopping to chat, then bringing their own coffee, and then it became this whole neighborhood thing. So I guess I'm saying don't lose hope that you can't change things in your situation.
Do you really develop lasting friendships on the course or in rec league sports? I just haven't had that experience and the popularity of those activities is sky rocketing (see: running clubs) while the problem doesn't seem to be getting any better.
When I did rec league sports most of the guys were there to meet women
There wasn't a men's only league
I'm terrible at this. I struggle to push myself to ask deeper questions of new friends, feeling like I'm being intrusive or prying, but I think it's necessary to do this in order to move forward. When we were in college, making friends was easy, because there was a shared experience right in front of us to talk about, and that could naturally lead to deeper conversations. As we get older, that isn't really there, and it takes active, deliberate effort to get there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_men's_club
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_men%27s_club
Golf, generally, is pretty expensive. It's like minimum $50 for an outing, you need equipment, correct clothes, etc. Some places require membership, often priced intentionally exclusively. It's pretty natural for something exclusionary to get a negative cultural bias.
Oh, and it is a terrible resource hog. You can't fit many people on a golf course at any given time without disrupting gameplay, and all that grass requires a lot of water and maintenance.
> any reason to spend a couple hours outside with my friends sounds amazing
This is, of course, available in many forms that don't involve hitting balls with sticks, but also there are many varieties of ball+stick that satisfy this.
Golfing is an artificial competitive activity that exists in an artificial and manicured version of nature. There is nothing wrong with it if you like the activity, but you can just go for a hike or stroll in a park if you want to be with friends outside.
Not only is a great show that touches on relationships and loneliness and modern alienation with a touch of magical realism and esoterica and alchemy but it focuses on a fraternal (in name only, women are members) order that your grandfather might have been a member of but have disappeared due to rising individualism, rising rents and displacement.
But there's no reason we couldn't start building them again. Not high end exclusive clubs like Soho House but just a place with books and a reasonable membership fee and a bar with cheap drinks for added revenue and occasional "open to the public" events.
There could be ones for software devs, ones focused on philosophy or great literature, ones for musicians or artists.
I've run the back-of-a-napkin numbers and even in expensive cities it doesn't seem impossible if your goal is to just break even and foster a community.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2p1osv0jj8
Sadly I discovered first hand why membership is declining (this lodge was a magnet for socially inept conspiracy theorists).
Where? I searched and didn't see any where free.
Worth the $6.99 for AMC though.
I live in a big city where every member ends up knowing other member (male or female) even if your own Lodge is restricted to one sex. It's a lot of fun and I do believe it could be beneficial for a lot of incels.
Only way I can see it working is if the government pays for social spaces. An extension of the library system but more focused on events and socialising rather than being a quiet space for reading.
The government effectively does financially support social clubs by exempting them from taxes: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/other-non-profits/...
Actively providing money to clubs would be a tough sell. Grant writing is hard, grant reviewing and auditing is expensive, and there could be a PR nightmare if the government provided money to an "immoral" club or didn't provide money to certain classes of clubs.
Also, do check out the interactive map at the Huell Howser Archive, if you haven’t seen it [^0].
[^0]: https://blogs.chapman.edu/huell-howser-archives/
They're really exclusive and they always have been. You and I would not get in, not now and not in the Victorian days. Even 'new money' is usually not ok. You really have to have gone to the right school and have the right family.
The latest incarnation was "Men in Sheds" which eventually got the traditional treatment - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5qd9l3094o
You just described a country club, right down to the innate classism and exclusivity rules.
I say this as a former dude who has spent the vast, vast, vast majority of my life as a man, socializing with men and not-men, in public. I have never had a single issue.
Plenty of full explanations in this thread.
I have seen this ever since the moment me and my friends hit puberty in high school, to this very day. When a group of men is hanging out they are more relaxed. The moment a woman is in the space the vibe changes
I cannot be the only person who has noticed this
A mixed group works different socially than a male only group.
That's not because the men are socially incompetent. It's because it's a fundamentally different social situation. Even when everyone is an elite socializer.
I'm afraid you may be the one who needs to learn more about socializing.
This is the only thing you've said that I agree with
> If you lose the ability to be a normal person
What is normal for a group of men is different than what is normal for the same group of men when a woman is present
It's not rocket science here.
And why gender, but not race?
* Single men don't feel compelled to be horndogs and show off and compete.
* Married men are tired of always doing everything with their wives.
* Possible gay interest?
* Something about model trains, apparently women ruin model trains?
This is impossible in spaces where women are also present.
This says a lot about that person, that they can't imagine men socializing any other way. I think they're making excuses for their own bad behavior.
However, and this may shock you, I also love hanging out in non mixed groups. And they are not the same.
That depends on what "normal" is, and I don't think you or I get to define it.
I mostly hang out in mixed-gender groups, but I absolutely have seen the difference in vibe others in this thread have noted, when I'm hanging out with a group of just other men. Especially when compared to a mixed group that has both single men and single women.
> men are putting these strange rules and requirements on their own selves
I wouldn't call it a "rule" so much as a "phenomenon". It just seems to kinda happen. Not always, and not in every mixed-gender group, but it does happen. I don't think anyone is making up or following any kind of "rules", and I can't control group dynamics or behavior on my own.
> I don't think that's a society issue. I think that's a you issue.
I think this discussion would be more productive without thinly-veiled ad hominem attacks.
Who are you to speak for “the vast majority of women”?
Personally it's not for me, I'm a heterosexual male but I get on far better with women and find men's spaces intimidating.
And on top of that, I've heard some gay men complain about straight women in their spaces. That's just another example of this phenomenon.
A lot of people baulk at this sort of arrangement/tolerance - but I bet it's quite common.
Its frustrating and tiring experience for all men, thus the need to vent out somewhere else where these dynamics dont play out semi constantly.
I am pretty sure women see it similarly in reverse although details in dynamics are very different.
5 dudes chilling is a different dynamic than 3 guys 2 girls. People who keep insisting it's about some weird need for men to be offensive don't seem to have ever observed basic gender dynamics.(not saying you are, other responders)
I haven't observed this sort of thing happening in decades.
That being said it just comes more subtle as people get older or alternatively remove themselves from the dating pool.
As for bjj, the scenario of the instructor dating a female student and breaking up the gym in the ensuing fallout is a well-deserved trope by now. There are women at my gym and you can make it work if everyone’s bending over backwards to be professional, but it’s obviously Different.
I trained at a gym where that scenario happened, people were already leaving because the teacher was an ass in general, played favorites with the male students and created at cliquey environment.
There really isn't anything women can't handle in front of men. Thinking you have some dark thing that cant be said in front of women or that you need to change how you behave is odd and exclusive to you.
Whether or not this proposal is a good idea is not even the point: the point is that it was considered plausible, and hence that not even coastal progressives actually think it desirable to treat men and women equally.
I'm not making any claims about what anyone can or can't handle. I'm simply observing that just about every mixed group ends up adopting female norms of communication. I'm not even saying that's necessarily a bad thing for a mixed group, I think it's to some extent natural and healthy in social settings. In fact taboos that proscribe the ways men may speak in the presence of women are also quite common cross-culturally. But the fact that there is a difference remains.
The US marine corps noticed this and it was a huge point of contention (kind of still is).
If one has never spent any time in all male spaces or has and thinks that men are defective women, like the average male therapist or counsellor this may not be obvious.
In the US by the 8th grade, 48 percent of girls receive a mix of A and B grades compared to 31 percent of boys. More tellingly, Boys account for 71 percent of all school suspensions. The gap remains through high school and in college, with females representing nearly 60 percent of all college graduates.
“If you treat girls as the gold standards and boys as defective girls, that’s going to be demoralizing,” Thompson says. “What do elementary and junior high girls always say about boys their age? ‘You are so immature.’ If that’s the norm, then this system is just rigged against the boys.”
There's a wonderful bit in a 2013 Time article which illustrates that this predominant viewpoint is often indelibly coded on the (majority female) teaching staff, to the grave detriment of the male students:
https://ideas.time.com/2013/10/28/what-schools-can-do-to-hel...
//Peg Tyre’s The Trouble With Boys illustrates the point. She tells the story of a third-grader in Southern California named Justin who loved Star Wars, pirates, wars and weapons. An alarmed teacher summoned his parents to school to discuss a picture the 8-year-old had drawn of a sword fight — which included several decapitated heads. The teacher expressed “concern” about Justin’s “values.” The father, astonished by the teacher’s repugnance for a typical boy drawing, wondered if his son could ever win the approval of someone who had so little sympathy for the child’s imagination. ... If boys are constantly subject to disapproval for their interests and enthusiasms, they are likely to become disengaged and lag further behind//
I don't know that "girls" remains the gold standard so much as girls are more able to conform to broader behavioral expectations. This is not to say teenage girls are immune from hormonal-driven behavior issues, but it manifests in different ways. I have a 13-yo daughter and let me tell you it's no walk in the park. But it's absolutely not a surprise to me that boys account for the majority of problematic behavior.
If societal expectations are things like: kindness, respect, agreeableness, calmness, paying attention, not talking back, not fighting, and so on... and girls tend to conform to these while boys tend not to, that doesn't necessarily indicate a conspiracy against boys.
They can, and thats not the point of having men’s groups and men’s spacing. This only reveals your assumptions and biases.
> offensive to others
Sound like you have issues. It's a club. They meet up to play board games. Maybe you could start a club of people who are offended by everything.
There needs to be some place men can just spend time with other men. Yes, it’s a problem if those men only places become important to business or politics such that it disadvantages women, but there’s got to be something else instead, then.
Women should also have places where they can be together without men.
And there should be a majority of places where men and women can spend time equally.
This is literally anytime, anywhere though. Do just not meet up with their friends? You can go to dinner, get drinks, go hiking, play sports, bike, ski, sunbathe, play videogames and many more things in single-sex groups without raising an eyebrow. The real classic for men of a certain persuasion from a western cultural POV is golf right?
I think there's some strange cultural hangup I'm missing where the entire place needs to be single-sex.
What friends?
What you described is unrelated. Yes, people can and do go out and do stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gentlemen%27s_clubs_in...
Male-only country clubs also exist although are slightly more controversial and less common, such as Burning Tree, Garden City, Butler National, Augusta National (until the last ~10 years), Pine Valley (until the last few years).
The unfortunate reality for most of us is that these places are among the most desirable and hardest clubs to be accepted to in the world - and we probably wouldn't get in.
They're expensive to run, so they often target a wealthier demographic who can pay.
Em. Nearly all clubs on that page that I checked are open to women or no longer exist.
Several appear to be women-only social clubs, placed on the page by mistake.
They can run into trouble when they allow the public to use their facilities, or grant membership so freely that they start to seem like they aren't really private.
For an example of gender discrimination at private golf clubs:
https://www.golflink.com/lifestyle/no-women-past-rock-chicag... lists Old Elm, Bob O'Link, Butler National, and Black Sheep Golf Club as four Chicago area male-only golf clubs.
> Perhaps no club makes its restriction more apparent than Black Sheep. At the end of the club’s lengthy driveway sits a large rock and the internal slogan amongst members is, “No Women Past the Rock.”
https://forums.golfwrx.com/topic/2013806-black-sheep-golf-cl... has a comment from last year verifying that gender restriction. I have not verified the others.
Similarly historically it wasn’t just elitist hangouts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_men's_club
No women to blame there. What is the cause of the male loneliness epidemic then?
Like a bar, but you know that if they're there, they know a few people and aren't crazy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisebridge
when i first moved back to the city from overseas, noisebridge was an awesome third place to hang out and hack on stuff while meeting regulars.
I mean, I am a decent person, but somehow I ended up with a key that worked for the the building and the 2nd floor of the old Mission location of Noisebridge by my second or third visit, despite never having been a member or paying dues etc. I got it from someone else who had also gotten it from someone else if I remember correctly. Only members were supposed to have keys, I think? I wasn't shy about the fact I wasn't one, but I didn't flash the key around either. Hopefully they have tightened up on that if it's a recurring issue.
Stuff like getting the key was just part of the scene in SF that you could randomly encounter, like the time I was working security for the American Psychiatric Association trade show at the Moscone Center and the Church of Scientology protested against the conference right outside, then a flash mob counter-protest of anons in Guy Fawkes masks appeared. SF is just weird like that for some people I guess. Maybe it's just me?
It was a huge issue. Noisebridge has had to do a "reboot" three times now, 2014, 2017, and 2024. The whole place was closed for some time, everything was cleaned out, and members were re-authorized.
High school kids go there to work on class projects together, just like I did at the library when I was a teenager.
But I bet a social club that rigorously enforced the rules of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood would be more popular than anything goes.
We also threw open to the public art shows and parties with drink sponsorships and everything.
What's better than a church environment? A "city gates" environment.
I am not part of the church any longer, a properly run co-working space, not one that tried to emulate soul less corporate America, gives space for the wealthy tech bro and the poor artist to have multi round interaction that both build trust and provide implicit (and sometimes explicit) accountability. Most of us operate in environments where, outside of family and work there is nothing of value to lose, and churches and other places that exhibit ideological ratchet effects aren't great.
The city gates, that's really the best place to be, we far outpunched our startup weight in the city we were in because we built trust more than anything.
I come from a missionary family that has probably planted more churches by number than any other group, one family far outstripping many mission agencies. That experience and family knowledge was absolutely critical to making what we did work.
But in the U.S. I don't think anyone is interested in funding a 3rd places startup, it's sad that the same people who will talk about the power of 100 true fans don't get the power of 100 people in true community and the way that opens up thousands of paths for people to try things they otherwise wouldn't be able to.
Sports clubs are full of friends you can make. I'm close with alot of guys that I train with.
Try tennis, or lifting, or running, or golf. Do NOT go to DnD meetups and other low effort stuff. Exertion is what forms bonds.
Schultz envisioned Starbucks as a “third place” between home and work, fostering community and connection.
https://mulcahyconsultants.com/2023/12/14/howard-schultz-and...
https://apnews.com/article/starbucks-racism-philadelphia-man...
At least you can/could play cards, converse with your fellows or some randoms.
CAMRA's definition includes "Is open to the public without membership or residency" and a bunch more that amount to "does not necessarily serve food" to distinguish from restaurants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gentlemen%27s_clubs_in...
NYC and London are both having a bit of a renaissance of new clubs being founded, although most of them are coed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kkryT4nOwA - Michigan Automotive Relic Society
Me and my brother would go there after school to play some board games or dungeons and dragons during the weekends.
Each shed has its own policy and opening hours, best to look up your own local shed.
Without exception the people who were my closest friends in high school didn't really keep in touch when we all went off to college. The friendships I made in college did not persist after graduation. There's a guy at work I had lunch with almost every day for years, he retired and that was the last time I saw him. There was a group of fathers I was friendly with because our kids were playing ball together on the same team. The kids got older and went their separate ways, and we really don't see each other anymore.
Maintaining friendships takes work if circumstances don't assist.
Might be largely the same for women, but it seems to me they tend to make more of an effort to keep in touch and keep getting together.
This is all just my experience so I could be way off I guess.
I'm not saying this is always easy, and sometimes one or more people in the friend group just decide that the friendships aren't that important to them to maintain. But it's absolutely possible, and can be very rewarding.
The friends that persist beyond what you describe are because we invent some shared project to work on together. Really doesn’t matter what it is.
I have three friends from high school that I still keep in touch with. We have a Whatsapp group that isn't super active, but we chat once or twice a month there. Even though we all live in different places now, we meet up roughly once per year, for a few days, to see each other and hang out, and our chat traffic jumps in frequency for a couple months after that meetup.
I have three friends from college that I still keep in touch with. We have a Signal group that's a bit more active than my high school friend group, with weekly activity. In-person meetings are rare; two of the friends have larger than average family obligations. In college we originally bonded over scifi TV shows, and when new episodes of some shows we all enjoy come out, we'll try to do group watches of them on Zoom (usually with a general chat/hangout before we start watching).
I have three friends from a previous job that I still keep in touch with (I have other friends from this same job that I still keep in touch with and see often enough, but this particular group struck me as a true "friend group" and not just a random collection of people who sometimes see each other in various combinations). We have a Slack workspace that was originally created for one of the guys' bachelor parties in 2018 (this is the only all-male group out of the three). Two of us still live within a ~30 minute drive of each other, but the other two have moved away. The Slack is very active, with near-daily activity, even though one of the four of us lives in a drastically different time zone now. In-person meetups are a bit more informal (and rare for the one of us who lives across the world); often it will just be two or three of the four, depending on who is visiting someone else's city at the time.
While I'm not involved in the day-to-day lives of these friends, they are still dear to me, and maintaining these connections is important to me. I guess it's important to all of us; in the past I've been a member of group chats where there are one or two people who never participate, even though the others do regularly, and it always feels like a bummer to see their name in the list but never hear from them (the former co-worker group I described is like this). It's a tough thing, though, when you think about it: to make these sorts of things successful, the friendships need to be of roughly the same importance to everyone in the group, and I expect that's a difficult bar to meet sometimes.
In my experience, she lied to you.
The split isn't married vs non-married, it's with kids vs without kids.
I hate to have to be the one to say it, but speaking from my mid-forties, what you are experiencing is called "entering your 30s." If you try to sell "fix loneliness" to a "not committed yet to growing TF up" market you're cooked.
Ironically, I'm probably pretty close to who you think you want to hear from and speak to. But you can't justify my time and wouldn't hear me in any case. Find something else to sell and someone else to sell to.
To me this doesn't feel like some cheesy attempt to fix loneliness with tech. It’s just creating a space for something that’s clearly missing for a lot of people. Writing it off feels like part of the problem..
It isn't that I lack sympathy for the problem, for goodness' sake. Indeed to a reasonable first approximation the only reason I bothered to comment is that "male loneliness" is of interest to me, enough so that a solution aimed at an irrelevant epiphenomenon of a different problem strikes me as worth objecting to on that basis.
That said, the formulation deserves some obloquy of its own, in that I think it likewise hits the nail squarely on the side by misattributing a problem of general social atomization. It isn't a "men problem" per se, so much as that - for various reasons related largely to social roles and experiences, and varying interests and approaches to same - men tend to make a good bellwether for some aspects of what I maintain is a broader social problem. Think "bedrotting" versus "gooncaving" - different codings, especially as respects men being defined as the sexually assertive gender, but the same basic social behavior. (Or asocial behavior, which is of course the crux of the problem.)
Note too that that isn't the "early 30s in Park Slope" problem. (I guess Boston has different trendoid neighborhoods. I don't care.) That, to reiterate, is the very natural shift of focus as young careers and young families both demand time and interest, as described in the OP. That's normal for this stage of life, and while it is very much worthwhile to try to maintain a broad circle, that really will not be effectively fostered by college-style social events no one is going to have the time to attend anyway - not when the same time could be spent more productively on social events that also build and reinforce bonds in the spheres which do and should absorb your interest at this time.
I don't think that's really it. Well, it's a reason, but not the cause. I think people (not strictly men, but maybe this hits men harder for some reason) lose touch because they fail to understand that it requires different skills, mindset, and effort to maintain friendships when work, family, and life "get in the way".
If your friend group is centered around hanging out in the college dorms or doing coursework together, or going out for drinks after work, or just the ease of scheduling things because no one yet has kids, then when those things change, the friendship maintenance changes too. I think some people don't get that, or just aren't good at figuring out what they need to do to keep the friendship going. It's often more work, too, which can be difficult to adapt to.
Happy to hear what you have to say - email is in my bio - although I doubt we'd have a meaningful conversation if you write me off as trying to sell something instead of taking the more gracious interpretation that I want to help other guys build strong friendships (and build them for myself).
Don't get me wrong; I think you'll probably pivot to something more successful if you abandon the sunk cost soon enough. Just that I am extremely confident you will need to make that pivot. Of course you shouldn't take my word for it, though.
I know plenty of single guys who'd like this sort of club.
This definitely emphasises the importance of the filter event...
Excluding, let’s be honest, a couple of weirdos who don’t use FB as ideological stance is a problem.
Excluding huge swaths of “normies”(who are majority of people) by setting up third party website with zero reputation is not.
The only thing i found out, after connecting with a few people i know around me and scrolling through their history on facebook...the big party is over and i am too late.
Facebook isn't what it was anymore and people don't use it that much to connect with others.
On the other hand, some people are shamed to admit this point, as a result, joining this kind of club will make them look more shamed. It's just nature of humanity.
I think there should be a better idea for the second type of people.
Basically, the Friendship Paradox https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Friendship_paradox
I'm may not be the target audience if this is recently post-college, but the thing that strikes me is these activities feel a bit performatively male.
I guess my hot-take is there are certain things that people genuinely love (e.g. improv, dnd, video games, rock-climbing) perception be damned, and there are certain things that people do because they are socially acceptable stereotypes for males: drink craft beer, whiskey, poker, grilling, sports? And that it's about 20x easier to make real friends from the former than the latter.
My experience has always been if somebody says "Come over for poker night," it's gonna be much more awkward than if somebody says "Come over because I'm gonna play video games on the couch and smoke a joint and it'd be fun to have somebody to chat with while I do that." [I'd be curious to hear where other people fall on that topic]
Anyways, not to discourage your current tack, nor even say you should do a blunts and video-games event, but I just think some of the activities on the website seem branded to a very narrow type of guy (business majors? for lack of a better stereotype)
Brah that's just your experience. The activities that you described as `socially acceptable stereotypes for males` haven't been popular for longer than any ancestor you've spoken to has been alive as a conspiracy theory.
Some people legitimately like these activities and have the same reaction to `improv, dnd, video games, rock-climbing` as you do to the stereotypically male activities
?
We all live in this interconnected thing called a "culture." Maybe you've heard of it. It affects what we all do it at all times, the clothes we wear, what we value, who we strive to be, and where we spend most of our money.
In fact, some people would even give up their lives if the cultural pressure told them to. I bet most people are so heavily subjected to the pressures of cultures that they wouldn't violate harmless cultural norms for $1,000 a day (e.g. crossdressing).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture
I don't mean to present this as entirely black-and-white. But also if you think that the interest in poker in college-aged-boys spiking after Casino Royale is a coincidence I think you're kidding yourself.
We're working through R. Kent Hughes "Disciplines of a Godly Man". https://a.co/d/7jeAATr
Much of the NYT article can be explained away by the Gell-Mann effect. During most of human history it was hard to maintain multiple strong bonds anyway; long distance communication pre-internet was hard too. There are plenty of modern opportunities for finding friends based on interests: conferences, concerts, sports bars etc. How much of this discussion is a moral panic caused by imprecise notions which by definition cannot be described by hard data?
I'm in my 40s and in my 20s (shortly after college), I created a meetup group and regularly met with a group of 10-12 people weekly (parties, hangouts, dinner, activities).
We are all married now (some with kids) and now meet once/month and the meetup group disbanded before covid. As I've gotten older, I realized that some friends don't make it to a new phase of life. Sometimes because it was a friendship of proximity (like a neighbor or co-worker) and other times because you are doing something different with your life.
When people get married, change jobs, start families, move away... then it actually requires a solid amount of effort to maintain those friendships. For some people they really value the friendships enough to put in that work, and for others they don't (and when they do, it has to be mutual for it to work out). The sad part is when people value the friendships, but don't understand that shift, and what's required, and those friendships fizzle out.
I still maintain friendships with a 10-15 people who no longer live near me, and who are doing different things with their lives, and are in very different circumstances than I am. The oldest of these friendships are pushing 30 years now. It's doable, but everyone needs to be on the same page as to what they expect from and what effort they're willing to put into the friendships.
I very much agree with this being its own thing independent of Big Social Media. We need more of that. Too many of these types of things have the flaw that their only online presence is a Facebook group, which implicitly excludes me and anyone else who doesn't have nor want a FB account.