Pandemic Isolation Is Forcing Men to Realize They Need Deeper Friendships

Because of the pandemic and dealing with isolation and the need for social interaction, it has forced some men to realize that they need deeper friendships. Many male friendships are rooted in "shoulder-to-shoulder" interactions such as watching sports or playing video games and with most of that gone right now, they are feeling the need more than ever to make deeper connections. Samantha Schmidt, reporter at the Washington Post, joins us for how some men are looking for more out of their friendships.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Monday, December seven. I'm onscar Ram Mirrors from the
Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America.
Because of the pandemic and dealing with isolation and the
need for social interaction, it has forced some men to
realize that they need deeper friendships. Many male friendships are
rooted in shoulder to shoulder interactions such as watching sports,
are playing video games, and with most of that gone

(00:22):
right now, they're feeling the need more than ever to
make deeper connections. Samantha Schmidt, reporter at the Washington Post,
joins us for how some men are looking for more
out of their friends. Thanks for joining, Samantha, Thanks so
much for having me. I wanted to talk about an
article you wrote for the Post talking about men and
how the pandemic is forcing some of them to realize

(00:43):
they need deeper friendships. A lot of male friendships are
often rooted in these kind of shoulder to shoulder interactions,
watching sports together, playing video games, things like that, and
with things shut down, you know, you can't really even
go out with a lot of people. Men are finding
out the they're not faring so well really, and they
need these outlets they need their friends to be vulnerable

(01:04):
in a sense, Samantha, you spoke to a lot of
different guys saying just this exact same thing, So tell
us a little bit about what you're learning. I was
really moved by the outpouring of emails I got when
I tweeted about the story idea, and a lot of
men were just telling me that they were noticing how
much they had relied on these interactions that, you know,

(01:25):
a psychologist referred to them as shoulder or shoulder interactions,
you know, watching football, playing video games, playing golf, interactions
where you didn't really talk that much. But it's kind
of like the way that a lot of men would
see their guy friends. And now without that, they're realizing
they had lost touch with their male friends, or they
had a harder time connecting with them, and they didn't
really have a clear outlet for talking about what they

(01:47):
were going through without having those kind of more casual
in person interactions, and a lot of people were really lonely.
But a lot of people were also finding new ways
to connect, and we're realizing that they were talking to
their guy friends in ways that were much deeper and
much more personal than before. Yeah, definitely. You know, a
lot of these ways that they were reconnecting were very

(02:08):
similar to a lot of other people, you know, zoom calls,
text group chains and things like that. But in one
of the examples that you gave there, you said that
some groups of guys were now exchanging over a hundred
text messages a day, and a lot of it could
have been kind of stream of consciousness, just fun stuff,
top of mind things, but that little by little things
did start to get deeper, deeper conversations as you mentioned

(02:29):
about loneliness, the isolation, things like that. And actually one
of the examples that keep standing out for me is
one dad I talked to said he realized his wife,
for example, has for her entire life gone on walks
with her female friends. It's something that she does all
the time, just to chat and catch up. But he
had never thought to do that with his guy friends.
You know, he mostly socialized at the softball league or

(02:51):
going out for drinks watching football, But he has now
in the last few months, gone on several walks with
his guy friends in parks here, dc us to catch
up and he's just he loves it, and he's realizing,
why did I never do this before this never dawneda
me to say, hey, man, you want to go for
a walk at lunch time today? But he's really enjoying
it and finding that he's talking about things kind of
been more personal ways. And you know, when you don't

(03:13):
have the distraction of everything else you're doing in these
other activities, like you, it really gives you a chance
to just talk and let go a bit more. Yeah,
definitely a shift for these men in their relationships with
each other. And why do experts think that this is
the case for a lot of men. Why don't they
connect in other deeper ways until you know, until it's
too late, let's say, until the pandemic hits, and then

(03:35):
they realized later that they should have been doing it
the whole time. There's not a ton of research on this,
but a few people have over the years explored this issue,
which they say is really a crisis of connections between men,
and they think it's really rooted in the way that
young men are raised. And I talked to this one
professor Niobe Way at n y U, who got a

(03:56):
book about boys friendships, and she says that as young
boys may ill friends when they're really young, they actually
tend to be very vulnerable with each other, and they
share secrets and they have these like very kind of
loving feelings towards each other. But then once they start
to enter adolescents, like fifteen sixteen, so they really start
to kind of shut down and be offensive, and suddenly
they're worried that it's going to seem gay for them

(04:17):
to be close with their guy friends. And so she
thinks is kind of rooted in in homophobia and misogyny
in this culture that just discourages that emotional intimacy between men.
So suddenly it becomes weird to just connect with men
for the sake of connecting and needs to be rooted
in a more masculine activity such a sports or video games.
There was a guy you profiled in your article. His
name was Manny, who went through this whole thing. He

(04:39):
went through a breakup. He was obviously isolated because of
shutdowns and things, and he realized that he really needed
social interaction that he wasn't getting anymore when he was
just going to go see the you know, sports games
and things like that, and you kind of go throughout
the article with him. At the end, he says, you know,
I also needed to step up too, and I'm going
to be real with my friends now and let them

(05:01):
know that I need to talk about stuff or be
vulnerable in those senses. It was really hard for him,
and I think it shows how this is the time
when a lot of people are struggling and sometimes when
these kind of moments come up, and also when they're
going through something like a breakup and suddenly you lose
somebody that you were more dependent on for that kind
of emotional and intimacy. Suddenly realized who do I go

(05:21):
to for this? Who can I open up to? And
Manny realized that he had kind of grown apart from
a lot of the guy friends that he would have
hung out with before, and he was trying to be
more deliberate, more intentional about opening up to them and
being vulnerable around them. And he hopes that by him
doing that, but they'll respond the same way that they'll
start to talk about their own lives, because he suddenly realized, like,

(05:43):
I don't actually know that much about their personal lives.
I haven't met a lot of their family members. You
kind of lose some of those more personal details when
you don't have a kind of culture of checking in
on each other and asking about more personal stuff that's
going on in your life. Reading throughout your article, I
just kept thinking about those memes going around that said
check in on your friends. They're not doing all right,

(06:04):
and you know, going through this, this applies to men
and women alike. If he's a big tough guy or not,
the guys are feeling some of that pain too, So
definitely check in on all of your friends and do
it for them, and do it for yourself. So just
a great little read, and I hope everybody takes the
time to check it out. Samantha Schmidt, reporter at the
Washington Post covering gender and family issues. Thank you very

(06:24):
much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me.
I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't
forget that. For today's big news stories, you can check
me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday.
So follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you
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