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
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?
Could be it's like how younger people shied away from Facebook to Instagram, and then the even younger people hopped onto Tiktok.
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.
Stuff like:
> 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.
What?
I had direct experience with the growth issues facing a traditional fraternal organization. We can't really use the words we mean when we talk about the jargon this comment uses, but suffice it to say, among the scores of men I know socially, the people who use that jargon are punchlines.
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.
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.