The emotional support thing is a consequence of building relationships when you do not need help, when you are fine. If you build them only when you need emotional support, you will be perceived as needy and people will get tired of it.
Men, broadly, have plenty of "relationships" that they invest themselves in and are extremely loyaly to.
What the study was about, and the discussion is about, is emotional support, and that quality is often not seen (or at least acknowledged) in the intense, loyal, committed, and earnestly worked on relationships that men do form, because its only one quality among a whole plethora that might define a relationship.
You build emotional support network by building it when you do not need emotional support.
men's friends on the other hand, don't at all mean that they can open up and get emotional support from them. they have to go an extra step in their friendships to find those that they can get emotional support from.
They do show up at my art and DnD meetups and some of them can barely talk, at first, but after a while you can see them start to come out of their shell, I find it takes about two years before their lives become transformed.
But again, they have to show up and thats on them.
And since we’re playing language/interpretation games: this attitude that men in particular feel entitlement in this area is backlash against people writing about problems that men have is if it isn’t simply and narrowly a problem of the individual. It starts like this:
- Initially it’s taboo
- Then it’s a topic about how men are failing as individuals
- Then it gets seen as a sociological problem (a sociological problem can still be an individual problem in other contexts, it’s a lens)
I just see streams of these weirdly skewed articles. The irony of segmenting society to fight loneliness is not lost on me.
Someone who wants institutions where people can get such support is pushing a narrative. Okay. Good for you.
Consider that many men (among others) don't consciously experience regular or frequent need for verbal or tactile emotional support as such, so they don't get a lot of practice culturing it as a skill, either as a giver or receiver, and don't often get to feel out which people in their network are going to be well-suited for it anyway.
Infrequent needs are hard to "work on" and often benefit from institutional support rather than ad hoc support: therapists, churches/etc, discussion groups, etc
It's sort of like changing tires, in that way. Now that manually changing a car tire is rare, because tires are more durable and crises can generally be remediated by calling some number on the cell phone you're certainly carrying, fewer and fewer people have actually done it and have a working, practiced familiarity with how to do it. But thankfully, roadside assistance and tow trucks are widely available and there's mostly no shame to using them now.
Supporting instutitonal access for emotional support would go along way towards helping the many people who just don't have an opportunity to "work on" building support networks the way you suggest.