Male loneliness is cultural, not biological.

Platonic male touch was once normal and visible.

Modern masculinity trained men to fear misinterpretation.

Reclaiming platonic touch is part of solving male loneliness.

Men are lonely in ways we don’t quite know how to talk about.

Despite unprecedented material comfort, modern life has left many men socially undernourished. We live longer, eat more, and work in safer conditions than any generation before us. Yet rates of loneliness, depression, and despair among men continue to rise.

This contradiction is often framed as a psychological problem: Men don’t open up, don’t communicate, don’t ask for help. But the problem, I argue, isn’t simply emotional. It’s physical—and specifically, it’s about touch.

Touch is one of the most basic human needs. From infancy onward, physical contact regulates our nervous systems, communicates safety, and reinforces belonging. For many men today, however, platonic physical touch has become fraught, awkward, or altogether absent. Hugs are abbreviated, affection hedged with jokes. Comfort is withheld unless justified by sports, alcohol, drugs, or crisis.

This wasn’t always the case.

When Men Could Be Close

Before the late 19th century, physical affection between men was common, public, and largely unremarkable. Men held hands, embraced, leaned into one another, shared beds, and wrote emotionally intimate letters expressing love and devotion. Historians describe these bonds as romantic friendships—deep, committed relationships that were not assumed to be sexual. (Hat tip to The Art of Manless for writing about this in "Bosom Buddies.")

Masculinity at the time was defined by character, honor, duty, and civic virtue, not by sexual orientation. There was no rigid heterosexual/homosexual binary. Physical closeness between men did not require explanation.

Even figures we now associate with rugged self-reliance lived in a world where male closeness was ordinary. Abraham Lincoln, for example, shared a bed for several years with his close friend Joshua Speed while living in Springfield—a common practice at the time due to space and custom. Their surviving letters reveal........

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