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 deep affection and emotional reliance. As historian John E. Kohl documents in Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln, such intimacy between male friends in the 19th century was neither unusual nor automatically sexualized.

The Trial That Made Touch Dangerous

What changed? Historians point to the trials of Oscar Wilde as a key inflection point, part of a late-Victorian shift in which male intimacy was increasingly watched, interpreted, and policed through suspicion about same-sex desire—making certain kinds of platonic touch feel riskier in public life.

Wilde, an Irish playwright, was convicted of “gross indecency” for his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, a poet and author. The trial was sensationalized on both sides of the Atlantic and did more than destroy Wilde’s life—it altered how male intimacy itself was interpreted.

After Wilde was sentenced and incarcerated, affection between men was seen as increasingly suspect. Physical closeness was no longer simply behavior but, in the eyes of many, evidence of identity. Touch began to signal not friendship but deviance.

At the same time, early sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis began classifying people by sexual desire. Same-sex intimacy was reframed as proof of a type of person rather than a set of actions. Male affection, once ordinary, became diagnostic.

In the decades that followed, cultural ideals of masculinity shifted even more, toward greater emotional restraint and physical toughness. This left less room for visible intimacy between men—what some historians have called "hard masculinity."

How Work, Power, and the Law Reinforced the Shift

Industrialization accelerated the change. As men moved from farms, guilds, and kin-based labor into factories and urban wage work, male bonding spaces became more hierarchical, competitive, and surveilled. Emotional closeness lost its economic and social value. Dependence on other men was reframed as weakness.

By the early 20th century, male touch tended to be permitted only in narrow contexts: sports, military service, or violence. Men could tackle one another, fight one another, even die together—but not hold each other in grief or comfort without raising suspicion. Stoicism became the masculine ideal. Emotional restraint was recast as strength.

After World War II, male intimacy became even more dangerous. During the Cold War, homosexuality was framed as a moral threat and a national security risk. The U.S. government’s "Lavender Scare," formalized under Executive Order 10450 in 1953, led to the investigation and removal of thousands of gay federal employees, most of whom were men. (Lesbians were also targeted, though to a lesser degree than gay men.)

Men suspected of being gay, as well as those who had merely vouched for or associated with other targets, were often aggressively interrogated, fired, and publicly outed. The message was clear: Affection between men could cost you your job, your reputation, and/or your future. In this way, governmental power enforced cultural anxiety—and men learned quickly that visible closeness carried real consequences.

The sexual revolution of the 60s, unfortunately, did little to stem the tide. And as sexual identities became more publicly defined in the final decades of the 20th century, same-sex touch was more likely to be interpreted through a sexual lens.

For many straight men, this created a layer of self-consciousness around physical affection, as well as an unspoken rule: If I touch another man, I must clarify that I’m not gay. Thus emerged the choreography many of us now recognize instinctively—the side hug, the shoulder-only embrace, the back slap, the joking disclaimer. Affection survived, but only in a tightly constrained form.

This Is Cultural, Not Biological

This fear of male touch is not universal. In India, for example, male friends commonly hold hands, walk arm-in-arm, lean on one another, or rest their heads on each other’s shoulders during long bus rides. These gestures are not typically read as romantic or sexual. They are understood as expressions of trust, familiarity, and affection.

Indian men are not more emotionally evolved. Their culture simply did not undergo the same Western trajectory of sexual categorization and moral panic. In many parts of the world—including India—public male affection has remained more culturally normalized, suggesting that Western anxieties about male touch are historically specific rather than universal.

The contrast matters because it indicates that male loneliness is not innate. It is learned.

What We Can Do to Break the Cycle and Support Platonic Male Touch

The need for platonic physical connection may have been suppressed, but it hasn't disappeared. This might explain a familiar phenomenon: When inhibitions are lowered—through alcohol, drugs, or extreme circumstances—men often become more physically affectionate. Arms go around shoulders. Hugs linger. Barriers drop. The desire was always there. Permission was not.

As Nick Norman, a fellow Psychology Today contributor, has noted, many men experience “a deeply felt lack of permission to be authentic,” particularly in expressing closeness and vulnerability. The result is not emotional deficiency, but emotional containment—connection constrained by fear of misinterpretation.

Thus, if we are serious about addressing the male loneliness epidemic, we have to expand the conversation beyond communication skills and emotional literacy. Those matter, but are incomplete. Men also need permission to be physically human with one another again.

That starts small. Hug your male friends. Hold on a second longer. Offer comfort without apology or qualification. Normalize affection that does not require explanation. In this way, I argue, we can reclaim what was lost.

Male loneliness isn’t who men are, but it is what we have inherited. Fortunately, inheritance, unlike biology, can be changed.

Kohl, John E. Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed. https://academic.oup.com/columbia-scholarship-online/book/30485

U.S. National Archives. “Executive Order 10450.” https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/10450.html

Niobe Way. Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection. Harvard University Press overview: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674072428

Andrew Elfenbein, “On the Trials of Oscar Wilde: Myths and Realities” (BRANCH Collective) https://branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=andrew-elfenbein-on-the-trials-of-oscar-wilde-myths-and-realities

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