What's up with men? On masculinity, identity, and men’s mental health today

The majority of the people who have sat across from me in session have been men. Over time, certain questions have continued to resurface, regardless of what brought a given client to me: What does it actually mean to be a man right now? Who am I supposed to be for the people I love? Where do I fit when so much of how I was raised to see myself no longer seems to apply? These aren't small questions, and I don't think they're being asked enough outside of therapy.

Masculinity has never been one fixed thing, but it's fair to say a lot of men were handed a fairly narrow version of it — one built around providing, toughness, and self-sufficiency. That version made more sense in a different economy, a different set of family structures, a different era. It's not that men can't adapt; it's that adapting well requires actually naming what's changed and what hasn't kept pace.

We've gotten so used to treating men's struggles as either invisible or self-inflicted. As a result, we've stopped actually looking at what's happening. So, let's take a look.

Men's mental health by the numbers: Education, suicide, and loneliness

The picture isn't pretty when you look at education, the workforce, and mental health together.

In 1970, just 12% of young women (ages 25 to 34) held a bachelor's degree, compared to 20% of men — an eight-point gap in men's favor. By 2020, that had flipped: 41% of young women held a degree compared to 32% of men, a nine-point gap now running the other direction. Richard Reeves, who has spent years researching this reversal, points out in Of Boys and Men that boys are falling behind girls across the education system — two-thirds of the students at the top of their high school class are girls, and two-thirds at the bottom are boys. This is one piece of what people mean when they talk about a "crisis of masculinity," though I think that phrase gets thrown around more than it gets examined. The gap is worse for boys from poorer and middle-class households, and worse still for Black boys, where for every Black man earning a college degree, two Black women do.

Male suicide rates have climbed roughly 30% since 2010, with the sharpest increases among men in their 20s and 30s — a demographic shift that should alarm anyone paying attention. And from 1990 to 2021, the share of men reporting they have no close friends at all rose from 3% to 15%. Some researchers have started calling this a male loneliness epidemic, and I don't think that's an exaggeration.

Sit with that last one for a second. One in seven men, by that measure, is moving through life without a single person he'd call a close friend.

Is this payback? Why men's struggles aren't a zero-sum game

I've seen versions of that sentiment in a lot of places, some more sympathetic than others. After millennia of patriarchal domination, perhaps men had it coming? Perhaps this is the moment when they pay the very tolls they once extracted?

I understand the impulse. It's also true that while women now dominate the top of their high school classes and earn more degrees, they remain dramatically underrepresented at the very top of the economic pyramid — so nobody's claiming the scoreboard has fully evened out. But the impulse to treat men's struggles as a kind of overdue payback doesn't actually help anyone, including the women in these men's lives. We aren't solving these challenges ourselves, and we aren't asking for help either. Society, which very much includes all of us, has downplayed men's struggles for a long time.

After centering Christian, White, cisgender men for generations, we've slowly and begrudgingly widened our focus to include almost everyone else. That's good. It's necessary. But the felt experience for a lot of men hasn't been "now I have more people at my side." It's been "I've been forgotten and left behind." Those two things — the necessity of the shift and the disorientation it's produced in men who didn't ask for a map and weren't given one — can both be true at once.

Men's role in society today: When the old rules stop working

Many of the men I work with are living a life that has traditionally felt like one long duty — to their partners, their children, their parents, their sense of being a man who contributes. I want to be clear that women carry an enormous version of this same duty, often a heavier and less visible one. But traditionally, men were meant to fulfill theirs by being present (more visible to the public) and bringing home a paycheck, while women did the actual, ongoing work of caring for everyone. That bargain, whatever its fairness, at least came with clear instructions.

Now the instructions don't match the world. Men are struggling to find a partner to build a life with, and struggling to earn a wage that would let them support a family they haven't been able to start. If you're not meeting the traditional milestones — degree, job, partner, house, kids — and nobody's replaced them with a new set of milestones that actually apply to your life, then what exactly are you supposed to be doing? A lot of men don't have an answer to that question. And not having an answer to "what am I doing with my life" is one of the more corrosive things a person can carry around silently.

Men and vulnerability: Why so many men have no close friends

Here's what worries me most in the room: the lack of a solid support system — partners, family, and especially friends. Not friendships built around an activity (e.g., golf, poker, the group chat about fantasy football), but friendships where a man can actually say what's going on with him and be received.

Boys have traditionally been told not to show emotion, not to cry, to handle it. That kind of emotional repression in men doesn't disappear with age — they just learn to hide it better. Those boys grow into men who never built the emotional range to show up for themselves, let alone for the people around them, including other men. Men and vulnerability aren't natural enemies, whatever the old script implied. They just haven't been introduced properly.

And here's the trap: say you're one of the men who is ready to open up, ready to model vulnerability with a friend. What does it look like when you do, and the person on the other end isn't equipped to receive it? Not because he doesn't care, but because he was conditioned the same way you were. You reach out, and the hand on the other side doesn't know how to catch you.

For all intents and purposes, patriarchy has failed men too. It gave them a role, a set of instructions, a kind of armor — and then the world changed underneath it, and the armor turned out to be the thing keeping them from connection, not the thing protecting them.

Modern masculinity: Finding a new definition of what it means to be a man

Journalist Christine Emba said in an episode of The Gray Area that young men especially are looking for role models and realizing they feel unsure and uncomfortable in their place in the world. That's what I hear in session more than almost anything else — not so directly and not a specific complaint, but a kind of low-grade disorientation. Who am I supposed to be? What does being a man actually mean if it isn't the old checklist? And if I don't know, who do I even ask?

Masculinity manifests in as many forms as there are people who inhabit, however permanently, masculine identities. There is no single correct way to be masculine, no matter what any of us were told growing up. But knowing that intellectually and actually feeling settled in your own version of it are two very different things — and most of the men I work with haven't been given much room to find out which version is theirs.

Signs of a masculinity crisis: Depression, anger, and emotional repression in men

In practice, this rarely arrives as "I'm having a masculinity crisis." It shows up as a man who can't name what he's feeling beyond "fine" or "stressed" or "annoyed," when what's underneath is closer to grief, or fear, or shame. This is part of why the signs of depression in men so often get missed — not sadness and withdrawal, but irritability, overworking and burnout, or a short fuse that everyone, including the man himself, chalks up to "just stress."

A masculinity crisis can show up as a man whose sense of worth is entirely tethered to what he produces — at work, in the gym, in bed — and who has no idea who he is when he's not producing anything. It shows up in how men talk about sex: as performance, as proof, as the one place they're allowed to want something openly, which puts an enormous and often unspoken weight on it. It shows up as anger that's easier to access than sadness, because anger was always the more permitted emotion.

None of this makes these men broken. It makes them a product of a script most of them never chose and rarely examined, because examining it was rarely, if ever, modeled for them.

Toxic masculinity vs. positive masculinity: Building something men actually want

I want to steer away from a framing where masculinity itself is the villain. "Toxic masculinity" gets used so broadly now that it's lost most of its precision, and I don't think shaming men out of a role helps them build a better one. Reeves argues for something similar — that doing more for boys and men doesn't require doing less for women and girls, and that the answer isn't punishing masculinity but building what he calls positive masculinity: a version rooted in responsibility, courage, and care, without the parts that require emotional self-amputation to maintain. That's a very different project than either defending traditional masculinity or discarding masculinity altogether, and I think it's closer to what modern masculinity actually needs to look like — not a rulebook, but a set of values a man can choose on purpose.

That's closer to what I try to do in the room. Not strip a man of what feels masculine to him, but help him find out which parts of that identity are actually his, and which parts he inherited without ever agreeing to them.

A lot of men still ask themselves why they haven't gone to therapy yet, even when they know something's off. Stigma is a big part of the answer — the quiet fear that sitting across from a therapist means admitting failure, or losing some part of what makes you a man. But there's also a more basic problem: nobody's ever clearly defined a man's role in society today, so it's hard to know what you're even failing at. Therapy isn't about fixing a broken man. It's about helping a man figure out, on his own terms, what he actually wants his life and his masculinity to look like.

How therapy for men can help you reconnect with yourself

If you're a man reading this and some of it landed, here's where I'd start. Say the actual feeling out loud, even if the only word you have for it at first is "off." Find one person — a therapist, a friend, a group — you can practice being unguarded with, and accept that it might feel clumsy before it feels natural. Notice where your sense of worth is entirely tied to output, and get curious about who you are without it. None of that requires you to stop being a man in whatever way feels true to you. It just requires you to stop doing all of it alone.

Find a therapist who works with men: A personal invitation

If any of this resonates — if you've been carrying a version of this quietly, or you're watching someone you love carry it — I'd be very glad to talk with you. I work primarily with men navigating exactly these questions: identity, purpose, relationships, sex, and the harder work of learning to access and express what's actually going on underneath.

If you've been putting off looking for a therapist, or you're the kind of person who doesn't love the idea of therapy in general but knows something needs to change, that's a completely normal place to start from. You don't need to have the language figured out before you reach out. Reach out to schedule a free consultation, and let's figure out where to begin. You don't have to figure out the map by yourself.