Author: Rich Gorecki

Men Do Friendships Differently Than Women

My last post in this series making my case for 2025 as The Year for Better Male Friendships, I explained some of the ways technology, smartphones, and social media impact boys and young men differently as it relates to our friendships. In this next post, I explain why our friendships are different from females and begin to detail some reasons why we struggle to make and keep friends.  Men Have Connection Issues My initial post for the series included a video by Richard Reeves on The Decline of Friendship. It stated that recent studies show that 57% of men report feeling lonely and 15% claim to have no close friends at all, which is a significant change since 1990. In my book, Get Out of Your Man Cave: The Crisis of Male Friendships and a previous post in this series, I wrote about the The Life-Stages of Friendships which is

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The Effect of the Virtual World on Boys and Men 

In this post, I continue this series that 2025 is The Year for Better Male Friendships. Via several posts, I am making my case that men need deeper, more authentic friends because 57% of men report feeling lonely, and 15% claim to have no close friends at all; numbers that are significantly higher since 1990. In this post, I explain how the virtual world pulls males from the real world. This retreat keeps boys and men from developing the skills to become competent, successful, and loving adults who succeed in work, love, and marriage.  Our Time with Friends is Dropping Previous posts in the series included an interesting video on The Decline of Friendship. I also wrote about how The Life-Stages of Friendships impact how we make and keep friends changes as we get older. More recently, there are other factors that impact friendships. I explained in No Time for

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Male Disengagement from the Real World

The more I read Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, the more concerned I become about the effects of smartphones and social media. As I explained in my last post, No Time for Friends, Haidt believes these have led to a decline in the average daily time we spend with friends; not just young people but everyone. In this post, I present his alarming findings on what is happening specifically to boys as they retreat into a virtual world. This is just another piece of evidence to further my case for 2025 as The Year for Better Male Friendships. The Harm is Different for Boys than Girls Part 3 of The Anxious Generation is titled “The Great Rewiring: The Rise of The Phone-based Childhood.” Haidt opens that section with a chapter on the Four Foundational Harms of this rewiring (Social Deprivation, Sleep Deprivation, Attention Fragmentation, and Addiction). He then follows with

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