“Woodrow,” Gus McCrae says, lying in a bed dying, “quite a party.”

It’s one of my favorite lines from my favorite novel, Lonesome Dove.

Why?

Because it perfectly captures one of the richest portrayals of male friendship in literature: the friendship of Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call.

Like a party, Gus and Woodrow’s friendship is messy. It’s uneven and full of tension, punctuated by laughter and the occasional fight. And like a party, where you often find yourself shoulder to shoulder with people you didn’t pick to hang out with but have to figure out how to get along with, Gus and Woodrow were thrown together as young men and had to learn how to get on while being polar opposites.

To understand why their friendship hits so deep for me (and other men), it helps to look at what communication scholar Bill Rawlins calls the “tensions of friendship.” In his book Friendship Matters, Rawlins describes four opposing forces that exist in every close friendship. I talked to Bill about this on the podcast several years ago, and it’s one of my favorite conversations.

The four tensions of friendship, if not managed appropriately, can destroy the relationship. But these same tensions are what give friendship its unique tang. And if you look at Gus and Woodrow, you’ll see all four playing out throughout the sweeping story of Lonesome Dove.

Independence and Dependence

Unlike family, marriage, and business alliances, friendships are not held together by blood or legal bonds. There are no clear cultural expectations or contractual obligations that set its terms. The bond between friends is purely voluntary and made only of will. You enter a friendship by choice and can end it by choice. That freedom is what makes friendship so rewarding, but also so fragile.

In my podcast interview, Rawlins said that friends “gift each other two freedoms”: 1) the freedom to live their own lives, and 2) the freedom to depend on each other when needed. These two gifts — the gift of independence and dependence — create a tension.

Gus and Woodrow’s friendship showcases that tension throughout the novel. They’re opposites in nearly everything. Woodrow is the stoic — all duty and discipline; Gus is the epicurean — content with a bottle of whisky and a game of cards. Each lives his own life on his own terms and mostly lets the other be.

Mostly.

Because they can’t help but meddle with each other. Gus ribs Woodrow for being joyless; Woodrow mutters that Gus is lazy. They tussle and irritate one another, but they know how far they can push each other. When the tension gets too high, they back off and give the other person some space. But then they always circle back to one another, because they both know they need each other.

That back-and-forth between independence and dependence is the heartbeat of their friendship and that tension is what kickstarts the main plot of Lonesome Dove. Woodrow, bored with life on the Texas-Mexico border, decides to drive a cattle herd from Texas to Montana. Gus wants no part of it; he’s happy enough sitting on his porch in Lonesome Dove and watching his pigs. Gus could have let Woodrow go off on his own and do his own thing while he stayed behind doing his.

But he knows Woodrow can’t do the drive alone.

“It’s your show, Call,” he says. “Myself, I’m just along to see the country.” 

Gus gives Woodrow the gift of dependence.

While on the trip, Gus serves as Woodrow’s faithful companion. But he still does his own thing. And Woodrow lets him.

Woodrow gives Gus the gift of independence.

Good friends go back and forth in offering each other both dynamics — sometimes freedom, and sometimes attachment.

Affection and Instrumentality

Rawlins notes that friendships hover between affection — caring for someone simply for who they are — and instrumentality — valuing them for what they can do. Men, he says, often lean toward the instrumental side. We bond by doing stuff with each other and for each other. We value guys for the concrete things they add to our lives — skills, resources, connections, advice, etc.

That tension runs through Gus and Woodrow’s friendship. One of the reasons Woodrow puts up with Gus is that he knows Gus is a cool operator. He’s proven his grit in their battles with the Comanches as Texas Rangers. Gus is useful . . . when he wants to be.

Woodrow’s got an undercurrent of affection for Gus as well — even if he just doesn’t have it in him to express it. Woodrow instead shows his affection the only way he knows how: through work. Woodrow demonstrates his love for his lifelong friend by hauling Gus’s carcass all the way back from Montana to Lonesome Dove. Everyone thought it was stupid. But Woodrow did it because he loved his friend.

Gus leans more towards the affection side. He expresses his love to Woodrow through words. He teases and provokes Woodrow in an effort to draw his buddy out of his shell. When Woodrow refuses to loosen up, Gus keeps talking anyway.

Their friendship lives in this tension. Woodrow’s practical devotion frustrates Gus, who wants warmth; Gus’s talk frustrates Woodrow, who wants deeds. Between the two, affection and instrumentality keep tugging at each other.

Judgment and Acceptance

Every friend wants to be accepted for who they are. But real friendship also involves judgment. We choose friends because we admire them. When friends fall short of their own ideals, we notice. But do we call our friend out and risk a relational rupture? Or do we stay silent in order to maintain the friendship? It’s a fraught tension. Rawlins says one of the defining tests of friendship is “the moment when someone risks delivering the judgment that needs to be delivered.”

For the most part, Gus and Woodrow accept each other — warts and all. But the tension between judgment and acceptance comes to a head when Gus challenges Woodrow for not claiming Newt as his son. “Give him your name, and you’ll have a son you can be proud of. And Newt will know you’re his pa.” But Woodrow can’t do it. He’s too restrained by pride and the duty-first code that’s governed his life. Gus knows that, but he presses anyway. He cares about Woodrow too much to let him off the hook.

Gus doesn’t scold to feel superior. He does it because he genuinely cares about Woodrow. He knows Woodrow’s got more in him than orders and work, and loves Woodrow enough to say so.  Woodrow accepts the rebukes because he knows Gus isn’t taking a cheap shot. He knows Gus loves him.

Real friendship lives in that uneasy space of accepting someone as they are while still asking them to be better.

Expressiveness and Protectiveness

The last tension of friendship that Rawlins identifies is between expressiveness and protectiveness. This is the tension between the desire to share feelings versus the instinct to hold them back. Sometimes we don’t share our feelings because there are parts of ourselves we want to keep to ourselves — we want to protect certain aspects of who we are. Or we don’t share our feelings because they would poke someone else’s vulnerabilities too acutely — we want to protect them from being hurt. Women, generally, lean toward the expressive side; men toward the protective. We tend to want to keep more of our inner lives private.

Ol’ Gus isn’t afraid to express his feelings to Woodrow. It annoys Woodrow how much Gus shares his opinions with him. But he lets Gus yammer.

Woodrow, the stoic, keeps his feelings close to his chest. If he wants to let Gus know how he feels, he’ll show him. When Gus lies dying, this difference becomes heartbreakingly clear. Woodrow sits by his bed, silent. He’s thinking about how stubborn his friend is and how much they’ve quarreled over the years, but also about all the good times they’ve had together. But he can’t bring himself to say anything. Gus saves him the trouble: “Woodrow, quite a party.” That’s it. The line sums up decades of friendship.

Woodrow’s final act — hauling Gus’s body across a continent to bury him where he wanted — is the ultimate form of protectiveness. It’s Woodrow’s way of being able to say “I love you” without having to express his affection in words.

The Fruitful Tension of Friendship

The thing that makes friendship special — its freedom — can also make it fraught. With no external scaffolding to hold it together, and no set expectations for how it’s supposed to go, tensions inevitably arise.

Gus and Woodrow’s friendship reminds us that the tensions in friendship aren’t problems to solve. Independence and dependence, affection and instrumentality, judgment and acceptance, expressiveness and protectiveness — these dynamics will always push and pull against each other. The trick isn’t to eliminate the tensions but to figure out how to live with them. That’s what mature friendship looks like: not a hope for frictionless ease, but a commitment to faithful grappling.

If you’ve ever had a friend willing to wade through the hard parts without walking away, you know how rare it is. It’s a friendship that lasts because you both keep choosing it again and again.

By God, it’s not always easy. But it’s quite a party, ain’t it?

For more insights on friendship, listen to this episode of the AoM podcast with Bill Rawlins (and be sure to check out this episode all about Lonesome Dove as well!):

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

If you own a car, you know the importance of regular maintenance. Rather than waiting for your vehicle to break down and paying for costly repairs, you take it in for oil changes, tire rotations, and filter swaps. Sure, this upkeep requires time and money, but it keeps your car running smoothly, extends its lifespan, and helps you avoid breakdowns before they happen.

If we’re willing to maintain our cars, why not give the same kind of preventative attention to something even more important, like, say, our marriage?

A growing body of research shows that even happy couples benefit from proactive care, and clinical psychologist James Cordova has developed a once-a-year “Marriage Checkup” that helps couples stay connected and resilient. It’s been shown to improve marriage satisfaction, increasing intimacy, fostering emotional acceptance, and reducing relationship distress — with benefits lasting up to two years. Unlike traditional therapy where the focus is on fixing a broken marriage, the Marriage Checkup is designed to celebrate wins and look for ways to improve a marriage before it goes off the rails.

Cordova takes readers through this relationship review in his book The Marriage Checkup: A Scientific Program for Sustaining and Strengthening Marital Health. The book is aimed primarily at practitioners, but couples can get a lot out of it. I highly recommend picking up a copy. It contains a ton of good, actionable information and is one of the best marriage books I’ve read. 

Here’s how to prepare for and carry out a Marriage Checkup inspired by Cordova’s recommendations. 

The Check-In Before the Checkup

Schedule it and make it special. Choose a consistent month to do your marriage checkup. It could be on (or right before) your anniversary or every January. You might go someplace special for the checkup, like a bed and breakfast or a local hotel. If time or money are tight, simply block off two uninterrupted hours at home.

Agree on communication ground rules. To keep the checkup productive and positive, agree on some ground rules that you’ll uphold during your discussion. Only one person speaks at a time. No interrupting. Speak for yourself, and don’t assume or judge your spouse’s thoughts or intentions. If you’re the listener, just listen. Don’t argue or rebut. Ask clarifying questions if needed. Avoid John Gottman’s Four Horsemen of the relational apocalypse: criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. If these interpersonal saboteurs make an appearance, agree ahead of time to take a two-minute break.

The Marriage Checkup

Cordova created a thorough, pages-long survey that he has couples fill out before they meet with him for the Marriage Checkup that he facilitates. I think a lot of couples might find this too clinical or customer-service-y to do, though.

For an average couple doing a Marriage Checkup on their own, I think you can get away with informally discussing the areas of the relationship that Cordova highlights in his detailed survey.

Below are conversation-starting questions, based on Cordova’s survey, that cover each area explored in his Marriage Checkup. You don’t have to ask all of them and feel free to come up with your own. It’s just about prompting a discussion about where you’re at and want to go relationally.

Big Picture

• How do you think our marriage is going overall?
• What were our biggest marriage successes this past year?
• What were our biggest challenges?

Communication

• Do we express our emotions in healthy ways with each other?
• How’s our fighting? Anything we can do to make disagreements more productive? Do we get defensive with each other?
• Do we feel comfortable bringing up things that are bothering each other?
• Do we feel like we listen and understand each other?
• Do we engage in enough chit-chat and conversation that’s not just about kids and running the house?

Time Together

• Are we spending enough time together where it’s just us and not the kids?
• Do we need to do more date nights? Husband and wife only vacations?
• What are the small rituals that help us feel connected? What’s stopping us from doing them more regularly?
• Do our screens/devices ever get in the way of being present with each other?
• Are we doing things together that feel fun, or mostly just things we have to do?

Money

• Are we on the same page financially?
• Are there any money-related topics we tend to avoid?
• What financial goals matter most to you right now?
• What’s stressing you out about money right now?
• Do we ever feel guilt or resentment about how we each spend money?
• Do you feel like we have equal say and responsibility when it comes to money?

Sex

• Are you happy with our sex life overall?
• Are you happy with the frequency of sex?  
• Anything you’d change about our sex life?

Parenting

• How do you think we’re doing as parents lately? What are we doing well? Poorly?
• Are there things about being a dad/mom that you’re struggling with but haven’t brought up?
• Do we back each other up when one of us has had to enforce rules or boundaries?
• What kinds of character traits or values are we actively trying to pass on to our kids?
• Do you feel like we’re on the same team when it comes to parenting? Where do we align? Where do we clash?
• What’s one parenting practice we admire in others that we could try out?

Household Management

• Is there anything about how we divide chores or responsibilities that’s feeling unfair or unbalanced right now?
• How often do you feel like we’re reacting to chaos vs. planning proactively?
• Are there any systems or rhythms we’ve outgrown — and need to rethink?
• What’s one routine or habit in our house that’s become a stressor instead of a help?
• What’s one thing that would make our home life run more smoothly?
• Do you feel like we have a good system for staying on top of things — like bills, schedules, errands, etc.?
• What could we each do to show a little more appreciation for the respective efforts we put in to running our home?

Intimacy

• Do you feel like I know and understand you?
• Were there moments during the past year when you felt like I did a good job of trying to understand you? Any moments when you felt misunderstood?
• Do you feel like we’re still continuing to turn toward each other or are we slowly drifting into parallel lives?
• When we’re together, do you feel like I’m fully present with you — or often distracted or elsewhere?
• What’s something I used to do — like listening, affirming, noticing — that you miss?
• What are small things we could do to help us feel closer?

Spirituality

• What’s our telos as a family? What do you think we’re ultimately here for — and how can we help each other live that out?
• What kind of spiritual legacy do you want to leave for our kids or community?
• What does spirituality mean to you right now — and has that changed over the years?
• How do our beliefs show up (or not show up) in our everyday decisions — like parenting, money, or time?
• Do you think we live according to our values? What helps us stay aligned — and what throws us off?
• Are there any spiritual practices — like prayer, meditation, or Sabbath rest — that we could do together more regularly?
• What’s been hardest for you spiritually this past year?
• Is there anything you’re wrestling with that you wish we talked about more openly?

Friendship

• What’s something we’ve done together recently that made you laugh or feel joy?
• Are there hobbies or activities we used to enjoy that we’ve let go of?
• What’s one new thing we could try together just for fun?
• Do you feel like I take an interest in the things that matter to you — even if they’re not my thing?
• How good are we at cheering each other on when one of us has a win or a big day?
• What do you genuinely admire about me — not as a spouse, but just as a person?
• What’s one memory that makes you smile when you think about us as friends?

Make a Simple Action Plan

Hopefully, these questions prompted some productive conversation and drew you and your wife closer together.

Based on your conversation, list out the following as you wrap up your Marriage Checkup:

• 3 wins to keep doing. Celebrate your strengths.
• 3 things you’re going to do to improve a weak point. Come up with some concrete steps to take/habits to adopt.

Schedule a 30-day check-in to see if you’re following through on your plan. If you’re doing a weekly marriage meeting, this is something you can talk about then.

Consider establishing a yearly tradition where you revisit your checkup notes before your anniversary to see how you’ve grown.

We maintain the things we value. Our homes, our cars, our teeth. Why not our marriage? A yearly Marriage Checkup can be a tool for keeping your relationship strong and fixing vulnerabilities before they become big problems. Remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Community is one of life’s most valuable but increasingly scarce resources. While we hear about a supposed epidemic of male loneliness, many men still resist joining groups or struggle to maintain involvement after initial enthusiasm wanes.

Today on the show, Frank Schwartz will help us understand the barriers to building male community and how to overcome them. Frank is the CEO of F3, a free, all-volunteer men’s leadership organization that uses workouts to bring men together and supports hundreds of decentralized chapters worldwide.

In the first half of our conversation, Frank explains the psychology behind men’s hesitation to join groups, how to navigate the “wish dream” of idealized community, and why expecting perfection kills participation. We then discuss what makes leadership in a decentralized group different from traditional hierarchies, the importance of embracing messiness, and why allowing men to make their own decisions creates stronger leaders than giving them a rulebook to follow. We end our conversation with Frank’s perspective on cultivating patience as a leader and how to measure success when building a community of men.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• F3
• AoM Podcast #324: How Fitness, Fellowship, and Faith Are the Cure for Sad Clown Syndrome
• Q Source: The F3 Manual of Virtuous Leadership by David “Dredd” Redding 
• AoM article on phronesis/practical wisdom
• Dying Breed article on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s vision of community

Connect With Frank Schwartz

• Frank on LinkedIn
• Frank on X

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Community is one of life’s most valuable but increasingly scarce resources. While we hear about a supposed epidemic of male loneliness, many men still resist joining groups or struggle to maintain involvement after initial enthusiasm wanes. Today on the show, Frank Schwartz will help us understand the barriers to building male community, and how to overcome them. Frank is the CEO of F3, a free all volunteer men’s leadership organization, that uses workouts to bring men together and supports hundreds of decentralized chapters worldwide. In the first half of our conversation, Frank explains the psychology behind men’s hesitation to join groups, how to navigate the wish stream of idealized community, and why expecting perfection, kills participation. We then discuss what makes leadership in a decentralized group different from traditional hierarchies, the importance of embracing messiness, and why allowing men to make their own decisions creates stronger leaders than giving them a rulebook to follow. We end our conversation with Frank’s perspective on cultivating patience as a leader, and how to measure success when building a community of men. After the show’s over, check out our shownotes at aom.is/mensgroups.

Frank Schwartz, welcome to the show.

Frank Schwartz: Hey, thanks so much for having me man. I appreciate it.

Brett McKay: So you are, is it the CEO or president of F3?

Frank Schwartz: This is a very good question. And up until a couple of years ago, I could have said president, but now CEO. We kind of eliminated the president position. And the thing about F3 is, and guys who are familiar know, but those who aren’t, everything’s kind of very made up. So we have sort of different names for what we do that are a little bit kind of inside baseball. And so, yes, CEO on paper, but the official title within F3 is Nantan.

Brett McKay: Okay.

Frank Schwartz: Which is an Apache word kind of meaning cultural and spiritual leader.

Brett McKay: All right. So you’re the CEO of F3. We’ve had the guys who started F3 on the podcast. This was back in 2017, episode number 324. And we’ll link to that in show notes. But for those who aren’t familiar, what is F3?

Frank Schwartz: So F3, it’s a free men’s leadership group that uses workouts to trick you into coming out so we can teach you about leadership. That’s really what it is. But essentially it is to men’s workout group. Our stated mission is to plant, to grow and to serve small workout groups for men, in order to invigorate male community leadership. The founders, as you mentioned, Dave Redding, Tim Whitmire, Dredd and OBT, affectionately known within F3, kind of looked around and said, “Hey, we see a lot of guys at church and other civic organizations and at work, and whatever. A lot of guys just standing around with their hands in their pockets, and nobody doing anything about the world around them. And influencing their community, and there’s just not a lot of leading happening.” And Dave with his special forces background said, “Hey, the place I learned the most about leadership, and the way I think we could spread leadership throughout our communities and in our world, is via training, physical training.” It’s a great place, pretty low risk to do that. And that wasn’t the intention when it started, which again, you’d probably go back and listen and hear it, but when the intention when it started, but it is kind of where it ended up.

So the short answer to that very long answer I gave is, it’s a place where men can come into community with one another and get physically fit and learn leadership.

Brett McKay: And again, it’s all free, man. You can go to their website and you can find, there’s like chapters all over the world at this point. How many chapters are there at this point?

Frank Schwartz: Ooh, I should have had that much more readily available on the tip of my tongue. I think it’s about 450, maybe just shy of 450.

Brett McKay: Okay. And so, typically the workouts are early in the morning before work, and it’s a bootcamp style workout, calisthenics, things like that?

Frank Schwartz: Yeah, typically body weight, although some places, there’s kettlebells or sandbags and some of that kind of stuff that guys use. But yeah, typically, if you sort of shot at the middle of the curve on an F3 workout, it’s gonna happen about 5:15, 5:30, sometimes a little earlier, sometimes a little later, and it’s gonna be a lot of body weight and calisthenic type, some running, pushups, sit-ups, pull-ups, and then really get a lot of whatever we can find.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So you do the workout, and then there’s also a fellowship aspect to it, a leadership aspect to this. Tell us more about that leadership component, because again, the workout is the hook. That’s like the Trojan horse for that other stuff.

Frank Schwartz: Right, yeah. It’s just the way we sneakily trick you into coming, ’cause you go, hey, free workout, and a guy goes, aha, I could try that. What’s the problem? So the three Fs are fitness, fellowship, and faith. And really, we don’t have a program per se, but again, if you were to kind of shoot at the middle and go, “Well, what’s typical?” Guys get together early in the morning, and work out together. It’s a pretty strenuous, pretty vigorous workout, generally speaking. And then we get together for what we call a cafeteria afterward. You hang out, you make friends, and you get deeper in fellowship with one another, because, and you know this probably as well or better than most anyone, community is really where we’re gonna save the country, where we’re gonna do our best work, is in community with one another. So we put men in community with one another. And then what happens inevitably, once you do that, is guys start looking at their lives and go, “Well, now that I’ve got these things more or less squared away, I’ve lost some weight, I’ve got some friends. Well, now what? What am I supposed to do now?”

And they start looking outside themselves. Now that they are more settled, they start looking outside themselves and saying, “Well, what can I do for others?” And that’s the big question of faith. What is it that exists outside yourself, and how can you live in such a way that you can kind of wear yourself out in the service of that thing?” So we don’t make any kind of determination about, well, a guy ought to believe in Jesus Christ or a guy ought to believe in Buddha or a guy ought to believe in whatever. We just say, you’ve got to believe in something bigger than yourself in order to be a virtuous leader. And that’s what we do. And so, a lot of times in those meetings after workouts, guys will study. They might study certain kinds of books or whatever. We have a book that Dave wrote, Dredd wrote, called “The QSource” And it sort of outlines our overall leadership philosophy and framework. And so, guys will study that together, and we’ll discuss that together. We’ve got podcasts about it and all kinds of stuff. So I wouldn’t say there’s like a super formal program, but we do have what we call stuff worth trying.

And so, you kind of get in there, and you’re like, “Oh, hey, I don’t know if this will work for you or not, but here’s the framework, and maybe try it, until you find something better.” But that’s the idea, is to create leaders amongst men, and to take those things that we learn in what we call the gloom, which is that those pre-dawn hours when your family’s sleeping and work hasn’t started calling yet, those things that we learn there and take them home, take them to the community so we can be better people.

Brett McKay: And the leadership structure of F3 is unique. It’s decentralized. Tell us more about that, how that works.

Frank Schwartz: Absolutely. And this is conceptually, I think Dave and Tim early on were like, we can’t lead everywhere. We can’t be everywhere. And if really what we’re called to do is to create leaders, then we’re gonna have to hand off the power here as time goes on. And so, the idea is that, if you start making rules, then you have to make more rules to enforce those rules, and it kind of becomes this big spiraling thing. And then pretty soon, you’ve got 5,000-page bills getting introduced into Congress, right? So we live by a mission, a credo, and five core principles. And the idea is, that every man has been born and put on this earth to be a leader. That is his job. That is what he has been created to do. And so, what we try and do is help guys to recapture that. We want men to lean into that part of themselves, and to figure out how to not just lead a workout well or to even manage something well, but to truly influence others for good, in every place that they’re in.

Brett McKay: Okay. And so, it’s all volunteer?

Frank Schwartz: I feel like I didn’t answer the question very well.

Brett McKay: No.

Frank Schwartz: Right. So to decentralize it, right?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: So since every man is a leader, we say, okay, then I can’t be in charge of where you are. Because Brett, you’re in where? Tulsa, right?

Brett McKay: Correct.

Frank Schwartz: Yeah. So I don’t know what’s happening in Tulsa. I can’t tell you what to do in Tulsa. I don’t have any idea of what the right thing to do will be where you are. So I have to teach you how to lead, and give you the power and the empowerment, I guess really, to say, hey, you make those decisions. I think that honestly, not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s been one of the best things I learned for myself from F3 is that, I don’t need permission to be a man. I don’t need permission to be a leader. I think that’s something that I think men and maybe people in general, kind of crave in our world anymore. We want someone else to tell us what to do. I don’t know whether it’s because we just don’t wanna make the decision, or because we want it to be their fault if it doesn’t go well or something. [laughter] I don’t know. But we don’t seem to wanna take the personal responsibility. And F3 teaches us that there isn’t anybody else responsible but you.

Brett McKay: And you’re the CEO, but again, this is volunteer. You’re not paid to be the CEO?

Frank Schwartz: Yeah, no.

Brett McKay: This is all voluntary?

Frank Schwartz: No salary here.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, tell us about your experience with F3. When did you join and why did you join?

Frank Schwartz: So I joined in late 2014. And the reason I joined is because I was overweight, and I had sleep apnea, I had high blood pressure. I had high cholesterol. And my doctor was like, “Hey, guess what? You’re a stroke waiting to happen.” So I’ve got to get you healthy somehow. We want you to live for your young kids. And I’ll send you the picture. You’ll love it. But essentially, I was like, I got to get in shape somehow. So I started going to the gym, but I kept hearing about this F3 thing. Kept hearing about it, kept hearing about it, kept hearing about it. And finally, I was like, fine, I’ll just go. And so, I showed up one Saturday, and I was hooked. I was absolutely hooked. There was just something very magical about the fact that it’s always outdoors no matter what. It was freezing cold. Like horrifyingly cold, ’cause it was November when I went out for my first one on a Saturday. And there was just something invigorating about like, we’re outside in the elements. And then at the end of every F3 workout, we have something called a COT, or a Circle of Trust.

And it’s a place for men to kind of lay down their burdens next to their brothers, where we can pick it up together. The old saying, a burden shared is half a burden, a joy shared is twice the joy, something along those lines. And so, it’s a place where you can kind of lay down your burden and say, hey, help. And I’ve heard everything in those things. But there was something about that end piece, laying my hand on another guy, ’cause you get in kind of a big circle and you kind of huddle up and then feeling that energy from other men, who were in the same spot I was trying to figure this out together. It was just magical. It was magical. So I kind of jumped all in, both feet and ended up finding myself in just weird coincidental places. [chuckle] If you’re a believer in coincidence, then it was coincidental. For me, it was providential. And I just would find myself bumping into the right kind of people, and just volunteering and jumping in to say, yeah, no, I can help with that or whatever it might be around sort of the F3 universe.

And then pretty soon, became really good friends with Dredd, Dave Redding, and we kind of figured out how we’re gonna do this together. So, there was a guy he handed it off to, and then that guy, stepped down and handed it off to me. And that’s the way it’ll always go forever. And I think, kind of to touch on both things, how I got involved and why I got involved is, A, how it was almost by accident, and how I became the leader of this whole deal, I think also was almost, again, coincidence or however you wanna look at it, but almost by accident. Where I just sort of right place, right time. And I think God put me where he wanted me to be. But I think that the nice thing or maybe the nice thing, but the beautiful thing about this is that, I will serve for a period of time, and then I will have accomplished what I need to, and I’ll hand it off to somebody else.

And so, to kind of harken back to the how do you decentralize this thing is, first thing you have is a mission. Second thing you have is no ego. I can’t lead, the mission must lead. The mission must take us to the next level. The mission must take us where we wanna go. I’ll help make decisions along the way, to support that mission or to move us forward toward that mission. But ultimately, that’s how we decentralize it. Is we only commit ourselves to these very few things. We don’t try and run an organization. We try and keep a mission in men’s hearts, and they’ll run the organization. They’ll figure it out where they are. You guys will figure it out there in Tulsa.

Brett McKay: I’m curious, like how, your life has obviously changed because of your involvement with F3, but how have you seen other men’s lives change during your involvement with F3?

Frank Schwartz: Sure. There’s easy ways, obvious ways, guys lose weight, they get a little more fit, they start looking better in the mirror, their health gets better, their mindset gets better. That’s the easy stuff. We have seen things in F3 where, look, and one of our core principles is that it’s open to all men, no matter what. So number one is it’s always free, as you mentioned. Number two is that it’s open to all men. And when we say all men, we absolutely mean it, Brett. And so, we have convicted felons working out next to billionaires in the same workout. You’d never know. You’d never know. And so, the way that this changes men or the things that it does, is it turns a light on in their hearts again, because it doesn’t matter what your lifestyle has been or will be. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been, where you came from. What matters is that you’re a man. When you are a man, you have this need inside you. You have this desire inside you. And the world has a tendency to try and figure out a way to quiet that spark down.

To get that drive tamped down so that we can control you, and we can make sure that you become non-dangerous to the things that we’re trying to do. So F3 kind of wakes you up. And so, we hear stories of guys who beat alcoholism. We’ve saved marriages, and guys attribute it to F3. And people who have been steeped in addiction, who have come out of it because they say, “Hey, being around you guys has made me realize I got to do better in my life.” And turn their lives around. So it’s almost innumerable. The number of stories that we could tell, that are out there in guys that in a very acute way, “I changed my life today.” That’s almost innumerable. Probably in some ways, for every single guy, however many there are, we estimate something like 75,000, 80,000 guys. So there’s 80,000 different stories that we could tell of how it impacted a man’s life and made his life better.

Brett McKay: That’s awesome. So I wanted to bring you on the podcast today to talk about leading groups, like leading men’s groups or even just forming a group of guys who, you’re trying to get some friends going. So I know a lot of our listeners, that’s something that they’ve been trying to do. They struggle with, and they run into these issues and they just feel like it’s impossible. So I wanna tap into your expertise with your experience, establishing the culture in F3 of where guys get together. And you also have other leadership experience as well. And maybe you can find some insights from F3, that we can apply to other domains of our lives ’cause I think you can. So the first question is, you hear a lot about the male loneliness crisis. Men today, they seem incredibly lonely. They’re looking for friends. But at the same time, men, they seem resistant to joining a community group or even getting things going with another guy just to hang out. What do you think is going on there? What’s the tension going on there? What do you think’s behind that?

Frank Schwartz: I tell you, here’s what I think, and I could be wrong, but I think that the hesitancy on the part of men to do this kind of thing is, well, a number of things. One is fear. Terrifying. He’s afraid to fail. He’s afraid to fail, and he’s afraid to have people criticize him. He’s afraid to say, “I’m making a stand, because that’s not an easy thing to do.” And I think guys are afraid of that. And I don’t blame them. It ain’t fun, to have other people be like, you suck. So I think there’s some of that. I think there’s some fear and some trepidation around doing that kind of thing. But I think also, it’s kind of like we were alluding to before, the thing that I think keeps guys from doing this, is they really believe that there’s some right way to do it that they’ve been just kept out of the loop. They just don’t get to know what that right way is. And other people seem to be doing it just fine, but gosh, why won’t anyone write the book so I can just follow the program?

Well, the problem is there’s no program. And if you believe there’s a program, that just means you’re following somebody else’s dream. You’re following somebody else’s way of doing it. And so, I think that to some degree, it’s like, why won’t a guy do this? Well, ’cause he thinks there’s a right way to do it, and he’s afraid to fail. I think that’s a lot of it. And I think guys get lonely because they have been convinced that somehow that that’s what they are, and that that’s the epidemic. And so, we just believe it. We’re like, well, I guess we’re lonely. If they say so, I guess we’re lonely. They’re the ones doing the research. Or maybe sometimes I think too, they’re like, I’m afraid of putting myself out there. I don’t really wanna get hurt. I don’t really wanna whatever. I don’t wanna lead. I don’t wanna have to take on all that responsibility and all that kind of stuff. But I also think, that one of the things that keeps a guy from feeling that connection or wanting that or whatever it might be, or to start a group like this is, he just thinks that, again, since he thinks there’s some way to do it right, that he shouldn’t start until he knows that exact way. When the fact of the matter is, and again, this probably as well or better than anyone, is you won’t know until you get out there and start.

Brett McKay: Right.

Frank Schwartz: You just got to start. You just got to do something. And I think the momentum will help carry you, but this alleged epidemic of loneliness, and I do think it exists. I think that people do feel lonely. I think it gets solved by doing things, by being out there and being with people.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think you hear people talk about a lot like, oh, well, we no longer have any third places anymore to go to, et cetera. And it’s like, well, you can make a third place, like find a park and do a workout. Nothing’s stopping you from doing that.

Frank Schwartz: Nothing, it’s funny. And not that you and I frequent Starbucks as a whole lot necessarily, but I love that the new CEO brought mugs back.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: Right?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: I don’t know if he has the intention of turning it back into more of a gathering place or a third place or whatever you wanna call it. I don’t know. But nothing says, get out of here, like a paper cup with a sleeve, that they shove at the end of a counter and they just yell your name. They don’t want you to stay. They want you to get out. They got to turn tables, man, ’cause they got money to make. ‘Cause they got investors and shareholders to answer to. And so, you don’t have to wait for Starbucks to create a third place for you, although I do see it starting to trend more maybe back that way. You don’t have to wait for church. And you and I both know, theoretically, that should be a great third place to do that. It doesn’t end up that way sometimes. And so, sometimes you just have to take matters into your own hands. I was telling somebody this morning, actually, men look around people, look around a lot and go, somebody ought to do something about that.

The thing that we teach and that we talk about a ton in F3 for sure is, hey, if you think that thought, the instant you think that thought, the next thought ought to be looking in the mirror and going, wait, I just remembered, I’m that somebody.

Brett McKay: Yeah, totally agree. It’s that whole Tocquevillian ethos, Alexis de Tocqueville talked about in Democracy in America, talked about, when he came to America, he noticed how Americans at the time, if there was like a tree in the middle of a road, they would just form a group together and solve it. They wouldn’t wait around. He said, well, in Europe, they would like, wait, okay, who are we supposed to go to to get this thing?

Frank Schwartz: Which government agency is gonna fix this? Yeah.

Brett McKay: And I feel like we’ve kind of lost that. We’ve kind of become like Europeans in the 19th century that Tocqueville was criticizing.

Frank Schwartz: I think you’re right. I think you’re right. And I think that’s why I’m so grateful that, well, I say I found F3, but I think F3 found me, to a large degree. And I think that’s the way it always goes. If you want something good in your life, you’ll either find this or it’ll find you. But that’s been the best thing is it’s like, guys no longer, guys that I hang out with anyway, we don’t sit around going, somebody ought to do that. It’s done before anybody had the thought of whether or not it should get done. ‘Cause we knew it should get done.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Something I’ve seen in different organizations, whether it’s like a sort of informal group of individuals, just guys trying to get together to do a workout together, a poker night once a month, or even more structured organizations like at a church group, you’ll see this phenomenon, you’ll get it going and then you’ll have guys who enthusiastically show up once or twice, and then they just vanish. You’re like, man, what happened? What’s going on? So what do you think is going on there? Is it a failure of unmet expectations or something else going on?

Frank Schwartz: I think it’s a similar problem. You know what January 19th is? I think it’s the 19th.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s like Quitter’s Day or whatever?

Frank Schwartz: Quitter’s Day, right. [laughter] Exactly. So I think some of it’s that. Everybody starts with great intentions, but boy, when the rubber meets the road and it starts to get hard, I don’t wanna show up for that. Someone’s supposed to… I’m supposed to be entertained, Brett. My phone taught me that. I’m supposed to be a consumer. The commercials, my YouTube pre-rolls taught me that. I’m supposed to just eat and drink and be merry. I’m not supposed to go do stuff. I’m not supposed to be something. And so, I think guys show up, and it happens in F3, as you might imagine. Some guys come out and they blaze out, and I always get nervous. The guys who are just a little too enthusiastic, and I want to be like, eh, you’re gonna need to save some for the fifth lap here, biggin’. You need to pump the brakes just a little bit because consistency, is gonna beat energy every time.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: Forever and ever, amen. Right?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: Simon Sinek talks about the infinite game. I don’t know if you read that one, but it’s a fantastic book. And essentially, he kind of says, most of us run around with this sort of finite mindset that there’s winners and there’s losers. And there are in sports, in places where there is a definite ending, a finite time period or whatever it might be, but there’s no winning in life. It is not a race. It never has been a race. It’s a journey that we’re all on together, theoretically. Or we should be. And I think it’s part of our culture where it’s like, well, I showed up to the gym three times, I’m not in shape. I can’t figure this out, I quit. And you go, well, no, you have to show up for months and years. And then you have to stay at it. There’s no arrival. Again, it’s this finite mindset of, well, I thought after three times it was gonna be perfect for me. And you go, well, the only way it was gonna get perfect for you brother, is if you stood up and made it perfect for you.

You have to do it. You have to be the one responsible. You have to be the one involved. And so, even if you showed up to church or to the poker night or whatever, and after a couple of times you were like, this was great, maybe something didn’t go your way and you’re like, well, screw that. I’m supposed to have everything I want all the time. Man, what a finite mindset. You’re just, you’re setting yourself up for failure. But if you recognize that everything you do has purpose, because it’s part of this long and infinite journey toward your ultimate self-actualization or whatever term you wanna put on it, but for you to become what it is that you were meant to become, if you recognize that, and you can kind of, I hate the term, but lean into that. Man, your life becomes infinitely better because you realize you’re playing a long game. You’re playing a very different game than other people are playing. And that’s what I think is the great thing about F3, and really Art of Manliness and a lot of the things that are out there, that we’re doing is because it isn’t a finite thing.

Everything that you see and encounter is a tool to help you on this journey, and to make you a better person as you go. And I think people forget that, and they think, well, I didn’t win after the third time, so I don’t wanna do that. I wanna go where I feel good and happy and get my dopamine hit all the time.

Brett McKay: Yeah. No, I’ve seen that in my experience with different groups, whether it’s a church or even just friend groups, or we even see this on The Strenuous Life within our geographic groups. I think some guys, they go into these, like, oh man, here’s a group of guys doing things. I want to be part of this community. And then I think they have what’s called, my wife, she wrote this great series on our Substack, Dying Breed, about Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ideas on how to live in a spiritual community. And Bonhoeffer talked about one problem he sees, is that a lot of people have, he calls it the wish dream of community, this idealized version of what it should be. And then once they actually encounter the reality of it, it doesn’t meet that. And they’re like, this sucks. It’s not as great. I’m not getting what I thought I’d get out of this. I’m out of here. And I’ve seen that in so many groups, where people, I think they have too high expectations or they have this overly idealized version, it’s gonna be like a Norman Rockwell painting.

Everyone’s just in the barber shop, singing, playing the banjo, and it’s this community. And community can be that, but it’s also, you have to deal with just annoying people. You have to deal with friction. And it’s like, I tell people, if you want community, you have to want all of it. You have to want the good stuff and also the frustrating parts of it as well.

Frank Schwartz: Oh man. Preach as they would say.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: Because that’s exactly it. We’ve been taught to think, and I don’t know, maybe this existed before and we just didn’t know, because it wasn’t as prevalent and it wasn’t in our face like it is now with social media. But certainly, social media has made it so that we look around and I look around and we go, well, but they’re in Italy again. We think that only the good parts get to exist and if there’s bad parts it’s because we did something wrong or the thing is wrong or whatever because the lie is that everything is, it’s utopia all the time. But the messy is what teaches you the things you need to know, so that you can refine and make it better as you go. So when you show up to the whatever it is or if you start the whatever it is, and I can’t tell you, and you probably did the same thing before AOM or Strenuous Life or any of those things came along too. I’ve started, I don’t even know how many things that have just gone out either in a nice blaze of glory failure or a slow whimper into the death in the corner failure.

I’ve started all kinds of groups. I’ve tried all kinds of crazy things to try and get done what I wanna get done or to bring people together or whatever it might be. And then I just look and go, well, it’s kind of that Thomas Edison idea. I didn’t invent a light bulb. I invented 10,000 ways to not make a light bulb. [laughter] I didn’t discover the light bulb or whatever it was. And I feel similarly. I didn’t discover how to lead a men’s group. I discovered lots of ways to do it wrong. And then, I’ve tried to practice on the other end how to maybe not do it so wrong this time.

Brett McKay: No, that makes sense. Yeah, it’s continual learning, Kaizen, or whatever you wanna call it.

Frank Schwartz: Sure.

Brett McKay: Talking about your experiences forming communities, can it be intentionally engineered or does it have to be random or serendipity or is it a mixture of both?

Frank Schwartz: I’m gonna say, yeah, it’s probably a mixture of both to some degree. I don’t like the word engineered, just because I think it implies that there is something that you can build. I want my bridges engineered, ’cause I don’t want them to break. We don’t want a lot of failure when it comes to bridges. So I don’t mind failure when it comes to people, because that’s life. That’s just part of how we do it. So I think intentionally engineered, maybe not engineered, but does it have to be intentional? Boy, I tell you what, it better be. It better be. ‘Cause it can’t be complete chaos and just hope for the best. I think just like any good leader or any good leadership model, you’ve got to have a mission in mind. You’ve got to have an end state in mind. Where are we headed? What is it that we’re trying to accomplish here? And not just tasks, but what, again, going back to Cynic, what he might say is a just cause. What is that thing that is much bigger than all of us that we’re trying to get to?

And if we have a good sense of what that is, then we can be intentional toward that. And then what you have to do, I think is you have to allow for the chaos around you. So you be intentional about the things that are supposed to be controlled, which is adherence to mission maybe, or enforcing standards when it comes to like, hey, you’re not living the core principles or whatever. But that’s more of an arm around a guy and telling him in a one-on-one kind of thing. But then I think you have to allow for the chaos around you and the serendipitous accidents or whatever you wanna call them. And it’s actually a good example, in a way, to harken back to the early days and kind of the founding of F3. And I don’t remember, it’s been a while since I’ve listened to the original podcast that you were talking about from ’15 or ’17, whatever it was. But the guy, the group that this sort of broke off from, was a guy who wanted to control things.

He was capping the membership. He was the one leading every time, stuff like that. But what was recognized was, if I let go of control, and if I let go of the leadership and if I simply teach others to lead, rather than try and be the leader all the time and if I adapt to the circumstances that are in front of me and incorporate them, then I’ll come out with a better product. If it had only gone the way that Dave and Tim and even myself, if I was only willing to accept the things that I think are good ideas, we’d die. We’d die. I have some good ideas every once in a while, but that’s why the other thing I would people who are starting groups, don’t do it by yourself. Don’t do it by yourself. You can be the person that has most of the vision or you might be the good organizer or whatever, but by golly, you better find some people who have some complementary skill sets and mindsets and bring them in, and you’ve got to influence them and love them into buying into the dream and the mission of what you’re trying to get done.

‘Cause, there’s no way I could do this thing by myself. So I embrace the chaos, because either A, I’ll get stronger as a man or a leader, or B, I’ll learn some stuff that will actually make the group much stronger. There might be ideas that it’s like, oh, well that actually is a whole different direction we might take things that we hadn’t thought of before. If it was up to me or if it was just up to my vision or our initial thoughts, it would be engineered to failure.

Brett McKay: That makes sense. It makes total sense. I’m curious if you’ve seen this problem in groups or in F3, ’cause I’ve seen it in groups that I’ve belonged to. Everyone joins a group for different reasons. You think they’re all joining for the same reason, but oftentimes they’re not. I’m sure for F3, it’s the same thing. Some guys, they just want the workout. Others are there for the friends. Others are there for the leadership training. I’ve seen this in other groups where I belong to, where you think, oh, you’re here for this thing, and then you see them getting really persnickety about another issue. It’s like, oh, actually you’re not here for that thing. And then it causes all this conflict. So how do you balance competing ends in a group?

Frank Schwartz: Well, I often say if it was easy, we wouldn’t need leaders. You got to recognize that any time you do one thing, you’re gonna get dynamically more of it, and dynamically less of something else. And so, there is always this eternal tension in leadership of figuring out all the different competing factors. So one thing I would say is, yes, everyone joins a group for their own reason, but they stay typically for a very similar reason. And I think ultimately for a successful group, I think they have to stay for the mission. If they’re dedicated to the mission, if they see those things and if they’ve experienced something in that group where they go, no, no, but I understand what we’re really trying to get done here, then you can look past a lot of the other stuff. Dave introduced me to something he called the Augustinian Code, although apparently it’s dubious as to whether or not St. Augustine actually said it. And that is in essentials, we will have unity. In non-essentials, we will have liberty. But in all things, we will have charity. And so, I think you have a desire and a dedication and a focus on a mission, and then a guy joins for whatever reason he joins for.

But I think he stays because he says, no, I understand that there’s stuff that is greater than me, these things that are bigger than me. Those are things that I serve. I take myself out of it. And then he stays because he wants the same thing we want, which is, in our case, to help build leaders and to unlock men’s hearts and minds so that they can be maximally effective in their areas of influence, whatever that might be. So I think that’s the answer.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think the key there is just communicate the mission constantly. And…

Frank Schwartz: That’s all I do.

0:32:36.2 Brett McKay: Yeah, and if you think you’ve communicated it enough, you probably haven’t. So in a traditional leadership setting, say like a company or even a church, there’s typically a clear hierarchy, like president, vice presidents, et cetera. F3 doesn’t have that in these groups. So what does leadership look like in a decentralized volunteer community like F3? ‘Cause I’m sure, there’s lessons we can take from F3 to any other voluntary group that you might belong to.

Frank Schwartz: Well, that is our hope. In fact, we would like you to take it to the non-voluntary groups that you belong to as well. ‘Cause I think there’s things that we can teach about leadership that are definitely applicable in every area of life, even those that are non-voluntary. But to your point, I think the number one thing to remember is, you said, what is decentralized leadership? It looks messy. That’s what it looks like. [laughter] To have no leader, set person that you’re like, well, he just told me, I guess I have to do it, is messy. And it’s funny because this is something that came up early on in my sort of serving at a national level in F3 was, one of the guys got really frustrated and he was like, “What are the men thinking? Why can’t they just do the thing that I want them to do? What are they thinking?” And I had to say, I was like, well, I think they think that they’re free to lead. [laughter] I think this is your fault. You taught them, that they’re leaders and then when they do the thing, they’re trying to lead, you get mad at them.

So it’s kind of funny. But I think that we want you to recognize in a decentralized situation, that every person ultimately is responsible for the outcome of their own lives. And so, if they’re leading a workout that day, yeah, they might be responsible for the individual outcome of that workout. And they may have sort of positions or kind of different areas of responsibility or something within a region or group of F3 or whatever. I have a different job, I guess, technically, than maybe some others. But ultimately, it isn’t that one job is more important than another. It’s understanding that A, if I called the guys in Tulsa and said, hey, you’re gonna do this for your workout tomorrow. When they stopped laughing, we could probably have a discussion about it. Right?

Brett McKay: Right.

Frank Schwartz: I can’t tell anyone what to do. I wouldn’t even pretend to. I wouldn’t attempt it, because number one, it’s not my job. Number two, they understand now, that they’re the ones with the responsibility. And coming from me, it would be comical, because they ask me questions all the time. Guys ask questions like, well, how old should a kid be before we let him come to an F3 workout? Man, you’re looking for a rule and I get that and I understand why you want it. But ultimately, you have to make that decision. You’re the one responsible. And I know that frustrates you, but that’s just the way that it is. I can’t tell you what to do. So my job is not to tell you what to do. My job is to stand and to help you discover the right answer that you already know or that you have in your heart. Or what is the answer that aligns most with the mission that we theoretically all believe in? That kind of a thing. And so, I think it looks messy, but it also looks like just a lot of love, a lot of influence. I don’t remember how many times I’ve not answered a question to a guy, but suddenly at the end of our conversation, he seems to know what to do.

Brett McKay: No, I’ve had that experience too with The Strenuous Life.

Frank Schwartz: Yeah, right.

Brett McKay: I’ll get questions from guys like, well, does this count for this requirement? Or if I do this, will it count? Or how about if I do this for our group? Is that okay? And we have this guiding principle in The Strenuous Life. I’m sure Strenuous Life listeners know what I’m about to say. Phronesis, which comes from the Greek, ancient Greeks, and it’s basically practical wisdom. It’s like knowing what the right thing to do for the right reason, the right time, for the right purpose. And I just tell people, use your phronesis, man. Use your brain. You’ve got it. I trust you. You can make that decision.

Frank Schwartz: It’s in there.

Brett McKay: And a lot of guys, they get frustrated with that, ’cause they just wanna be told exactly what to do. I’m like, I’m not gonna do that. I want you to develop this capacity to make decisions and use your judgment.

Frank Schwartz: Yeah. I think that fundamentally, and this is something that I think is so critical to leadership of any kind, certainly of any small group, and very, very certainly of any sort of volunteer-type organization, like what we’re doing out here. It’s a different one when you got a boss and a boss can just tell you what to do or they can threaten you to get fired or whatever. That’s not leadership. That’s just management. And so, if you’re gonna be in real leadership, I think another thing that we forget amongst the many, is that this is a love endeavor. This is a love endeavor. And our world has taught us that, if I love you, that I will kind of plow the road ahead of you and you never have to worry about anything. I will accept you exactly as you are, and I will let you do whatever you want because that’s love. But it’s not, it’s permissiveness. And permissiveness actually is it’s own kind of sin in my estimation. And so, I think that what you’re talking about there, that’s real love.

Real love is loving you enough to let you fail. It’s loving you enough to let you figure it out and struggle through it and make your own decision. Dude, if I could just tell my kids exactly what to do, and have them do it, my life would be infinitely easier. Infinitely easier. It is messy and horrifying, that I send them on their way and I’m like, and they come to me and they’re like, dad, what should I do? And I look at them and I go, you’ve been taught how to make decisions. I think you should do that. They don’t love that. [laughter]

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: As you might imagine. But that’s how I answer the things to the guys in F3 too. They’re like, well, what should we do? I think you should employ those tactics and those techniques that you’ve learned along the way on how to make decisions, and you should do that. Because I can’t tell you and I should not tell you. In fact, I love you too much to tell you. You have to know for yourself. If I tell you, it’s what I think, if it goes wrong, then it’s my fault, if it goes right, then it was my success somehow, and I love you too much. You get to do this. This is your deal.

Brett McKay: How should leaders of small groups of men, whether it’s a church or you got a book club or whatever, how should they define success?

Frank Schwartz: That’s a good question. Every group is gonna have it’s own definition, I’m sure. And so, I would say, success looks like adherence to whatever that mission is. So for me, how about this? How about I answer it this way? For F3, here’s what I think success looks like. And guys all over the country and even our board sometimes and certainly from outside organizations, look and they’re like, well, how are you measuring success? And I’m like, well, that’s a good question. It sounds like you probably have an opinion about that. Why don’t you tell me what you think? And they’re like, well, growth numbers. Like how many men are in F3? You should be tracking that. You should know. And I’m like, okay, but what if every guy in F3 is an idiot? But we have 500,000 of them, but they’re idiots. And they’re like, oh, I hadn’t thought about that. Exactly. So that can’t be it. Okay, well, what if we have only 10 guys that are in it, but they’re really dedicated to the mission? Is that success? Again, I go, well maybe. I don’t know. Here’s what I know.

For me, success looks like, I wore myself out, my personal success. I wore myself out in the service of the mission. And I think success across the organization, for us anyway, is largely anecdotal. It’s the stories I hear about men saying, I recaptured my life. My wife and I get along now. We snatched our marriage from the jaws of divorce. Or it looks like I quit drugs and alcohol. Or I lost 100 pounds or whatever it is. The individual results of “success” I think you’re gonna have as many, as there are individual guys. So I think success for us, is knowing that we did the best we could to adhere to the mission and serve the thing that is greater than us. That’s the best I can answer on that one.

Brett McKay: Something I’ve had to struggle with as a leader of different groups I belong to, is cultivating the patience that’s often required to lead whenever it seems like things are just going slower than you want. Have you had that struggle as well? And if so, what have you done to overcome it?

Frank Schwartz: Yeah, no, I struggle from a condition known as perpetual dissatisfaction. [laughter]

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: I don’t know if you’ve said something similar, but no, patience is not my jam. I tend to move fast. I decide things fast. I live fast. In fact, a guy, CEO of a very large fitness company just yesterday was like, “You have an intensity issue.” And I was like, do I? That’s interesting coming from you, but okay. So I recognize that that’s my bias. I say that to say, I have tons of biases, Brett. And I’m always gonna be slightly dissatisfied. I’m always gonna think that it’s not moving fast enough. I’m always gonna be unhappy with the result of something. I’m happy with a lot of results too. Don’t get the impression that I walk around sad all the time going like, why can’t everything be wonderful? It’s not that at all. But I know that I have biases. So the advice that I would give to someone starting a thing or who’s looking to lead in any way, the way to cultivate that patience, is to segment your life a little bit. So exhibit patience where in those environments where it’s appropriate. And then by golly, get yourself a mentor and get yourself a small group.

In F3, we call them shield locks. You lock shields with two, three other guys. And those are the guys that hear the best and the worst and the hardest and the whatever. And I unload it to those guys and they get to hear it. And then they get to tell me that my head is in my rear end, or they get to tell me where I might be choosing poorly or where I might be choosing well. So, okay, it’s not moving as fast as I want. Fine. Too bad. It’s moving as fast as it can. It’s moving as fast as it’s supposed to. The analogy I give a lot of times to guys, is I go, all right, ’cause I’ll say it in their marriage. Something went wrong in their marriage, and they’re struggling. And then, they’re trying to make good on it, but they can’t seem to get their wife to forgive them and to move forward or whatever. And I said, well, here’s the thing.

You think of it like a seed that you put in the ground, and you can put all the nutrients you want in that soil and you can cover it up at the perfect depth, and you can measure the pH and the moisture content and you can make this thing just as optimal, the perfect amount of sunshine, keep the temperature, whatever it is. But that seed, is gonna sprout above the edge of that soil, when it is darn good and ready. And the only thing you can do, is to consistently try and create a perfect environment or as optimal an environment as you possibly can. That’s your job as the leader in the group or in the organization or whatever it might be. That’s your job, is to consistently try and create optimal conditions so that when growth is ready to happen, it happens. So again, we get our minds caught in this finite game of, well, but I didn’t get this done by X date. And so, it must be not going well, or it must be a failure or any number of things. And I just say, no man, again, I think you’re just, you’re playing the wrong game as a leader, particularly of a volunteer organization.

But I think as a leader in general, it only serves us to remember, that this is an infinite game, that goes on forever and ever and ever. And so, patience is all you have. Time is all you have. You can’t control any of the other factors. I can do what I can to maintain an optimal environment. And then when that seed is ready, it’ll come up.

Brett McKay: Well, Frank, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about F3?

Frank Schwartz: Just go outside and whether you hear some crazy guys in a parking lot somewhere barking in cadence, then you’ll know. That’s where we, no, I’m just kidding. Yeah, go to f3nation.com. There’s a place like if you’ve never heard of F3 before, and you think to yourself, man, that sounds like a thing I might wanna try. Go to f3nation.com. You’ll see a link in there up at the top that says locations. I think it’s under new or get started or something, I don’t remember now. But you find the map, find the locations, find one near you. And men, just show up. Just show up. And then we’ll help you through the rest. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. We’ll guide you. We’ll get you moving. But yeah, go someplace. Just find one near you, and show up. And you can read all about us on the website there.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Frank Schwartz, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Frank Schwartz: Brett, I appreciate the time, my friend. Take care.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Frank Schwartz. He’s the CEO of F3. You can find more information about F3 at f3nation.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/mensgroups. We find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.

 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. Where you can find our podcast archives. And make sure to sign up for a new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay. Reminding you not just to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Face-to-face socializing in America has declined by more than 20% nationwide. Among some groups, like young adults and unmarried men, the drop is closer to 40%.

But strangely, this hasn’t led to the loneliness epidemic that you hear so much about. Instead, we’re seeing a new phenomenon: rising aloneness without rising loneliness.

Today on the show, Derek Thompson will help us understand this puzzling disconnect and its profound implications. Derek is a staff writer at The Atlantic who recently wrote a piece entitled “The Anti-Social Century.” In the first half of our conversation, Derek unpacks the cultural shifts and technological developments — and no, it’s not just the smartphone — that have created what he calls the “convenience curse.” We then get into why even self-described introverts are often happier when forced to socialize, the concerning trend of young men settling further and further into isolating, sedentary leisure, and practical ways we can strengthen our atrophied social muscles to become better, happier people.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: The Importance of Developing and Maintaining Your Social Fitness
• AoM Podcast #742: The Power of Talking to Strangers
• AoM Article: Introversion as an Excuse
• AoM Podcast #176: The Vanishing Neighbor & The Transformation of American Community
• AoM Article: Use Technology Like the Amish

Connect With Derek Thompson

• Derek on X

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. Face to face socializing in America has declined by more than 20% nationwide. Among some groups like young adults and unmarried men, the drop is closer to 40%. But strangely, this hasn’t led to the loneliness epidemic that you hear so much about. Instead, we’re seeing a new phenomenon, rising aloneness without rising loneliness. Today on the show, Derek Thompson will help us understand this puzzling disconnect and its profound implications.

Derek is a staff writer at The Atlantic who recently wrote a piece entitled the Anti-Social Century. In the first half of our conversation, Derek unpacks the cultural shifts and technological developments. And no, it’s not just the smartphone that have created what he calls the convenience curse. We then get into why even self described introverts are often happier when forced to socialize, the concerning trend of young men settling further and further into isolating sedentary leisure and practical way we can strengthen our atrophied social muscles to become better, happier people. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/alone.

All right, Derek Thompson, welcome to the show.

Derek Thompson: Great to be here. Thank you so much.

Brett McKay: So you recently wrote a piece for The Atlantic called the Anti-Social Century, which traces how much less time Americans are spending socializing than they used to. What are some of the numbers on this front? Like what’s been the general decline in in person socialization?

Derek Thompson: The basic story is that American socializing declined in the second half of the 20th century. And then in the early 21st century, it pretty much fell off a cliff. Overall, face to face socializing has declined by more than 20% nationwide. Among some groups like black men and teenagers, decline is more like 40%. And so almost half of the face to face socializing that people had is gone now in just 20 years. That’s a remarkable remake of human experience. And then some of the individual statistics are really jarring, like the fact that couples now by, I think, a margin of 4 to 1, spend more time watching television together than talking to each other. Women who own cats. This one got me in trouble with some people, but I’ll say it here. Women who own cats now spend more time caring for their pets than they do speaking to another person in a face to face situation. So we’ve really seen just a total transformation of how Americans spend time with each other.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you talked about how it’s particularly pronounced amongst young adults. There’s a line from the article, the share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours, has declined by nearly 50% since the early 1990s.

Derek Thompson: It’s pretty nuts. I don’t know what else to say. It’s incredibly depressing. It’s wild. And it’s one reason why when I found these statistics, I was like, I need to do something big on this. I write essays for The Atlantic. I have a podcast, Plain English, those outlets, those 1,000 word essays or 40 minute podcasts, those let me get a little bit into a subject like this. But I really was getting the sense that the decline in face to face socializing and its flip side, which is the rise of mere aloneness of absolute solitude, was becoming one of the most important social facts in America. And I think the implications of this decline in socializing that you’ve pointed to are just truly immense.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And besides some of the numbers we just mentioned, you talk about some of the things that Robert Putnam talked about in his book ‘Bowling Alone.’ The rate of people being involved with community organizations declined. The frequency of people entertaining at home like hosting friends for parties, games to entertain, that’s all been declining as well.

Derek Thompson: And that had been declining for a while. That’s the stuff that had been declining since the 1960s. So, brief history of ‘Bowling Alone,’ for those who haven’t read it or maybe have just heard of it or have heard of it so many times they feel like they’ve read it, here’s the upshot. Between the early 1900s, the 1960s, practically every measure of socializing was going up. People were spending more time together. They were more likely to join associations and clubs. And then somewhere around the 1960s, 1970s, the tide turned and America became much more individualistic. Our cars allowed us to drive away from each other, homes got more comfortable, entertainment got more awesome. So it became more fun just to stay at home and sit on the couch and watch TV or play video games or look at your phone. And then finally, in the 21st century, if the automobile privatized our lives and the television privatized our leisure, the smartphone privatized our attention, it meant that we could be in huge crowds of people and be essentially alone on our phone getting involved in some psychodrama millions of miles away in phone land. And so that’s the story that Putnam sort of sets up.

And what I try to do is to extend it into the 21st century. When he published his book in 2000, there were a lot of people who said, I’m not entirely sure that you’re right about this, Bob, I think maybe you’re wrong, and we might see a great surge of socializing in the world remade by the Internet. And in fact, everything just got worse from one perspective. And so that’s really where this piece picks up.

Brett McKay: How did the pandemic accelerate this trend? So this has been going on for, you say, 50, maybe 40 years, this trend of people not getting out and socializing as much. How did the pandemic accelerate this?

Derek Thompson: Well, the pandemic accelerated it because if you’re locked down, you certainly aren’t spending a lot of time with other people outside of your home. So clearly, we know that the pandemic increased time spent at home and decreased time spent with other people. But what’s interesting to me is what happens if you compare, say the years 2021, which is when people were coming out of lockdown. What if you compare 2021 and 2023?

Well, it turns out that alone time actually increased. So even in the post pandemic era, we were spending more time alone. And if you look at time spent at home, the work from home revolution is sort of its own secular thing. There’s some people being called back to the office. There’s some people still working at home. But the Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey, who looked at time spent at home, concluded that in 2022, the average American was spending about 99 minutes more every single day at home. And that wasn’t just about working from home. It was about eating more at home, praying more at home, entertaining more at home, socializing more at home. We really did become more of a phone bound and home bound nation, even around the acute crisis of the pandemic.

Brett McKay: Yeah, see, I think something that the pandemic did is, it kind of built an infrastructure. Like, the infrastructure is already there to do this stuff, but it kind of forced us to do it. We’re like, oh, this is actually an option. Instead of going to a restaurant, I can just do DoorDash. Instead of going to the movie theater, I can just stream a movie to my home. I mean, I’ve noticed that in my own life.

Derek Thompson: Well, yeah, and all that’s great. I want to be very clear. That stuff is awesome. Like, sometimes you’re just exhausted and you’re like, I could cook dinner or I could go out, but damn, I really just want to order a burrito to the house and watch whatever on Netflix, right? Like, catch up on Severance, watch White Lotus. Like, we’ve all been there. Okay? I am not trying to tell people in any way that these conveniences are somehow evil. I’m trying to get them to recognize the cost of progress, the cost of convenience.

I think with television or smartphones, we’re becoming more familiar with the fact that, yeah, television is incredibly entertaining. Smartphones are ludicrously entertaining. But maybe smartphones are causing a bit of anxiety. Maybe watching too much television means being a bit of a recluse and pulling yourself out of the physical world. And in fact, I’ll just pause here to say one of my favorite statistics from this piece is that, between the 1960s and 1990s, the average American added about 300 additional hours of leisure time per year. And you’d think, like, what would you do? What would you, listener of this podcast, do with an extra 300 hours of leisure time next year? Well, it turned out that people spent almost all that extra leisure time watching television.

So we really, really love watching television. That’s for sure. What I’m trying to get us to recognize is not television’s bad, smartphone’s bad. Ordering food to eat at home is bad. No, these are conveniences. But convenience can have a cost. And the cost of what I call the convenience curse is that leaning too much into these behaviors and devices and technologies often means pulling ourselves out of the physical world.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that what you just said about the increase of leisure time, I think a lot of people think, oh, if I had more time, I would hang out more, I would do creative hobbies, I’d become an artist, I’d write a novel. But it seems like what we typically do is we just plow whatever time opens up into the path of least resistance activities, which is mainly screens, which is interesting.

Derek Thompson: Yeah, screens are incredibly entertaining. I mean, they’re amazingly entertaining. And they’re also super easy. I mean, I don’t remember every single thing that you just listed, but you talked about hanging out with friends, becoming an artist, writing a novel. Writing a novel is freaking hard. Okay? Becoming an artist means sucking for a while before you become an artist, that you’re not embarrassed of being. Learning a new language. I’m thinking of things that people might say if you ask them, what would you do with 300 extra hours of leisure? I think most people might imagine that they would do hard things, but we’re exhausted and simple creatures to a certain extent, and we prefer many times to do easy things. And there’s practically nothing easier than folding yourself into a comfortable couch and turning on a streaming service. That’s very easy. And that’s why I think we’ve been essentially donating our time and our dopamine to screens rather than to physical world activities.

Brett McKay: Okay, so the television increased the amount of time we spent alone in the second half of the 20th century. The smartphones in the early part of the 21st century. You also talk about the role that cars played in this. What role has the car played in us not socializing as much?

Derek Thompson: The car’s another great example of a really wonderful technology that has costs. One cost, I guess you could say, is, pollution, unless you’re driving like a plug in electric. But one social cost of cars is that they allow us to be away from other people. The vast majority of time that an American spends in a car is not carpooling. It’s alone. The vast majority of time that Americans spend in cars is alone. Which means that, if Americans overall they are increasing their car use, they’re probably increasing their time spent alone as well. And what happened in the 1950s and 1960s is that we built these ribbons of asphalt leading from cities into suburbs, and people could buy bigger houses. That’s cool. But that also meant lots more time spent in the car. It meant longer commutes, and it meant houses that were a little bit further away from other people.

And so when you put all that together, I think you have the beginning of this revolution that Putnam was talking about, where this nation of clubs and associations and people coming together became a nation of not front porches, but backyards. People pulling back into their own spaces, their private spaces, and associating the American dream, associating a sense of wealth, of having made it, as maximizing control over private spaces. And I think that sort of kicks off this revolution that I’m talking about.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And it’s even, as you mentioned earlier, it’s influenced how our homes are designed today. And it’s created what you call this idea of a remote life where we’re trying to do everything in our home. Homes, if you’re out in the suburbs, some of these homes had those giant cinema rooms in the bonus room upstairs. A lot of homes these days have garage gyms so they don’t have to go… I have a garage gym. I haven’t been to a public gym in almost a decade. And even bedrooms are being designed like, how can we maximize people being by themselves? And what’s interesting, if you look in the 70s, in the 60s, 70s, like, homes were designed for socializing. I remember 70s, there’s that trend of conversation pits, that doesn’t happen anymore.

Derek Thompson: Yeah. Right. Sunken living rooms. That’s my wife’s favorite piece of home decor. Yeah. Whenever we’re on Zillow and she sees a sunken living room, her heart goes aflutter for sure. Everything you said is very true. And when it comes to architecture, two of the more interesting conversations that I had were with Clifton Harness, who’s the co-founder of TestFit, which is a company that makes software to design layouts for new housing developments. And he told me, the cardinal rule of contemporary apartment design is that every room has to be built to accommodate maximal screen time.

So whereas in previous conversations about how do we build a beautiful space, it was like, how do we let the light in? High ceilings. How do we make it a perfect space for light? And now the question is, how do we give the most comfort to the most people? And the answer is, make sure that there is an obvious space to put the flat screen television and a couch. And Bobby Fijan, who’s a real estate developer that I also spoke to, offered up an amazing quote. He said, “For the most part, apartments are built for Netflix and chill.”

This is something that architects and developers are thinking about. They have our preferences in mind. They wouldn’t be able to make money if they didn’t. They are designing not for our stated preference of, oh, if I had an extra 300 hours of leisure, I would learn a new language with 10 new friends, and we’d all become Picasso. No, you make money by watching what people do, by watching the revealed preference. And the revealed preference of Americans is we want to spend as much time at home as we can. And I would just say here, before passing back to you, is that like, when it comes to things like, home gyms, I work at home all the time. I work out at home all the time. I definitely don’t want to give people the impression that I’m trying to stigmatize a bit of solitude or stigmatize activities done at home. What I want to do is to show people the receipt of the choices that we’re making. You can make a series of totally understandable choices and then lift up and recognize that your socializing time is declining year after year after year. That is the awareness that I want us to have. It’s more about awareness than it is about stigmatizing.

Brett McKay: Okay, so the amount of time people are spending by themselves has been increasing. You’d think since alone time is increasing, loneliness has increased. Is that the case? Is there, as we often hear in the media, a loneliness crisis going on?

Derek Thompson: No, I don’t think there is. I think the loneliness crisis is overblown. And that might seem like a very confusing record scratch moment for people if they’re like this guy talking about the surge of aloneness, doesn’t think there’s a loneliness crisis. Well, here’s what the data shows. The data shows that for young people, loneliness is up a little bit. But for people overall, there’s really not a lot of evidence that loneliness is increasing. What we have instead is rising aloneness without rising loneliness.

Now, one interpretation of those two statistics is that there’s no problem. People are absolutely thrilled being alone. That’s why they’re not lonely. But turns out when you use the same American Time Use Survey to ask people if they’re happier around other people or alone, people tend to be much happier around other people. So here’s what I think is happening. I think that loneliness in small doses is actually good. I think that loneliness is a biological cue to tell us to get off the couch and get out into the real world and to see people and be around people and touch and high five and hug. I think that what’s happening instead is that people are spending an enormous amount of time on their phones and they’re dumping their dopamine onto their phones.

They’re scrolling on TikTok, they’re scrolling on X, they’re scrolling on Instagram. They’re basically getting all of this dopamine flushed into their brains looking at their phones. Also probably a bit of cortisol if you’re on X or if you’re just made anxious by whatever you’re seeing on Instagram or these other platforms. You’ve got all of this anxiety and all this dopamine that’s being flushed into our brains. And then we put our phone away and how do we feel at the end of this leisure time? We feel exhausted. We feel like we’re absolutely spent.

Ironically, this leisure time has made us feel less inclined to want to have the drive to go out and be around other people and even risk the hazard of, I’ll drive there, but there won’t be parking. I’ll get on the subway, but it’ll be delayed. So I think that people aren’t feeling the historical biological impulse to be around other people. And it’s registering in surveys as our not feeling as lonely as we should be. And that’s why aloneness keeps rising year after year after year. I think we are quietly making ourselves miserable because we’re not feeling the healthy pinch of loneliness.

Brett McKay: Okay, so let me just recap that. So you’re saying because we’re on our phones all the time, we’re kind of getting like this pseudo socializing going on in our phones. When we actually want to spend time in real life with people, we’re like, the signal’s not there. ‘Cause we’re like, well, I already got my fill. Like, I’ve already been around people.

Derek Thompson: I think it might be that for some people. I mean, there’s so many different people in the world, and so I can’t speak for all of them, but there’s two different things that could be happening here, and I want to make sure that I’m precise about distinguishing between them. So one thing that you’re describing is that lots of people think that time spent on the phone is a sort of substitute for time spent with people. I think that’s wrong for a variety of reasons. I think it’s much harder to build intimacy by catching up over text than spending time with someone over a table.

I also think that people have a much stronger relationship with other humans in a physical world presence than they do on their phones. So I think there’s a problem of replacing sociality, hanging out with people in the real world with para-sociality, which is spending our time with people on the Internet and imagining their inner weather and their inner lives. So I absolutely agree to a certain extent with the picture that you just painted that time spent on phone is a poor substitute for time spent with other people in the physical world.

But something else is happening that I think is biochemical. With dopamine cycles, there’s something called phasic dopamine, which is the dopamine hit. The amount of dopamine that we get when we experience something that elicits a bunch of dopamine. And there’s tonic dopamine, which is our underlying baseline levels of dopamine. And I think one thing that’s happening is that people are spending so much time on their phones that their phasic dopamine is going nuts, and it’s leaving them with lower levels of tonic dopamine, which means their baseline level of dopamine is depleted when they put down their phone. And that means when a friend reaches out to you at say, 7:00 PM on a Wednesday, when you’ve spent the last hour and a half just scrolling through TikTok, and that friend says, hey, do you want to hang out? You say, “I don’t know, man. I’m kind of beat. Work was really a lot. And also, I’m really stressed about whatever thing is happening in the world, and it’s just too much of a misadventure for me to get out of the house. I’m going to pass. I’m sorry, dude.” And we see this to a certain extent.

There’s a section of the article where I describe this TikTok trend that my wife introduced me to where you have young people who are socializing less than any young generation that we have on record celebrating when their friends cancel plans. It’s called cancellation among some folks. That makes no sense if you think about young people being lonely. It does make sense if you consider my biochemical explanation that young people are spending so much time with their phones that when a friend cancels plans, they’re happy because they’re dopaminergically exhausted by their phone experience. So I think by summary, two things are happening. Not only are our phones a poor substitute for real socialization, but also our phones are absorbing the dopamine that we should be giving to the friends in our life.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we’re spending more time alone, but we’re not necessarily lonely because of it. And that’s because while loneliness usually manifests as a signal that drives us to be be with other people, we’re not feeling that drive anymore because we’ve donated the thing that gives that drive, our dopamine, to our devices. And you point out in the article that even though studies show that alone time increases unhappiness in the long term, you say this in the article. Nonetheless, many people keep choosing to spend free time alone in their home, away from other people. Perhaps one might think they’re making the right choice. After all, they must know themselves best. But a consistent finding of modern psychology is that people often don’t know what they want or what will make them happy.

Derek Thompson: Yeah, there’s an idea. The Harvard psychologist, Dan Gilbert, I believe, called it miswanting. And it’s this idea that people aren’t very good at understanding what they’ll want. And in a way, it’s a bit of an extension of the principle that predictions are hard, especially about the future, right? Predictions are hard, especially about the future, especially about us. It’s hard to predict exactly what’s going to make us happy. So sometimes you buy a piece of furniture that you’re obsessed with or a coat that you’re obsessed with, and three months later, you never really think about it. It doesn’t really offer any additional unit of happiness to any particular day. This happens all the time. It’s what Gilbert calls miswanting.

Well, I think people might miswant aloneness as well. I think they might miswant introversion. And how would you prove this? Well, there’s a University of Chicago psychologist named Nick Epley who did a really interesting study where he asked commuter train passengers to make a prediction. How would they feel if asked to spend that train ride in Chicago talking to a stranger versus being alone? And the vast majority of participants predicted that the quiet solitude would make for a much better commute than being forced to talk to a stranger. But then Epley’s team creates this experiment and he has some people keep to themselves and other people are instructed to talk to a stranger. And those people are told the longer conversation, the better. And then afterward, you have both groups fill out a questionnaire. How do you feel in this moment? Not a prediction of the future. How do you feel right now?

And despite this broad assumption that the best commute is the most silent commute, it was the people instructed, randomly instructed, to talk to strangers who reported feeling significantly more positive than those who kept themselves. So this is a really, really fascinating and possibly fundamental paradox at the core of human life. As Epley told me, we are social animals. We are made better by being social. But we are afraid of sociality in various ways. We’re afraid of not being light, we’re afraid of boredom. We’re afraid of the awkwardness of an initial conversation with someone who we don’t know well or maybe the initial awkwardness of conversation with someone we used to know well or even do know well. There’s all sorts of social anxieties that can accrete around the social animal. But fundamentally, it does seem like in a variety of research settings, if you force most people to be social, even those that consider themselves introverts, they will tell you immediately after the experience that they’re happier than the people who were not forced to be social. So, yes, to your point, I do think that we misunderstand something very core to human nature.

Brett McKay: I liken to making the analogy of like, social life to physical fitness. Like, you cannot exercise and not eat well, and on a day to day basis, you’ll feel okay, you’ll feel fine. But then eventually you reach a point where you realize, oh man, I’m overweight, I’m really out of shape, my cholesterol’s high, I’ve just got really poor health. And it’s the same thing with socializing. If you’re not socializing very much, I mean, you feel okay on a day to day basis, but then you realize, oh, man, something’s wrong. Something’s wrong here. Like, not only have your actual social skills atrophied or you get rusty in how you interact with people, but you feel like something is wrong internally.

Derek Thompson: Yeah, I mean, I would love to hang out in this metaphor here, this equation of physical fitness and social fitness because I think it’s a really fruitful connection. How is social fitness similar to physical fitness? Well, at the highest level, modern life isn’t built for it. So why do we exercise? Why do you have a gym in your garage? Well, the answer is that you’re not a hunter gatherer. You’re not getting your exercise from the essentials of life. From day to day living. You probably spend a lot of time sitting. Maybe you’re sitting right now. You probably spend a lot of time just not walking that much by being in your house. And so we had to, in the modern world, invent this bizarre thing called a gym where we go and work out, which is not something our ancestors did. They lived. They didn’t lift weights just to get ripped.

There’s a way in which modern life has made it harder to be physically fit unless you make physical fitness a priority. And in the same way, I think modern life has made social fitness more difficult unless you make it a priority. It’s all too easy to just work from home in certain jobs, work from home, order into home, cook for yourself at home, entertain yourself at home, watch the infinitude of stuff that’s on Amazon Prime and Netflix and Max, watch a bunch of stuff on TikTok on your phone, infinitely divert yourself without ever leaving the four corners of your house. It’s very, very easy. And it’s especially easy right now, looking out in North Carolina. It’s been snowing for the last 24 hours. I don’t want to go out. So this is easy. But I would love to think about ways that we can equate physical fitness and social fitness, the same way that we purposely divert from our lives to go to the gym and work out. How can we purposely divert from the convenience curse to be more socially fit as well?

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. You also talk about the idea of introversion. I think because we live in a very therapeutic culture, we like to psychoanalyze ourselves. And people are like, well, I’m an introvert, and so I don’t need to socialize as much ’cause that doesn’t give me any energy. It drains me. Is that the case. Can introverts get away without socializing as much?

Derek Thompson: I think introversion probably exists. I definitely don’t think it exists in a binary. This is not like males and females. This is like a normal Gaussian distribution. This is like height. There’s the vast majority of people who call themselves introverts are like sort of kind of introverts. If you really put truth serum into them, then they would be introverts in some circumstances and not introverts in others. They might feel a little bit shy at a party where they didn’t know anybody, but if you put them in front of their best friends, they would open wide up.

And I would add, according to Nick Epley, the University of Chicago psychologist, if you nudged them just a bit to be more social at a party, what you would have is someone who has a slightly better experience than the wallflower who just sits in the corner of the party and looks at their phone. Yeah, that’s the evidence. I’m sure some people are listening, thinking, you know what? I hate parties. When I go or when my friends make me go, when my wife makes me go, I’m fine standing in the corner and just reading Espn.

I don’t know your life, right? Maybe that works out for you. But it does seem like for many people, introversion is a bit of a delusion. Yes. It can be nice to recharge. Yes. Of course, a bit of solitude can be a blessing, but people tend to be made happier in other people.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think people typically… I’ve done this too. They use introversion as an excuse to not socialize. It’s like, well, that’s just my personality. It’s like, well, actually, if you did it, you’d feel good. You’d actually enjoy it.

Derek Thompson: Yeah. My colleague Olga Kazan has a great book out called ‘Me, But Better,’ which is about the science of personality and personality change and the TL;DR, I read it. It’s wonderful, is that personality change is not only possible, it’s kind of easy if you commit yourself to it. Personalities are a little bit fixed by genetics and environment, but not that much. People can absolutely change their personalities. And people’s personalities change all the time in different circumstances. Someone listening might know a friend who was really closed off and shy in high school and then just found their community in college and suddenly became like a totally more confident person. Or maybe they knew some nerd in college who went off and made a bunch of money in their 20s and 30s and now are very different in many ways, personality change happens all the time. And a part of it is the recognition that our personalities, I think, are much more elastic than we think.

And sometimes, to your point, we define ourselves in very narrow boxes in order to justify our behavior. If we don’t want to hang out with people, oh, I’m an introvert. That’s concrete unchanging behavior. If we’re a little bit mean to someone, oh, I’m just a little bit neurotic. That’s just who I am, right? If we’re too much of a hard ass, oh, you know, I’m just a conscientious person. I can’t help it. Nope, you probably can help it. Personality is incredibly, incredibly liquid. And it does seem like if people use that liquid nature of their personality to become a little bit more social, overall, it makes them happier.

Brett McKay: Okay, so in the book, you talk about how men are spending more alone time than women. And you talk about this trend in which young men on the Internet are becoming secular monks. What’s a secular monk? What’s going on here?

Derek Thompson: So, yeah, secular monk is not my term. It’s a term that I love from Andrew Taggart, who wrote an essay in the religious journal First Things in 2020. And he was describing this group of men who he said seemed to be foregoing marriage and fatherhood with gusto rather than focus their 30s and 40s on getting married and having kids. They were committed to their bodies and their bank accounts and their meditation practice and their cold plunge. And he called them secular monks because he said it’s interesting that they are, on the one hand, really committed to this idea of like, monitored self control. They want to master like the monkey within. Master the demon within. And at the same time, they aren’t particularly religious. What they believe in isn’t God, but cold plunges or intermittent fasting or meditation boot camps.

And what I thought was interesting about it is, again, not that I think cold plunges are bad or meditation’s bad, but rather that taken to an extreme, you can see how this kind of behavior is very lonesome. And when I read the essay, I really felt this shock of recognition because in the previous months, I’d been thinking a lot about this sort of TikTok Instagram trend that I’d seen where it was basically like men showing off the perfect morning routine. And these videos were always of a piece. It was always like a good looking guy wakes up alone with his eye mask and in a beautifully lit room. And he journals and he cold plunges and maybe he saunas and he meditates and he works out and all these things happen. He eats something ludicrously healthy, farmed from some algae farm in Nepal or whatever, and all these things happen alone. We see him wake up and meditate and journal all alone. There’s no people in these dioramas of a life perfectly lived.

And I just thought that was really interesting because if you look at the data, the group with the largest increases in alone time are young men and particular young men without a college education. And I was just very interested in the possibility that we were building a vision of masculinity that was a bit like caveman masculinity. It was a set of behaviors that an individual could do alone in a cave in Siberia. You can wake up, you can meditate, you can journal, you can work out, you can do push ups, you can do incline, you can do all of that alone in a cave in Siberia. But you can’t be a friend and you can’t be a dad, you can’t be a son, you can’t be a mentor or a mentee. All of these relational aspects of masculinity are wiped away in the caveman masculinity depicted in these videos.

And I’ve done a bunch of episodes for my podcast, Plain English, about how I think the ultimate expression of 21st masculinity needs to be a more relational masculinity. It’s not about being strong for yourself. It’s about being strong for other people. And, yeah, that can mean, bench pressing your body weight times 2.5, but ultimately, the expression of masculinity should be for other people, because life is about other people. I mean, like, I don’t think that we want to represent the ultimate expression of happiness and strength in the 2020s as being a ripped person who journals perfectly, masters the interior weather of their psychology and basically doesn’t use it to help anyone other than himself. That seems like a really impoverished version of masculinity.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I mean, I think if you go back into history, even like a couple hundred years ago, that was the ideal of masculinity. Like, to be a man was like to be useful to your family, to your wider community. It’s about giving back, giving more than you take. But, yeah, something about our culture, the hyper individualized culture, we’ve gotten away from that. And I’ve seen those videos you mentioned. They give off very Patrick Bateman vibes whenever I watch them. I’m like, this is weird. And I think it’s interesting. What’s ironic about this whole, like, you know, some of these guys call themselves secular monks or they’re going into monk mode. Is that monks, they do have… There’s solitude plays. I’m talking about real monks. Solitude is a spiritual practice, but most monks live in communities because they’re looking for that friction and accountability that other people can provide to help them live a disciplined and holy life. So, yeah, if you really want to go into monk mode, you need to be with a bunch of other guys or people who are helping you. You need to be in a community if you want to be a real monk.

Derek Thompson: Yeah, totally.

Brett McKay: And then you also talk about how, even with these men are spending time alone with self improvement, there still is a lot of depression, anxiety, despair. And something you talk about is men, I think all people need this, but I think men, in particular, young men, they want to feel needed. They want to feel like a group needs them. And because they’re spending so much time alone and not within a group or community, they’re not getting that.

Derek Thompson: Yeah, I think neededness is incredibly important. And this is what Richard Reeves, who’s the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me. He says this is what men need. They want to feel essential to their families, to their community, to their office, to their work. He said… The quote that I loved in the piece is, “I think at some level, we all need to feel like we’re a jigsaw piece that’s going to fit into a jigsaw somewhere.” And it can come from… This neededness can come from all kinds of directions, friends, children, partners, colleagues, religious congregations. But it is, again, about moving away from this sort of caveman sense of what a man is for and toward a more relational sense of how can I use the strength that I’m building to help other people?

Brett McKay: Continuing on young men. For every secular monk out there using his alone time to work on his body and productivity, there are many more guys out there using their free time alone to engage in sedentary leisure. What is sedentary leisure?

Derek Thompson: Yeah. So the sociologist, Liana Sayer, who is at the University of Maryland, shared analysis with me about how leisure time in the 21st century has changed for men and women. And the most important, most interesting thing is that she divides leisure between engaged, which is stuff like socializing or going to a concert or playing a sport, and sedentary leisure. And sedentary just means like sitting down, watching TV, playing video games. And the largest increase, the largest increase, the most dramatic thing she found is that single men without kids who have the most leisure time are overwhelmingly likely to spend their leisure time by themselves in solo, sedentary leisure. So playing video games, watching TV, looking at your phone.

And again, that’s just kind of sad. I mean, I just think that I don’t know these guys, so I don’t want to be this writer who hops on the horn and just tells people how to live their lives. I don’t know them. I don’t know what makes them tick. But it really does seem, from the best evidence that we have, like a life spent alone is a bit of a life wasted. We really are made into happier, more meaningful people through relationships with others. And if young guys without kids are going to spend most of their time watching TV alone, that really does seem like a wasted decade.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and I imagine there’s consequences of that. Psychosocial, physical consequences. If you’re sitting around doing nothing, playing video games, you’re going to have health consequences, obviously, psychology. You’re probably going to be depressed. And yeah, I mean, all the things we talk about, deaths of despair, drug abuse, et cetera.

Derek Thompson: Right. All of that serious stuff. And this is serious, but it’s also a little bit… Has a little bit levity to it. You’re also not going to get laid if you spend all of your time at home playing video games and watching TV. You do, in fact, have to go out into the physical world to meet other people at some point. And I’m very interested, separate from this article, in the decline of coupling that we’re seeing throughout the world. It’s not just that teens have fewer friends or that teens, as you said at the top of the show, have reduced their face to face socializing with friends by 50%. People in their 20s are dating less. People in their 30s are getting married less. And then people in their 40s, consequently, are having fewer kids. Something really big is happening here in terms of the pulling away of people. Not just the pulling away of sexes, but the pulling away of people. And I do wonder, to your point, whether the behavior of today’s young men who are maxing out on solo sedentary time is going to create all sorts of problems for these guys in their 30s and 40s.

Brett McKay: And it could. It’ll probably have consequences on a society level eventually.

Derek Thompson: Yeah, yeah, right. I agree. I think it could. I mean, I don’t… I can’t say exactly what those consequences will be. But we talked briefly about the political consequences here, and it does seem like from research by Michael Bang Petersen, who’s a Danish political scientist, people who spend more time alone and who have more social isolation are more likely to look to politics as a place of entertainment. And he calls these voters need for chaos voters, because what they want most from politics, isn’t any particular outcome for any particular group. What they want is the feeling of chaotic entertainment. So that’s just one flavor, I think, of how we could absolutely see some of the changes happening today have real repercussions in the future.

Brett McKay: You say that while some of our social ties are getting weaker, some are getting stronger. Which bonds are getting stronger and which ones are getting weaker?

Derek Thompson: Yeah, so this is probably the part of the essay that was quoted most often back to me. Marc Dunkelman, who is a researcher at Brown University, has a great book that just came out called Why Nothing Works. I talked to him a couple months ago, and he said, the irony here is that the Internet has actually made some of our relationships much stronger. I am texting… This is Marc talking. I’m texting my wife all day long. When my daughter buys butterfingers, I know the moment she’s bought that butterfingers from CVS because of the credit card data that I have on my phone.

So in many ways, our most intimate relationships are tighter than they used to be. And then you think of that as the inner ring of socializing, and there’s an outer ring of socializing that’s sort of like the tribe, not the family, but the tribe, the people in the world who share your affinities and interests. So maybe if you have a favorite sports team in basketball or football, it’s everyone in the country who’s a fan of that team. And you’re probably following people across the country, maybe even across the world, who are fans of that particular team, certainly if you’re a fan of English Premier League.

So that’s sort of the outer ring of tribe. There’s a middle ring, though, of village. It’s not the people related to or are best friends, and it’s not the people we just find online and form groups with. It’s the people who live around us. It’s the village, it’s our neighbors. It’s the people we know when we walk around the street. And it’s there that our relationships have really atrophied. We really know our neighbors worse than we used to. And one good question is like, okay, who cares? What if you just have friends who aren’t your neighbors? Totally fair question. I would say that if the inner circle of family teaches us love and the outer circle of tribe teaches us loyalty, the middle ring of village teaches us tolerance. It is naturally tolerating to be around people you’re not related to who you disagree with a little bit because you’re not already best friends. And I think that we are losing touch with that village layer, and I think it is showing up in a variety of ways in our politics and in sort of the social fabric.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we had Marc Dunkelman on the podcast a long time. It was like nine years ago is episode 176. So, yeah, he wrote that book the Vanishing Neighbor.

Derek Thompson: That’s right.

Brett McKay: Where he introduces those three rings. And ever since I read that book, I think about that all the time, that sort of concept about the three rings. And I think he’s right. Like, that middle ring of village has gotten weaker, and you see it in just declines in people participating in PTA, volunteering for organizations. And even when you do get in those sorts of things, people don’t know how to interact. Like, they just yell at each other because, like you said, they haven’t practiced the virtue of tolerance. And you can see this play out, like on Nextdoor, the app. Have you used Nextdoor before?

Derek Thompson: I have, and I stopped very quickly because I realized what a cesspool it was.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah, I think it’s a perfect example of how we no longer have the skills to handle how to live in a village. So if you have a problem. Used to be if it was like 1985 and you had a problem with your neighbor, say your neighbor was blowing leaves into your yard. Well, you’d have to go over to your neighbor and calmly say, I understand you’re trying to clean your yard out, but can you not blow in my yard? People don’t do that anymore. What they do now is they’ll just post it up on next door and just put the person on blast. Like, look at this idiot. He’s just so inconsiderate. And then people are chiming in. Yeah, what a dummy. And the middle ring is gone.

Derek Thompson: I have a question about Nextdoor. The people who are commenting, what a dummy. Are they all direct neighbors or are they in some like… Like, where are they?

Brett McKay: It’s like in your sort of an area. So when you sign up for Nextdoor, you can sign up to only get updates within a certain Geographic radius. So like maybe the neighborhoods around you.

Derek Thompson: I see.

Brett McKay: And so, yeah, it becomes very polarized. Some people will just be like, yeah, the guy blowing leaves is dumb. You’re like, oh, you’re a dumb. You shouldn’t care. And it’s just like, oh my gosh.

Derek Thompson: And what’s interesting about that is you’re taking like the village, you’re turning it into the tribe. You’re essentially taking the relations that would theoretically be neighborly, but you’re turning them into a social network which creates in groups and out groups, which is not what you want in any pleasant neighborhood. Yeah. It’s been a while since I did a full ethnography of Nextdoor, but sounds no good.

Brett McKay: It is no good at all. I get on there every now and then when I have to sell something. I’ll get on there and then I’ll just kind of check in what’s going on. Like, oh, no, I don’t want to go to that feed anymore. So, yeah, the middle ring, the skills of socializing of dealing with people we’re not really close with, don’t have a lot in common with. Those are atrophying. And there’s some consequences that you’re just… Neighborhood life isn’t as pleasant, isn’t as productive. It has consequences for civic life in your town, your city, and also you can even say our national level with our politics. What can be done as individuals to restore a richer social life? Because it seems like we have all these external factors that are kind of nudging us towards spending more time alone. So what can we do to restore a richer social life in our lives?

Derek Thompson: Yeah, fortunately, this is easy. You know, you don’t need any medical invention to spend time with other people. You don’t need any kind of invention at all. You just need to choose. You need to make different choices. You choose to spend the next 15 minutes not looking at your phone, but texting a friend to meet up. And then you choose to spend the next 15 minutes not looking at your phone, but texting another friend to meet up. And then you spend the next 15 minutes not looking at your phone, but rather thinking about how can I create a new habit in my life that puts me around other people rather than puts me on my couch at 7:30 PM. Every single night.

It’s really easy on the one hand, unfortunately, it’s not so easily done because a lot of these issues are collective action problems, and I totally recognize that. So if you’re a couple and you want to have dinner parties with your couple friends. Well, it’s much easier to do that if there’s already a habit of dinner parties. If there’s not a habit of dinner parties, then you’re going to have a harder time getting people to come over. You’re going to feel a little bit more embarrassed about making the ask and maybe being turned down because people aren’t in the habit of going over to each other’s houses on Thursday nights or Friday nights.

And I get that it’s a collective action problem, but I also think that it’s important to give people this sense of agency. Like the topics that I’m writing about here are huge. We’re talking about national politics and things that exist. The level of nationwide and planet wide technologies. The automobile and the television set and the smartphone. These are big, big things. And it’s ridiculous to ask people to be absolutely Amish and just reject all technology. But the truth is the Amish have a very interesting way of thinking about technology that I learned when I was reporting for this piece. They don’t just reject all technology that’s modern. They reject technology that isn’t in keeping with their values. So they look at a technology and then evaluate it and then choose to accept or reject it, depending on whether their virtues are amplified by the use of that technology. And that’s very interesting. I think that the Amish probably go way too far.

I’m not interested in becoming Amish anytime in the near future. But it is very interesting to think about a sort of a mystic approach to one’s own life. Which is to say, what if rather than embrace every technology that made our life a little more convenient, we instead were really explicit about the values that we had. Maybe even we wrote them down and said, the most important things in my life are my family, my child, spending time with friends, work that’s meaningful to me, a fitness routine that keeps me healthy as long as possible. What if you wrote down your values and then only embraced the technology that furthered those values rather than took away from them? That might be a way for people who are not Amish to inject their lives with just enough Amishness that they reorient their living around a set of values rather than a set of dopamine giving devices?

Brett McKay: I love that idea that you can change the social texture of your life in just 15 minute blocks. So instead of using 15 minutes to just to surf Instagram mindlessly, use that 15 minutes to connect with a friend or make plans to get together. And I really like the idea of just being intentional and going back to that, the fitness analogy. We need to get out of this habit of thinking that I’m only going to hang out or socialize when I feel like it before you socialize?

Derek Thompson: Absolutely. Yeah, we’ve all been there.

Brett McKay: Yeah, yeah. Just make it like working out. It’s like, well, it’s 6 o’clock. I don’t feel like working out, but this is my workout time, so I’m gonna go work out anyway. And it’s the same thing with socializing. It’s like, well, there’s a party tonight. I don’t feel like going out tonight, but my social muscles need exercising, so I’m gonna go anyway.

Derek Thompson: This is why I love this analogy of physical fitness to social fitness. Because what you said, I think is really slyly subversive. Like, it’s common among people who work out to say, you need to commit to the habit because there’s going to be days you don’t want to do it and you should do it anyway. So this sense that essentially working out is a little bit like a vegetable, you should eat it even when you don’t want to. I don’t think we think of socializing like a vegetable. I think we think of socializing like a fruit. Something that tastes delicious. And if you don’t want to have a blueberry that day, no one cares. No one’s going to scream at you for not having a strawberry on a Wednesday. But what if we thought of socializing as more like a vegetable, more like something that was good for us, more like something we should commit to even when we didn’t feel like it. I think it’s a very clever way of subtly recasting this activity that we think of as being sort of frivolous and extraneous, as being actually fundamentally core to a healthy life well lived.

Brett McKay: So we talked about some individual things we can do. You mentioned that this is also a collective action problem. Are there any communal rituals or maybe some new things, some things we can implement into our culture to help this along? Have you seen anything in your research where there are groups, communities, towns who are cultivating more in person socializing?

Derek Thompson: Yeah, there’s definitely new trends that I’m following. You know, independent bookstores are booming. I think they’ve had more than 50% growth since 2009. And a lot of them are basically like miniature theaters. They’ve got author talks every night. And so that’s sort of a new ritual that’s starting. Here where I live near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, there’s a ton of board game cafes. And I know that board game cafes are sort of flowering across the country. And this is sort of an interesting inversion of the typical trend of American entertainment.

Typically, it’s like movie theaters where you used to have to drive to the movie theater, and now you can just stay home and do the activity. With board games, they’re invented to stay at home and do the activity. But these new board game cafes mean you actually drive to a third place in order to play board games to other people. I think that’s really interesting, and it gets people out of their house and around other people. But I’m most interested in really, really humble rituals. I’m interested in rituals that are essentially the equivalent of Friday night Sabbath, where in the Jewish tradition, you say a prayer, you break the bread, you pour some wine, you have a meal.

And that sounds just about fantastic to me. And I hope that it’d be, I think, really lovely to have a renaissance in dinner parties. This is a trend that we actually have data on it. The number of dinner parties in America or at least the number of dinner parties people say they go to, has been collapsing, not just for the last 20 years, but really for the last 60 years. I mean, the cocktail party is practically extinct compared to where it was the 1950s, 1960s. I think it’d be absolutely beautiful to bring that stuff back. And that’s simple. You don’t need another building. You don’t need any other infrastructure. All you need is an email and a person willing to send it.

Brett McKay: Well, Derek, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about you and your work?

Derek Thompson: Well, there’s three places they can find me. I’m a staff writer for The Atlantic. I host a podcast, Plain English with Derek Thompson, with the Ringer Podcast Network. And March 18th, I have a book coming out called ‘Abundance,’ co-written with Ezra Klein, about the future of American progress. And if you like some of what you heard today, I think you’d love the book.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Derek Thompson, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Derek Thompson: Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Derek Thompson. He recently wrote a piece for The Atlantic called the Anti-Social Century. You can find that at The Atlantic. Check out our shownotes at aom.is/alone where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps a lot, and if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it? As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Pornography is more prevalent and accessible than ever before, yet its effects on relationships, mental health, and human development aren’t popularly well understood. Discussions on the topic are often engaged in from an emotional or religious point of view; less typical is a discussion of pornography from an empirical frame.

My guest today, Dr. Brian Willoughby, a social scientist who has spent the past 15 years studying porn’s impacts, will unpack what the research actually says about how it affects personal well-being, relationship satisfaction, and sexual expectations. We discuss the latest data on porn use across different demographics, how porn impacts religious versus non-religious populations differently, and how exposure affects kids. Brian shares whether using porn causes erectile dysfunction and depression, what parents should know about talking to their kids about porn, the main risk of porn that’s typically under-discussed, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM’s series on porn and how to quit it (also available as an ebook)
• NYT article that Brian was interviewed for: “It’s Time to Talk About Pornography, Scholars Say”
• Most People With Addiction Simply Grow Out of It
• NYT article: “The Teen Trend of Sexual Choking”
• Brian’s research

Connect With Brian Willoughby

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Brett Mckay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Pornography is more prevalent and accessible than ever before, yet its effects on relationships, mental health and human development aren’t properly well understood. Discussions on the topic are often engaged in from an emotional or religious point of view. Less typical is a discussion of pornography from an empirical frame. My guest today, Dr. Brian Willoughby, a social scientist who has spent the past 50 years studying porn’s impacts, will impact what the research actually says about how it affects personal well being, relationship satisfaction, and sexual expectations. We discussed the latest data on porn use across different demographics, how porn impacts religious versus non-religious populations differently, and how exposure affects kids. Brian shares whether using porn causes erectile dysfunction and depression. What parents should know about talking to their kids about porn, the main risk of porn that’s typically under discussed and more after the show’s over. Check out our show notes at aom.is/porn.

All right, Brian Willoughby, welcome to the show.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Hey, it’s great to be here.

Brett Mckay: So you are a social scientist who studies family life and for the past, oh, almost, I think it’s 15 years now, you’ve been doing a lot of research about porn use and how it affects relationships. Before we get into your research, let’s start with definitions. In academic research, how do you define pornography? Because there’s that famous with Justice Stewart, Potter Stewart quote about obscenity. I know it when I see it. So academically, how do you define pornography?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, it’s interesting because that’s actually a question that kind of got me into this research in some ways. I came from a background of studying healthy relationships and dating during young adulthood. And the reason I started to turn my research into this area is because just so many young adults were mentioning 15, 20 years ago, like, hey, this, this is an issue I’m trying to navigate. I’m trying to figure out what it means for my life, what it means in my relationships. And so I kind of came over to the pornography research from that area and one of the very first studies I published is I was looking at the research is 20 years ago to answer your question is we weren’t defining it for anyone. We were just asking people, how often do you look at pornography? You know, what kind of just kind of these basic questions where we weren’t defining the term. And so I published a study that showed that when you just ask people, do you look at porn? You have no idea what they’re saying. Because people have such varying definitions for one person. That’s a, hey, I was looking at the SI swimsuit issue.

And I think that’s porn for another person. It’s like, well, unless it’s like super explicit group sex, if it’s just a couple having sex, even explicit hardcore sex, I don’t really consider that porn. So it was all over the map. And so today the field has gotten a lot better. Where we do tend to define now that we haven’t agreed completely on one clear definition, but probably the most common definition, at least in the research that we use, is that pornography is a form of sexual media, where the media, so the video, the picture, whatever we’re talking about, was produced and designed specifically or centrally to create sexual arousal. And that’s typically to differentiate it from, you know, Game of Thrones or a movie that might have some explicit sex scenes. But that wasn’t the main reason to produce the show or the film or the picture, you know, whatever it might be. So that’s usually the definition we’ll give people when we do research, say, hey, this is media designed specifically or centrally to create sexual arousal.

Brett Mckay: Well, let’s talk about the research. How prevalent is porn use amongst the general population in the United States?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, well, I mean, the simple answer is very prevalent. Again, it’s, it’s something that we kind of assume is happening and the research suggests that it is and that it’s likely been growing in popularity in terms of frequency and how common it is. We’ve got some good national data sets now that have looked at that question and obviously each data set’s going to have slightly different numbers. But our, our best estimate is, I guess the easiest way to, to answer that is more than half of all people view pornography, men and women. We still do see a little bit of a gender difference where men use porn more often than women. Most of the estimates have about 70 to 80% of men viewing pornography at least somewhat frequently, meaning at least a couple times a year, about around 60% of women. Those are kind of the averages if you look across the different samples. So it’s, it’s over half of both men and women with about a 10 to 20% difference between men and women.

Brett Mckay: Okay, you’ve also done research about how porn use differs amongst religious people. What does the research say there?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, that’s, you get two really interesting things when it comes to religious people is for men, if you look at just kind of overall use of porn, like I said, usually a year span is, is a common one in research. So if you look at the percent of religious men and non-religious men that have viewed Porn in the last year. The numbers are actually not really different. There’s not much difference between religious and non-religious men. Where the difference comes is in the frequency within that year. So religious men tend to use porn less frequently. They’re more likely to be in kind of a monthly pattern where they might use a couple times a month or use for a month and then not use it for a couple months and then come back to it. And then that’s typically due to, you know, moral beliefs or disapproval of porn where they’re trying to stop it or they don’t want it to be a habit in their lives. Non-religious men tend to be much more kind of a weekly pattern if they’re using porn. So it’s more kind of regular part of their, their sexual routine.

Women have much more of a difference when it comes to religious and non-religious women. Non-religious women, like I said, typically have not as high frequently as men. And we actually have, I think, less clear data about frequency patterns for women because I think women are more varied in their patterns. But religious women are the one group that tend to be much lower. Like 20-30% of religious women report using porn. And so it’s the one group that looks like they tend to actively avoid it, which in religious populations creates some interesting dating dynamics because then you often have men that have some history in use of porn and then a lot of religious women that have very little exposure and little use of porn. And so that, that creates some interesting dating dynamics around it.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, hopefully we can talk about that later on though. You’ve done some interesting research on that. Oftentimes when people talk about porn use, they talk about it as an addiction. And I think that word addiction gets thrown around a lot, probably too easily. How many people actually have a bona fide porn addiction?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, this I think is a really important topic because like you said, is the addiction term gets thrown around a lot and oftentimes misused in a lot of cases. So we’ve come a long way, I think, in the last 10 years on the clinical research on pornography. And, and there, there was and is still to a certain extent some debate about how addictive porn is and how much potential there is to develop a full compulsive behavior around it. But I think there’s a growing consensus that like gambling and like other kind of behaviors that have some reward attached to them, that they can be compulsive over time. The World Health Organization a couple years ago designated pornography as an addictive potential behavior. But having said that, the percent of the population that uses porn that would qualify clinically for kind of true compulsive addictive behavior is relatively small. Our best estimates are maybe somewhere between 7 to 15%, depending on the sample. So it’s a pretty small group that has really developed compulsive patterns. Now there’s a larger group next to that. If you want to kind of think about this like a continuum, you’ve got, you know, maybe 10% of your population that’s truly addicted.

Another Maybe, you know, 10 to 20% qualify for what, what’s oftentimes called PPU or problematic pornography use, which basically means, like, you’re not fully dealing with a compulsive pattern of thinking and obsessive thinking. It’s not that full addictive behavior, but it’s something that’s causing distress in your life. So maybe you’ve tried to stop a porn habit and haven’t been able to. Maybe it’s caused some issues in your relationship, it’s caused personal distress in your life. So there’s another kind of 10 to 20%, we think of people that qualify for problematic use because of that distress. And then you’ve got, you know, your other 60% of people that are somewhere on that continuum of I’ve experimented with porn and never really gotten into it to. I’ve used porn on a regular basis, but it’s never really become compulsive. It’s never really become a problem. It’s something that, you know, I’ve been able to stop at different points in my life and not really had any distress around. So if you want to kind of put it in terms of what percent of the population has some level of distress and a bad habit, slash, compulsivity estimates are somewhere between maybe 30-35%, somewhere in that range.

Brett Mckay: Okay. And I thought that was interesting distinction between problematic porn use and addiction. Something I’ve noticed, I think you’ve written about this too, is that people who are religious and they have, you know, moral qualms about pornography, they’ll often label their porn use as an addiction, even though it might be more of a problematic porn use. It’s not like they’re using porn like multiple times a day. It’s just like, well, I use it once a month. I don’t want to. And if I’m going to call this an addiction because I feel like I can’t help myself.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, yeah. And a lot of the research on problematic porn use has been centered not on religious people in, in general, but trying to capture that group that does have distress, it’s causing some mental health issues, it’s causing relationship issues. It’s distracting. And acknowledging that there can be a need for clinical resources for that people, but wanting to distinguish it from someone, like you said, that’s truly dealing with a addictive behavioral pattern where this is every day, maybe hours a day. I’m not sleeping, I’m having trouble going to work or school. I can’t hold a real relationship because of this. Like, those are two very things we want to make sure, clinically, in terms of resources and therapy, that we distinguish those. But like you said, we do know that religious men in particular oftentimes will report what’s called perceived addiction, which is they label themselves as addicts even though they aren’t. And there’s been some good research that shows that that self labeling, that perceived addiction sometimes can be more harmful than the, the porn use itself. That, that both those things are at play. But when I label myself a certain way and I get kind of a defeatist attitude about things because, oh, I’m an addict, there’s nothing I can do actually causes depression and causes some mental health issues above and beyond what the porn’s doing.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, and I think I’ve seen research too. It makes breaking or stopping the habit harder.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah.

Brett Mckay: What’s the percentage of the population that have, like, never seen porn?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: A very small dwindling population. When we look at teenage adolescent use and especially exposure rates, like, not just, you know, have you ever regularly used porn, but have you ever seen porn? Intentional or unintentional? That exposure right now is just about 100%. It’s not 100%. We do have, you know, some teenagers that manage to navigate their adolescent years and completely avoid pornography, but that number is dwindling. And I would guess, you know, realistically, Maybe you’ve got 5% of your population by 1819 that’s never seen porn. Now again, that’s intentional or unintentional. Obviously the, the number of people that have never intentionally sought out porn, you know, other than, hey, I clicked on this link and it took me here. My friend sent me this, or I saw this on social media, but that’s the extent of my, my porn use. Then you might be able to get up. I did one study that showed that maybe 10 to 20%, roughly of the population by 1819 has, has kind of avoided intentional porn use. But it is certainly the minority. It’s just, it’s so prevalent on social media. A lot of the pornography companies have gotten very good at hiding their links into other ads and other things you might click on.

I think most people have had that experience where you know, you’re on the Internet, you’re on social media. You. In fact, my teenage son, who’s 17, just referenced this to us. He was clicking on LED lights advertisement on social media. Nope. Took him to a porn site. So I think it’s just a very common experience to get exposed to porn, even if you didn’t intentionally mean to seek it out.

Brett Mckay: And something you’ve written about is that because it’s so prevalent, you kind of make the case that we need to normalize porn use. What do you mean by that? Because I think when people hear like, oh, normalized porn use, it means it’s good. What do you mean by normalizing porn use?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, I think it’s important to distinguish, like you said, is normalizing something doesn’t mean to say that it’s healthy. We have a lot of research that I’m sure we might talk about, about the harms and the risks of using pornography at really any age, any stage of life. But the normalization is just acknowledging that it is normal for most teenagers, for most young adults to have exposure for pornography. Like I said earlier, we know the majority of our young adults and teenagers, especially as they get up to 17, 18, 19, have not just seen porn, but are actively using it on a regular basis and masturbating to it. And so if this is a normal behavior, meaning most people are doing it, then it’s I think even more important for parents, for young adults, for really anyone to educate themselves about the potential risks of pornography and educate themselves about what this is, the effect it could have on your life, you know how to navigate it individually and with couples. Because there’s a whole now new area that’s opened up in the last 10 to 15 years where because most men and women have some history with pornography is when we date each other and particularly when we form long term relationships.

There’s this whole new thing now that’s opened up in relationships where we have to talk and navigate pornography together. There is a study that I did two years ago, or one of the big findings we found in a national sample in the United States was that the majority now particularly of dating couples are using pornography together, which was kind of a new finding. We knew it was happening, but we didn’t know that we had hit the majority point for couples now too. So it’s not just most people use porn on their own. Most couples now use porn together as well. So it’s Just, it’s something that has to be taught. It has to be talked about. And we need just more resources.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, you can’t pretend like it’s not happening, basically. Let’s talk about age. You’ve kind of been mentioning this. Typically, people are getting exposed to porn at a younger and younger age. What’s the average age when people are first exposed to pornography?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, so average age right now in the United States is 10 to 13, which is a lot younger than a lot of people realize. But it very closely follows when most kids get their first smartphones. You know, that’s right around the age, kind of those preteen years where parents are giving kids phones for the first time, or at least they’re getting regular access to the internet. And as we talked about, you’re on the internet long enough, you’re on social media long enough, it’s pretty common then to come across some sort of explicit sexual material. And so that’s, again, that’s the average. You do get people that don’t come across porn, don’t seek it out ’til later in adolescence. You get a smaller group that’s exposed even earlier to that. But right now, 10 to 13 is pretty common. That’s kind of the norm right now in the United States, which is one of the reasons why I typically really try to urge parents to be aware of this, because most parents aren’t really thinking about the sex talk, aren’t thinking about the porn, aren’t thinking about these things ’til their kids really hit adolescence, you know, 13 plus. But by that time, a lot of kids have already been exposed to it.

Brett Mckay: You’ve done research on how the age of exposure influences porn use later in life. Can you walk us through that?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah. So this is, this is when we talk about the risks of porn. This is one of the ones that I think is really most critically, culturally to talk about, because we know the risk to kids is a lot higher to adults. You know, there’s a whole conversation you could be having about consenting adults and free speech and letting people, you know, access the pornography that they want as an adult. But when we talk about kids, a lot of the risks in the research become much more straightforward, much more consistent, meaning that the risk that kids have from regular viewing of pornography are fairly straightforward in terms of what they do. And earlier exposure tends to elevate a lot of those risks. So, for example, one of the most consistent risks we see is elevated risky sexual behavior, which makes sense if you watch and view a lot of porn, particularly as a preteen, as an early adolescent, you’re at a higher risk for sexual risk taking. So that, you know, sex with multiple partners, unprotected sex, things like that. In the earlier work, a child’s exposed, we tend to see elevated risk for that. The other big one, circling back to what we were talking about before, is an elevated risk later in life of compulsive and addictive use.

Just, you know, if you’re exposed earlier, which also makes sense. If you’re exposed earlier, you’re more likely to be hiding it, you’re more likely to be using it with, you know, less impulse control, underdeveloped brain, all that stuff. There’s a study that my grad student and I did also a couple years ago said one of the biggest risks of early exposure was an increased frequency of habitual use later in life. And so those are kind of the two main risks of earlier exposure is increased risk of developing that addictive pattern and an increased risk for risky sexual behavior later in adolescence.

Brett Mckay: Okay, so that’s important for, for parents to start talking to their kids as young as 10 even. You mean, to start having that conversation. And I thought it was interesting, the research you saw about how porn use changes throughout the lifetime. I think what you’ve seen is like, it usually spikes around teenage years, young adulthood, and then for a lot of, I’m talking about men. I’m sure it applies to women as well. When you get into your 30s and your 40s, it kind of tapers off for a lot of people or they just stop it.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, there’s a study that I did looking at this specifically, and we saw three main groups as we kind of tracked it through adolescence and young adulthood. So like you said, we did see this group that had a very typical risk taking pattern. So it’s a similar pattern we see with binge drinking, with sexual behavior, where it kind of builds through teenage years, kind of peaks around 18, 19, 20, 21, and then it starts to come down after that. And for a, a large group of people that use porn, that’s the typical pattern. It’s that kind of typical, you know, experimentation, I guess, pattern. We did see another group in that same study, though, that had this escalating pattern that never really went away. And we think that was probably capturing kind of this problematic compulsive group where it also built and kind of increased during adolescence, young adulthood, but it never really came down. It was something that the people were still dealing with or using at a high level throughout their 20s and 30s. And then we saw a third group, which is kind of what we call the abstaining group. But we acknowledge that most people in the abstaining group still reported seeing porn infrequently throughout their adolescent to young adult years. It just never became a regular pattern. And that was actually the biggest group. It was under 50%, about 40% in the study. And then the other 60% were kind of split between those two other groups.

Brett Mckay: I think it’s interesting because you see similar trends with other vices or other potentially addictive behaviors. Alcohol, cigarettes, drugs. And people don’t talk about this, but oftentimes what the research has found is people just grow out or they age out of their addictions. They might have an addiction to alcohol or cigarettes in their 20s, and by the time they’re 40, they just, it wasn’t like they tried to. It’s just they stopped for some reason. And I remember reading an article, a research article. I can hopefully find a link to it in the show notes. But a huge amount of people just age out of problematic vice behavior.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, yeah. In fact, you know, sometimes I hear people throw around drug analogies with porn, and oftentimes I hear, you know, porn is like heroin, porn is like cocaine, and those are really poor analogies. But for me, the one I always tend to use is alcohol. Alcohol is a really good comparison point for a lot of the research on porn because, like you said, is, you know, pornography or if you look at alcohol, you see this wide spectrum of how people engage in alcohol. And technically, every time you drink alcohol, you know, you’re hurting your body a little bit. You know, your liver is processing it and things like that. At least most, you know, hard liquors and stuff. But you get a segment of people that are able to utilize and use alcohol in ways that doesn’t really have a huge negative effect on their life and they use it responsibly and all those things. And then you have a group, like you said, that kind of, you know, goes through their typical young adult years and it spikes. And they go through college and they’re binge drinking and passing out, and, you know, it’s certainly having a lot of risk during that time in their life, but they kind of age out of it and they, they come down.

And some people go through that and say, you know what? I think I’m done with alcohol in my life. Some people say, no, I’m going to at least bring it down and be more responsible with it. And then you’ve got that group that, you know, struggles with alcohol, and it develops into an addictive, compulsive pattern, and they have to deal with that for the rest of their life. I mean, it’s not most people that drink alcohol. It’s a small percent of people that drink alcohol. But I think pornography tends to follow that, where there’s these kind of distinct groups that, you know, technically I think all have risk, but the risk profile is very different.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, I bet pornography is similar to sports gambling or online gambling. Same sort of thing. I bet it’s like a lot of young people who are primarily doing the online gambling and then fewer older people people.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the only caveat sometimes I note to all these patterns we’re talking about is there have been some in my field, including myself, that have at least noted that all the stuff we’re talking about has been based on data over the last 10 to 15 years. In the past, what we don’t really know is we have, because right now, the current young young adult Cohort in their 20s was kind of the first group that were digital natives to the smartphone. Right. As they grew up. The smartphone was there when they were born, and now they’ve spent their whole life with the version of the Internet that we have now. And so although all the patterns we’ve talked about have been kind of true of the past 10 to 15, 20 years, we don’t really know if that’s going to hold. There has been some discussion of, because of how the porn industry has shifted because of how much exposure to online technology and smartphones this generation in their 20s is now. There is the question of, do we see a larger portion of our current young adult generation that struggles with pornography into adulthood? In other words, is that group that has typically had a decrease into adulthood, is that group going to get smaller in the current generation? It’s been a question that’s been posed, but we don’t have the data yet.

Brett Mckay: We’re going to take a quick break for our word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So I’m sure a lot of people listening to this podcast, you know, if they got like a lecture from parents or a pastor about porn use, they probably were told these scare things about how porn will, you know, it’ll give you ED erectile dysfunction, it’ll make you depressed or will turn you into a sexual deviant. What does the research say about those things? Does porn use cause depression? Does it cause erectile dysfunction? You’ve seen a lot of that reporting in the popular press. And like, what’s porn’s connection with sexual violence to sexual crimes?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah. So this is where understanding those kind of distinctions around patterns of use is really important because the research shows very different effects based on if we want to kind of simplify and say, hey, we’ve got that compulsive group and that problematic use, if we kind of separate them out into people that are having clinical issues with pornography and then everyone else, the research suggests the risks and the effects of porn are fairly different in those two groups. So if we go over and talk about the people that are struggling with an addiction, struggling with problematic use, that’s typically where we see the mental health pieces. Now I guess I want to step back for a second and address something you said, which is the erectile dysfunction kind of arousal dysfunctional stuff that that’s out there. Very little to no research that suggests that’s the case. In fact, most of the research suggests that watching porn increases your arousal, it doesn’t decrease it. And actually that increased arousal can cause issues for people. But we don’t see a lot of compelling evidence. We do see links to the mental health stuff. So the depression loneliness, lower self worth and lower body image, those kind of things are in the research and particularly for that group that has kind of a high frequency problematic to compulsive use pattern.

That’s usually where we kind of see the majority of that research. And so pornography carries a mental health risk, particularly once it gets to that really high frequency compulsive pattern. That’s typically where we start to see that kind of outcome emerge for the majority of people that fall into that kind of occasional use. You know, maybe it’s a regular pattern, but it’s not, you know, becoming a bad habit, it’s not causing distress in my life. Where we see the risk there is largely relational. And so we have several meta analyses now that have shown that any kind of porn use, or the more porn that you use, relationship satisfaction and particularly relationship stability tends to decrease. What we think that’s about is pretty straightforward. It comes down to expectations and what we call sexual scripts, which are kind of when you go into a sexual situation, what do you think is going to happen? What are your expectations, how do you behave based on those expectations? And what we see is that people that use porn tend to carry with them unhealthy scripts and expectations into their real relationships. And part of this is often because pornography starts in adolescence.

And so when you don’t have a lot of sexual experience and porn becomes kind of the primary way that you think about sex and how you expect sex to look like when you become an adult or when you start to engage in your own sexual relationships. And the reality I think most adults understand is pornography is not showing a fairly normative view of sexual intimacy. You know, people don’t look like that. They don’t act like that. They’re engaging in a lot of sexual behavior that a lot of people in their real relationships don’t even enjoy. So that is the main negative outcome and risk that we see for pornography is just making real relationships, just generally and also specifically with sexual intimacy, more difficult. Now, there isn’t also, the other consistent thing we’ve seen in research, with a couple meta analyses, which are kind of studies of studies, is the violence piece. And it’s not quite as straightforward as the satisfaction stability research, but there is research that suggests that more frequent porn use is linked to more aggressive and violent attitudes, particularly about men towards women. There’s some research out there that suggests that it does increase the risk of aggressive behaviors towards women.

And again, that just ties back to the content. We know there’s a lot of pornography that depicts aggression and violence towards women, with women oftentimes enjoying or being depicted as enjoying that violence. And so that media use, just like any form of media use, has an influence on people, and it tends to make, again, healthy relationship formation more difficult. And that’s where most of the research has been for most people, is the main risk of porn is just making your actual human relationships a lot more challenging.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, there’s been articles about this in the popular press about how the scripts you pick up in pornography, you carry that over into your relationship and it just, people don’t like it. Right. You know, you’re a young guy and you watch, oh, you know, anal sex is normal. And you try that and like, your girlfriend or wife’s like, I don’t like that, or choking. That’s a violent thing. And there was a study that was done, I think they said that two thirds of female college students have been choked by their partner during sex. And that can obviously be a really scary thing for them. But guys think, oh, yeah, well, that’s what you do during sex. But I’ve also seen articles where the men themselves who do these things actually don’t even like doing it. But, yeah, they feel like they’re supposed to, because that’s what you do when you have sex. Because, well, that’s what I saw in porn.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah. Yeah, it sets up that expectation we did a survey two years ago where one of the questions we were asking couples, these were largely young adult and adult couples. And we asked them, you know, when you’re having sex with your partner, are you thinking about porn? Are you worried about porn? And what clearly came out is there is a significant group of people that were in a committed relationship that said, yeah, I’m worried, like when we’re having sex, I’m worried that my partner’s thinking about porn. I’m worried, I feel pressured that they want me to perform a certain way or engage in behavior that they’ve seen in porn. And that’s what I was referencing before about modern couples having to navigate something completely new that previous generations haven’t had to navigate. And it’s this. It’s knowing that both partners have history watching porn. And oftentimes a male partner who has maybe an extensive history throughout their life of watching porn, it’s just there. Even if you’re not talking about it, both partners kind of know that it’s there. It’s subtle, you might be able to pick up on it and what your partner is kind of asking for or kind of hinting at.

And so it creates a whole ‘nother dynamic. Particularly, like you said, when we know that a lot of people might be feeling pressured because of porn to act a certain way with their partner, that’s not either A, what they want to do or B, what is creating actual connection between the two of them. Because we know that sexual intimacy is meant to be and can be this very bonding, connecting, positive thing in a relationship. But when it starts to be this pressure filled, anxiety filled interaction, because we haven’t really openly talked about how porn’s influencing that, but we know that it is, we think that’s where some of the satisfaction, stability, you know, communication stuff we see in the research starts to come in.

Brett Mckay: So that’s another thing you talk about with your kids. Like, porn is not real sex. It’s designed for a specific purpose and they’re going to do things. Like the analogy that I use, like porn is like a fight scene in a movie. Like, no one really fights like people fight in movies. It’s the same sort of thing. Like, no one really has sex the way you see in porn.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, yeah. In fact, a common question I’ll get from parents is, is when, when should I have the porn talk? And I always try to quickly correct them and say, well, I don’t think you should have the porn talk. This is about the sex talk. It’s part of the Sex talk that hopefully you know, earlier than you think. Like we Talked about like 9, 10, you should be talking to your kids about sex and hopefully part of the message to your kids, you know, whether you’re religious or not or what your personal values are about sexual intimacy. I’m assuming most people would agree that, that sex between adults is a powerful and can be very positive thing in a relationship and that should be part of the message your kids is getting. And then if, if you have a desire like most parents do, that hey, I someday I want you to grow up and have this healthy, long term committed relationship with another person. Now let’s talk about porn in that context and let’s talk about how porn is showing you things and might make some of the things you think about sex. And in contrast to this positive, you know, message about connection and bonding and commitment, it might make that more challenging so that you can talk to your kids about the risks of sex in the context of some of the more positive and hopeful messages you’re giving them about intimacy as an adult.

So, so that, that way the message they’re getting isn’t just porn is bad because sex is bad. And so really what I’m learning is that if I have any sexual desire or sexual arousal, I probably shouldn’t talk to my parents because, because everything about that is bad.

Brett Mckay: Okay, so porn use negatively impacts all relationships. Does the degree of harm differ between religious and non-religious people?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: We, we don’t see that typically in the, in the relationship outcomes. So like the stability satisfaction is oftentimes in fact a lot of the research just controls for religion or religiosity and shows that same effect regardless. Now having said that like we said before, is, is what you can get in religious populations with couples is someone that might be in that, that occasional use. You know, hey, I’m using porn a couple times a year pattern that can now in addition to the relationship stuff, do two additional things in religious couples. One is like we said before, it could have some element of perceived addiction. You know, where I kind of exaggerate how bad and how negative use is and that causes personal distress and depression and stuff that, that wouldn’t happen in a non-religious couple. The other thing you get in religious couples because you get so, so there’s another term we haven’t mentioned, another academic term called moral incongruence, which is basically when you do something that is in opposition to a moral belief you have and that, that becomes relevant in religious couples because what can happen then in addition to all the stuff we talked about is that if we both hold these moral beliefs that porn is wrong morally.

And I find out, you know, if we go, you know, stereotypically gendered here, if I’m a wife and I find out that my husband’s been looking at porn three times in the last year, you can certainly get a much more exaggerated what we sometimes call behavioral trauma effect, which means, I feel violated in this relationship because you’re looking at porn. And in many cases in religious couples, for religious women, I feel like you have cheated on me. That, you know, they perceive it as a form of infidelity. And so now that perception, kind of like perceived addiction, that perception is going to increase the distress in our relationship because, not necessarily because of what the porn’s doing, but because I perceive this as this moral violation of our relationship or our marital covenant or however, you know, they’re perceiving it, that has that exaggeration effect. That’s oftentimes how I talk about this with religious populations is that there’s an exaggeration effect of all the other outcomes that we see.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, I’ve seen just anecdotally, marriages end because of that very thing. Like, the wife finds out, oh, my husband looked at porn two times in the past year. Divorce or like, engagements called off because the lady found out that her fiance had seen porn before.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, yeah, you see that typically only in religious couples. And again, that’s often due to this kind of moral incongruence, this moral boundary violation that religious couples have, where they have a more expansive view of what the boundary of fidelity is in a marriage. And in many religious couples, particularly a lot of religious women, do perceive pornography as, hey, you’re looking at another woman. You’re masturbating to another woman. I view that as infidelity. And then oftentimes it has the same effect psychologically and in the relationship as, you actually cheated on me. And it’s a hard thing sometimes to navigate clinically because from an outsider’s perspective or a therapist, you know, you can be tempted to say, hey, your husband looked at porn twice. That’s not cheating. Stop acting like it is. But if the woman perceives it to be that and it feels like that to her, it’s going to feel very real. And so oftentimes you have to work that couple through that as if it was infidelity, because it feels that way to one partner.

Brett Mckay: So is there any advice that you have? I know you’re looking at this from a descriptive point of view. You’re trying to describe the situation, but let’s say someone’s dating. So there’s this discrepancy between porn use between men and women or attitudes toward porn, women typically view it less, especially if you’re religious. Religious men are viewing it about the same percentage of non-religious men. How do you navigate, how do you have that conversation when there’s such differing expectations?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, I think first off you need to have the conversation because that’s what the descriptive research tells us is most people when they’re dating or married just don’t talk about this very openly. And that’s obviously an issue. And I think there’s two clear things to start talking about when you’re dating and to be clear. You know, this isn’t necessarily a first date, type of topic. But you know, once you’re committed and you’re kind of moving forward with the relationship, there’s two big things to talk about. One is disclosure, which just means that you should be talking about your history and your use of porn. And again, I’m always clear. Kind of like I talked about with parents is this isn’t this high pressure porn talk where you kind of awkwardly approach each other and say, okay, let’s hear it. You know, do you have a porn history when you’re dating someone you know, over the course of several months to several years, there’s this natural disclosure that happens. You start telling them about your family and you know, this hard thing that happened when I was a teenager and mental health struggles that you’ve had, you, you naturally do that in a committed relationship. So it’s simply adding porn to the list of things that you disclose to each other naturally that, hey, you know we kind of assume both of us probably have had some history with porn. As we get more committed, we should be talking openly about that so that we’re not hiding it.

Then the other thing that I think is really important to talk about is boundaries. What are the boundaries in our relationship? And I think this goes for all couples now, religious or not, it’s important to have a conversation openly with each other about boundaries. You know, if I’m dating someone again, I might be even a non-religious person, but I might in my head say, I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to be watching porn four times a week when you’re dating me. That doesn’t make me feel good. Well, if you feel like that, you should talk about that and negotiate the boundaries in your relationship around porn just like you would other boundaries like, hey, I, you know, I’m not comfortable with you hanging out with your co-worker at night alone, or I’m not comfortable with this. You need to talk about that with porn, about individual use, couple use.

Brett Mckay: Those are the two conversations that couples need to be having. I think all couples need to be having now is disclosure of what’s been happening in your history, and then discussion and negotiation and agreement about what the boundaries in the relationship are moving forward. That’s not going to necessarily alleviate all the stress and all the issues tied to porn, but doing those two things will alleviate a lot of the stress on this topic for most couples.

So we’ve talked about how porn use can negatively impact all relationships. Is there anything couples can do to mitigate the negative impacts of porn use? Is it just like not, you know, not using porn? Is that what the… Is that what you do?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, I mean, the, the simple answer to that is what you said. And in fact, again, tied to some of the studies, national studies that, that we’ve done, we always have the small group of people and couples that have decided, you know, whether it’s for religious reasons or other reasons to avoid pornography. And that’s always the healthiest group that we see. And, and so, yes, there’s some research to support the idea that, again, if you think about pornography as a risk at any level, if I want to maximize my risk of a positive relationship, then I would say, yeah, then, then avoid pornography. If you want to be in the, what we might call minimal risk category, then a lot of it goes back to what we talked about is clear, open communication, clearly establishing boundaries with each other. And then, I think, you know, I don’t want to say moderation, but I think being aware, like we said, if one of the main effects of porn is, is based on content, I think being really open and talking to each other about what the content is that we’re viewing. Again, we haven’t gotten quite to the point in the research where we’ve really paired content, specific content to specific outcomes, but I think we’re certainly moving in that direction that suggests that, hey, you know, if I’m watching porn and it’s consenting adults, and that’s all I’m looking at, that’s probably different than consistently watching porn that’s group sex or violent content.

Or, you know, depicting underage content or incest porn, you know, all these other things that I think will probably in the next 10 years in the research come out as having a more negative effect than, you know, maybe what you might call vanilla porn in some ways. So I think that’s another factor to be thinking about is what is the content that I’m consuming and how that might be affecting me individually and how it might be affecting us as a couple.

Brett Mckay: So we’ve been talking about, you know, you should start the porn discussion early with your kids and put it in the context of like, hey, look, I want you to have a satisfying long term relationship in the future. Sex is a part of that can be a really great part of your relationship, how you connect to your spouse and then porn use can harm that. I think that’s a great way to frame the conversation. I’m more, I’m curious too, particularly if you’re religious. We mentioned there’s that discrepancy between men and women where women view it less and have negative attitudes towards it and there’s that exaggeration effect. Should part of the conversation. As a parent, let’s say this is kind of very gendered, but let’s say you have, you know, if you have a son, you’d be like, don’t look at porn because it’s going to hurt your relationship. Right. Try to avoid it. With your daughters and if you’re religious, should you tell your daughters, like, look, hey, you’re going to be dating guys. And most of them probably seen porn.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, I, well, first off, I, I do think with your daughters is still have the porn conversation because I will say that being a religious woman who has a regular pattern of using pornography can be very isolating. A lot of religious women feel very isolated. They feel, they recognize that they’re kind of outside the norm and because of that they feel very anxious about talking to people about their porn use. You know, whether that’s going to a religious leader or their family or dating partners. It can be a very stigmatized, isolating experience. So I, I do think it’s important to talk to daughters about that just like you would with men and boys. But yes, I, I do think part of the message for religious families talking to daughters is again back to normalization, helping them understand that the vast majority of guys they date and our potential marriage partners down the line are very likely to have viewed porn at some point in their life, are very likely to have had some pattern of porn use in their life and teaching them that doesn’t necessarily and probably shouldn’t be this automatic no to a dating or marriage partner because immediately you shrink your, your, your dating pool down to a very small group of guys.

If that’s what you’re looking for and that it’s more about, like we said before, talking openly about it, talking about the potential impact it could have on your relationship. Understand the difference between a guy that, you know, had a year when he was 16 that looked at porn and that’s been the only thing in his life, versus a guy who’s been looking at porn and struggling with it for eight years of his life. Those are two different things that you need to approach differently in a relationship. I think having those nuanced conversations with. With your daughters and helping them understand it’s something they’re gonna have to navigate is a really important part of, of parenting, particularly for religious families.

Brett Mckay: Yeah. I think the openness, just the, the honesty whenever you, Of course, you know, I’m not saying I approve of porn, but if you stigmatize it so much, what ends up happening? You did some research on this. Like, guys just lie, particularly religious guys, because they know. I think you did research on. They know how much their value will go down in the dating market or the marriage market.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yes.

Brett Mckay: If they admit to porn use.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah.

Brett Mckay: And so they just lie about it.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yep. Or either outright lied to about it, or they do what I call toe dipping disclosure. You know, where you, like, kind of stick your toe in the pool to see what the temperature before you jump in. So what a lot of religious guys will do as teens and young adults and even adults is they’ll say, okay, I, I know the porn question is going to come up. So when it comes up, I’m going to tell you this little thing that happened. You know, So a lot of times, like, what a guy in his 20s might do when he gets asked about this in a religious dating context is say, well, yeah, I looked at porn a little bit when I was like, 15. And then they’ll wait to see what the reaction is. And if the reaction is, okay, we just had this very stressful conversation. You almost broke up with me because of that. Okay, well, now I’m definitely not going to tell you what I did last week. And so sometimes it’s not just outright lying, but it is that kind of partial reveal and then holding everything else back, which in some cases ends up being worse, because then down the line and when this inevitably oftentimes comes back out, it felt almost worse that you didn’t just lie to me, but you kind of half told the truth and then you withheld all this other stuff. And now I feel like I’m constantly peeling the onion back to get to different levels of the truth. And so, yeah, just being open is a really important part of that.

Brett Mckay: Do you have any advice on, I mean, you’re, you’re a parent of a teenager. Any advice on helping our kids avoid pornography?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, I mean, again, to be clear, completely avoiding it is likely not going to happen. But I do think there can be things parents can do that can really reduce one, the risk of early exposure. So at least kind of push that age out into the life course a little bit into adolescence, and then just generally reduce the frequency or likely engagement. And part of that goes back to just what we call digital literacy, which is understanding the current digital and technological environment that kids are in. Honestly, the, the easiest and best thing parents can do to help their kids avoid porn is delay giving them a smartphone and delay giving them access to social media. And those are two things that a lot of media and other scholars in my field that have looked at adolescent development in the context of technology have been saying for a decade now. I think the voices on that are getting stronger. There’s just not a lot of positives that come in the research from giving a preteen or even an early adolescent access to a smartphone and to social media. There’s just so much research that’s come out on cell phone addiction, on social media addiction, on the negative mental health effects that social media brings.

And then when you bring in the porn stuff, where those two aspects of technology are oftentimes the gateway to porn, for a lot of young kids, that’s a really easy thing to do, is just limit access and delay access. And it’s hard, again, I’m a parent. I’ve had, now four teenagers, got two kids in their 20s now. And it’s hard to be the parent that, that your kids are coming to you and saying, hey, every one of my friends has a smartphone. Every one of my friends has access to TikTok. Every one of my friends has access to Instagram. But helping kids understand that, you know, one, you’re not barring them for life, that you have a plan with them about how they’re going to slowly get access to these technologies and, and how it’s not an all or nothing. I think that’s a common approach parents give is they set this age, you know, whether it’s 10, 11, 12, 13, and say, okay, that’s the age where we give you this device. And then it’s just kind of go, you know, maybe we put some filters on your phone that kids can get around really easily instead of, I think a more nuanced and appropriate plan for helping kids slowly manage that.

Say, okay, you know, we’ll give you a cell phone early on, and it’s not going to be as smart smartphone, but we’ll give you a cell phone so you can start messaging and start getting access, and then we’ll get you a smartphone here. So you kind of lay it out to kids that, hey, there’s this plan from 10 to 18 where we’re going to slowly help you manage and learn how to use technology in an appropriate way. Just doing that will really help on the porn side, especially if you’re pairing that with the conversations that we’ve had. I think that’s kind of the magic formula oftentimes for parents is you have good digital literacy and you have a good, clear plan for slowly helping your kids navigate technology with a regular, ongoing conversation about pornography itself.

Brett Mckay: I don’t know if you have any advice. I’m sure there’s guys listening to this. They’re in their 20s, 30s, 40s. I mean, they’re married, they use porn. They’re not. It’s not compulsive. They’re not addicted. If you are addicted, you need to go get professional help to help you with that. But let’s say you just hit that problematic point. It’s like, you’re not happy with it. Any advice there based on your research and just talking to people in your field about what you can do about that?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, I think there’s two good resources to turn to. One is, and this feels simple, but again, back to the fact that so many guys don’t openly talk about this with other people. Is social resources really help? Again, so we talked about the drug analogies earlier, but there’s another analogy for most guys when it comes to porn, because again, for most guys, if they want to stop porn, it’s more of a bad habit when it comes to eating. So if you think about, like, diet and exercise, like, I want to exercise more, I want to stop eating so many donuts or drinking so much soda. And you think about what we know and what has worked for a lot of people about getting healthier. It’s not going to the gym by myself. It’s not buying all the home gym stuff like that. Some people can be super dedicated and do that. As soon as I get a group and I go to the gym with someone and, you know, I’m online in an environment where we’re doing a fitness challenge. People tend to be much better at breaking bad habits when it comes to eating and getting better habits when it comes to fitness, when they turn to other people and porn’s the same way.

Talk to your wife, talk to your friends, talk to someone. If you want to kick a habit, talk to someone about it and say, hey, you know, I’m trying to kick this habit. I want someone that’s checking in with me or setting goals with me. That in and of itself oftentimes is all people need to really move in the right direction or move in a positive direction when it comes to porn. They’re often just not willing, because porn’s kind of a taboo topic, to utilize those social resources. And again, it could be a spouse, it could be a religious leader, it could be friends, family members. Just using other people to help support you through that is oftentimes all someone needs to kick a habit that’s, you know, maybe a very infrequent or, or maybe in an occasional use type of pattern. That’s one thing. The other thing is there are apps and websites out there that are specifically designed to help people avoid porn. And they range from services that will basically lock your phone down for you, that are more meant for people struggling with compulsive use. But there’s other programs out there that are more kind of coaching based, that are more kind of geared towards the occasional use.

That again, I think when paired with social resources can really help you because oftentimes people just need to, to regularly remind themselves about avoiding porn. They need to recognize triggers in their life, like, oh, I’m stressed today, or I, you know, saw something on Instagram that kind of made me start thinking sexual thoughts. Usually just recognizing those triggers, having something that has me reflect on them is again, often enough to help someone kick a habit if it’s something that’s just a couple times a month to a couple times a year.

Brett Mckay: And I think the other thing too is just like, don’t beat yourself up too much if you backslide, because that’s just going to put you in that defeatist attitude. You’re going to get depressed, which is going to want to make you look at porn again. So just creates this vicious cycle and it’s just, it’s just going to make it worse for you.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, definitely.

Brett Mckay: I’m curious, is there any lines of research that you’re curious about exploring to understand pornography’s impact on relationships and emerging adulthood development?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, I mean, I think two areas. One is just better understanding the relationship dynamics. Again, we’ve got all this research now about the risks of porn to relationships like we talked about, but we don’t know a lot yet about how modern young adults and even teenagers are actively or not actively discussing or navigating it in the relationship. Again, we’re kind of assuming that couples are probably having some version of these conversations, but we’re not really clear right now in the research about how those conversations are going. Like I said earlier, we know that most couples are using porn together, but we don’t know how they got there. Like, how did that happen? Like, did the guy introduce it? Did you have a conversation about it? How do you navigate, like, what porn you look at together and what porn you don’t? So there’s a lot of questions about just kind of the coupled dynamic stuff that’s happening that I think we need more research that I want to do in the future. The other big thing, and this is actually where I’m putting most of my energy in, like, most things, it feels like when it comes to technology is artificial intelligence.

I think artificial intelligence is about to change the game when it comes to sexual media. Actually got a report that’s coming out through the Wheatley Institute, which is a group I’m affiliated with at my university, that’s going to be showing some national US Data when it comes to AI companion apps and AI generated images on social media that are oftentimes sexualized and AI porn. That’s showing that, particularly among people in their 20s, this is actually a very common behavior. It’s not more than half, but we’re finding 1 in 4, 1 in 3 young adult men are using AI companion girlfriend apps at some level now. And I think that’s really going to change some of the dynamics around pornography and sexual media in the next. I think it already is, but particularly in the next five years, is that technology becomes more and more popular. That’s another area that we really need to start having some more public discourse about, because I think it’s really potentially going to impact relationships in some unique way.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, I think so, too. I’ve been reading some articles about that. I think Esquire did one, New York Times did one about the AI companions. And what’s interesting with the guys, of course they’re using the AI to create, you know, explicit images. But what they’ve found is that the guys really just like the companionship. It’s an emotional thing. And so when they talk to the chat bot, they just get this great dose of affirmation, like, oh, she just loves everything I say. You know, it just. It just feels good. And that’s probably not Good for forming human to human relationships.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: That’s my, my big concern from the early research that’s coming out is that pornography, as common as it’s become, has never really threatened to replace a real relationship. It’s just kind of there. People are still, you know, dating and having sex with real people and getting married. And pornography doesn’t seem like it’s having a huge impact on that. It’s just impacting the trajectory and the dynamics. I think the AI stuff has the potential to really impact just baseline desire to engage in a real relationship. Because like you said, now if I have this companion app and most of these AI platforms are allowing me to now emotionally engage with someone that seems very real, that I can call on the phone and hear a real, you know, a real human voice that does not sound like a robot anymore, that can send me images and eventually videos that are explicit. So I can tie the porn piece that we’ve been talking about to now, someone who is perfectly validating, perfectly emotionally connecting, that always cares about what I have to say, that never fights with me. It starts to very quickly create an environment and an ecosystem that says, why would I engage in a real relationship if I can get almost everything I need over here instead?

Brett Mckay: And also, I think it complicates the infidelity aspect of porn. So, you know, a lot of, you know, men and women, they might think, well, if my spouse looks at porn, it’s not. He’s not cheating on me. I don’t like it, but it’s not cheating. The AI thing’s weird is like, oh, my gosh, I found these text messages my husband’s having with his AI girlfriend. This feels like it’s infidelity, like he’s cheating on me with a chatbot.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, yeah. In fact, I’ll give you just two fun, not fun, but scary scenarios that they’re tied to that just how complex this can get. Because a lot of these companions also have deepfake technology where I can feed an image in and use that to kind of generate the avatar. And so what happens when, you know, I feed our next door neighbor’s wife into that? And so I’m now engaging in a relationship with an AI companion, but it looks like our neighbor, or here’s another just crazy scenario that I think will happen. I can feed my spouse’s picture into it. And so I’ve created an idealized, perfectly sexual, perfectly, you know, shaped version of my spouse. Can you cheat on your spouse with your spouse? Is going to be a question people are going to ask themselves in the next five years.

Brett Mckay: And she doesn’t nag me, she just affirms me. Wow. Crazy world we live in. Well, Brian, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, so you can go to my faculty website at Brigham Young University. It’s usually where I’ve got my latest research published. Like I said, I’m a fellow at the Wheatley Institute at BYU as well. We’re regularly be publishing public reports on a variety of topics. Like I said, we’ve got the AI one coming out in the next couple days. So those are two of the the best places.

Brett Mckay: Fantastic. Well, Brian Willoughby, thanks for time. It’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Thank you.

Brett Mckay: My guest today was Dr. Brian Willoughby. He’s a social scientist at Brigham Young University. Check out our shownotes at aom.is/porn where you can find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up @dyingbreed.net It’s a great way to directly support the show. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give a review on Apple podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot and if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AOM podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Your friends saw the red flags. Your family voiced their concerns. But you were so caught up in the excitement of new love that you missed all the warning signs. Now you’re stuck in a relationship that’s making you absolutely miserable.

Why does this happen? According to researchers at University College London, “feelings of love lead to a suppression of activity in the areas of the brain controlling critical thought.” In other words, love can not only make you blind, but stupid.

So, how can you keep your brain switched on while dating and dodge potential bullets in the realm of romance? According to relationship expert Dr. John Van Epp, author of How to Avoid Falling in Love With a Jerk, it’s about using both your head and your heart by taking the time to understand your partner’s F.A.C.E.S.

F.A.C.E.S. — The 5 Key Areas You Should Know About Someone Before Making Romantic Commitments

Over decades of clinical experience working with couples as well as decades of research, Van Epp found that there are five areas — represented by the acronym F.A.C.E.S. — that a couple should know about each other before making romantic commitments: 1) family dynamics and background, 2) attitudes and action of a mature conscience, 3) compatibility potential, 4) examples of previous friendship or relationship patterns, and 5) skills for relationships. These five areas can give you an idea of the individual and relational character of the person you’re dating to help you decide whether you want to get more involved with them or not.

Below, we offer some questions, including ones recommended by Van Epp, that can help you more objectively view what your significant other is like in these key areas, spot potential red flags, and assess your compatibility.

(F)amily Dynamics and Background

Family experiences strongly influence our attitudes and behaviors in romantic relationships. Gender role expectations, communication patterns, and approaches for dealing with conflict or stress are all shaped by the experiences we had in our families of origin. So in the beginning of a relationship, ask someone about her family. As it gets more serious, meet her parents and other family members and observe the dynamics that exist between them.

Just because a dynamic exists in her family, doesn’t mean she’s bound to repeat it; while patterns do tend to carry over from generation to generation, sometimes the apple does, in fact, fall very far from the tree. But seeing a dynamic in her family may help you recognize it in her behavior and can simply prompt revealing conversations as to what she wants out of life and how she imagines her future family.

 As you’re figuring out the dynamics that exist in someone’s family, explore questions like:

• What’s the state of her parents’ marriage? Even if they’re still married, are they happily married?
• Did both her parents work, or did one stay home with the kids?
• What was her parents’ parenting style?
• How did her parents split household tasks and childcare responsibilities?
• How were finances handled between her parents?
• What was her relationship like with her father? Her mother?
• Is her family affectionate or more stand-off-ish?
• If she has siblings, does she get along with them? Does she still stay in touch with them? Why or why not?
• Was her extended family highly involved in her life?
• What family traditions were important in her family growing up? Does she want to continue them?
• Has there been any family cut-offs or estrangements?
• What was the mood or atmosphere of her home growing up?
• Were there any addictions in the family?
• How similar or dissimilar are your families?
• Does she like to spend time with her family? Does her family like to spend time with her?

(A)ttitudes and Actions of a Mature Conscience 

This is all about figuring out if the person you’re dating is a healthy, mature adult. Unlike the family-related questions above, which are more neutrally exploratory, these are questions where you’re looking for a certain kind of answer: one that indicates that the person you’re dating is more mature, rather than less.

• Does she have a personal code or set of principles? What is her sense of right and wrong, and where does it come from?
• Does she make wise and kind choices or just consider her own needs and wants?
• Does she show that she has a sense of how her words and actions affect others?
• Does she try to see the perspectives of others?
• How does she handle stress and setbacks? Is she resilient?
• How does she handle being in the wrong? Does she get defensive, or is she open to feedback?
• How stable versus moody is she?
• Is she impulsive?
• Is she neurotic? (Neuroticism is the personality trait most correlated with unhappiness in relationships.)
• Does she respect boundaries?
• Does she take the initiative or wait until someone tells her to do something to take action?
• Does she set goals for herself and work to achieve them?

(C)ompatibility Potential

According to Van Epp, the strongest relationships have both similarities and differences. What matters most is alignment on the big things — values, life goals, and lifestyle preferences, especially around family, religion, and money. While you don’t need identical interests, sharing some leisure activities strengthens bonds, too. And when differences exist (like one partner being more spontaneous, the other more organized), they should complement rather than clash. The key is finding someone different enough to help you grow but similar enough to build a stable, harmonious life together.

Here are some questions to explore as you figure out your compatibility potential; the more questions you can say yes to, the more likely you are to be a good match:

• Do you share the same values?
• Do you share the same religious beliefs?
• Do you share similar political positions?
• Are your long-term goals compatible?
• Do you have similar ideas on how many kids you want?
• Do you have similar ideas on family roles?
• Do you share a similar sense of humor?
• Do you have similar ideas about how to spend and save money?
• Do you have hobbies or activities that you share in common?
• Do you have a similar level of interest in travel?
• Do you have a similar level of interest in health and fitness?
• Do you have similar energy levels?
• Do you have a similar inclination toward socializing?
• Do you desire a similar level of physical affection?

(E)xamples of Previous Friendship or Relationship Patterns

How we act in one relationship typically demonstrates how we’ll show up in others. Healthy relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and even strangers suggest that an individual has developed the skills to maintain a strong, respectful, and fulfilling connection with a romantic partner.

Here are some questions to explore as you figure out if the person you’re dating exhibits healthy relationship patterns:

• How does she treat service people—restaurant servers, cashiers, attendants, and so on?
• Does she have road rage?
• How does she get along with people at work? How does she treat subordinates? Her boss?
• Has she been fired from a job before?
• Does she have close friends? How does she treat them? Do you like her friends?
• Does she gossip about others and criticize them beyond their backs?
• Did she date others seriously before you? Why did those relationships end? Were the breakups acrimonious?

(S)kills for Relationships

Relationship skills are connected with the attitudes of a mature conscience. You’re looking to see if your partner has the ability to navigate the ups and downs of a relationship maturely. Relationship skills include communication, conflict resolution, empathy, and emotional regulation.

Look for the following when assessing your partner’s relationship skills:

• When you’re talking, does she pay attention to you or check her phone?
• Does she interrupt you when you’re talking?
• When you speak with her, does she ask follow-up questions to ensure she fully understands you?
• Does she show compassion and genuine concern for others’ feelings?
• Does she open up to you when you sense she’s got something on her mind or does she clam up?
• When she has a problem, can she talk to you calmly, or does she blow up or get passive-aggressive?
• Does she stay composed when you have disagreements?
• Does she take responsibility for managing her emotions rather than blaming others?
• Does she make compromises and seek win-win solutions?
• Does she apologize when she’s in the wrong?
• Does she respect others’ needs, time, and autonomy?
• Does she communicate her boundaries without being aggressive about it?
• Does she express gratitude?
• Does she lie?

Know Someone Through Talk, Togetherness, and Time

That’s a lot of stuff to learn about someone you’re dating. And we just scratched the surface of what Van Epp talks about in How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk.

So what does this getting to know each other process actually look like?

According to Van Epp, you get to know someone through talk, togetherness, and time.

As you’re dating, ask thoughtful questions about your potential partner’s life, values, and character. These conversations shouldn’t feel like an interrogation but should emerge naturally as the relationship progresses.

Van Epp also encourages couples to spend time together outside the traditional date. You want to see how you handle different situations, particularly when stressed or overwhelmed. Also spend time with her friends and family to observe her existing relationship patterns.

We often don’t reveal our real selves right away. People are usually on their best behavior during the early stages of a relationship, so that someone’s true patterns and behaviors don’t manifest themselves for three or more months. That’s why Van Epp encourages couples to take their time before escalating a relationship. You need time to have those crucial conversations and to see how each of you behaves in different situations.

Love needn’t be blind, or stupid. By taking time to understand someone’s F.A.C.E.S., you can make a clear-eyed choice about whether they’re right for you. This doesn’t mean finding someone perfect (we’re all works in progress) but finding someone whose habits, values, and character align with what you need in a partner. Remember, it’s all about loving with your heart and your head.

For more insights on how to avoid falling in love with the wrong person, listen to our podcast with Dr. Van Epp:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

There has been a lot of cultural discussion of the way digital technologies and social media contribute to things like political polarization and adolescent depression.

But as I’ll explore with Nicholas Carr, the author of Superbloom, our digital tools are also changing our ability to connect with others and our sense of self in less appreciated ways.

Today on the show, Nicholas unpacks why the optimistic idea that more communication is always better hasn’t panned out and how the speed and volume of modern communication is overwhelming our human capacity to process information and maintain meaningful relationships. We discuss why the “messiness” of pre-digital communication might have actually been better for us, how email has evolved from thoughtful letters to rushed messages, and why seeing more of people online often makes us like them less. Nicholas also explains why having different versions of ourselves for different contexts was actually healthy and the simple rubric for better managing our relationship with digital communication tools.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Nicholas’ previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
  • Episode #276: Utopia is Creepy
  • Episode #632: How the Internet Makes Our Minds Shallow
• Charles Horton Cooley
• AoM Article: More Than Ever, the Medium Is the Message

Connect With Nicholas Carr

• Nicholas’ website
• Nicholas’ Substack, New Cartographies

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. There’s been a lot of cultural discussion of the way digital technologies and social media contribute to things like political polarization and adolescent depression. But as I’ll explore with Nicholas Carr, the author of Superbloom, our digital tools are also changing our ability to connect with others and our sense of self in less appreciated ways. Today on the show, Nicholas unpacks why the optimistic idea that more communication is always better hasn’t panned out, and how the speed and volume of modern communication is overwhelming our human capacity to process information and maintain meaningful relationships. We discuss why the messiness of pre digital communication might have actually been better for us. How email has evolved from thoughtful letters to rushed messages, and why seeing more of people online often makes us like them less. Nicholas also explains why having different versions of ourselves for different contexts was actually healthy. And the simple rubric for better managing our relationship with digital communication tools. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/communication. All right, Nicholas Carr, welcome back to the show.

Nicholas Carr: Thanks. It’s good to be back with you.

Brett McKay: So we had you on a long time ago to talk about your book the Shallows, which was about how Google was changing our brains. This is like 10 years ago, 15 years ago. You’ve got a new book out called Superbloom where you explore how our digital communication tools, whether it’s text, social media, short form video, how that’s changing the way we communicate, socialize, even just think of ourselves as a self in the world. So the word social media has just become… It’s just a common word we throw around. And I think a lot of people might think, oh, social media, that phrase was an invention of the late 20th, early 21st century, right? We did… Social media did not exist until Mark Zuckerberg came up with Facebook. But you talk about, there was a 19th century thinker who coined the term social media. His name’s Charles Horton Cooley. Tell us about this guy. What was his big idea when it came to communication tools and how we interact with one another?

Nicholas Carr: Well, Charles Horton Cooley, he was born in the 1860s in Michigan. He started out as an academic economist, but he ended up becoming one of the earliest American sociologists. Founded the University of Michigan’s sociology department. And the question he set out to answer, the question that really interested him is why does society change? And in 1897, he wrote this very interesting, very obscure at this point article about that subject. And he went through, you know, various possibilities, he talked about genetics and stuff like that. But ultimately he decided that the biggest force that changes society is changes in communication technology, changes in the tools we use to converse, to express ourselves, to exchange information and so forth. And in that article, and when I read it, I was kind of amazed, he uses the term social media. And as far as I can tell, it’s the first time it’s been used. And what he meant by it was that communication technologies allow us to form groups that are independent of location. So, you know, in the past, before we had the mail system and the telegraph and everything else, you know, your social group was whoever happened to be around you in the real world.

But he saw that as new technologies allow us to interact with people far away, we can form all sorts of groups without any spatial or even temporal boundaries. And he called these groups social mediums or social media in general. And so that… You know, looking at his work and particularly his stress on the importance of communication technologies, he called them communication mechanisms in shaping society was one of the real inspirations for the book.

Brett McKay: And what’s interesting, his ideas that he had in the 19th century, it seems like later thinkers about media and communication, we’re talking like Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman, they kinda picked up on these ideas, correct?

Nicholas Carr: Absolutely. I mean, I don’t know if they were inspired by Cooley, but you know, 50, 70 years before they started looking at this, Cooley had already come to this conclusion. And I mean, what characterizes McLuhan’s most famous saying, of course, is the medium is the message. And by that he meant that we focus on the bits of content that come through communication systems, media systems, but really it’s the technology itself that shapes the way we speak, who we speak to, even how we think. And that’s very much what Cooley was talking about at the end of the 19th century, that to paraphrase his belief, it’s that when mechanisms of communication change, society changes. Independent of the content that’s coming through those mechanisms.

Brett McKay: How did he see society changing? So what happened? Did he make any observations about that? As you know, we moved from, say, an oral communication society where we just talked to the people who are around us, around the fire pit or in the town village. How did culture, society change as we introduced letter writing or the telegraph, etc.

Nicholas Carr: Cooley saw that new communication technologies do two things. They change the way influence flows among people. And that just means the patterns of the way information go from one person to another. Certainly when you have electronic or electric Communications, everything speeds up. And you can cast your voice or hear the voices of other people far away instantaneously. But also it changes. And this is what I was talking about before. It changes how people form relationships and form social groups. And these can be people in the distance. They can be people who wrote books a long time ago.

And so what he saw, and I think this was very prescient, he used the term that as information speeds up and as we can talk to people far away and they can hear us, and there’s all these flows of influence and association that society would come to liquefy. And what he meant by that was, you know, when you’re just talking to people who are around you in the same place at the same time, then you have a lot of social structure, you have a lot of institutions, you have a lot of traditions, and they’re all, you know, sustained through these tight communities. The more you break down those kind of barriers, the more chaotic society becomes. And it becomes, rather than kind of this concrete thing that changes very, very slowly. Society starts to act more like a liquid and it changes much, much quicker.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And you can see this if you do sort of a genealogy of communication tools like say the introduction of the printing press. Because of the introduction of the printing press, like you had the Reformation, you had all these changes in what we’re thinking about religion, and you had these splinter groups. And then you also had the rise of, nation states and people thinking about freedom and individual rights. That wasn’t happening before the printing press, that new form of communication that allows you to speak across space and time.

Nicholas Carr: Right. And one of the implications of that, and McLuhan in particular is pretty good on that, about that, is that suddenly an individual can determine kind of their own knowledge base and their own intellectual activities. Because suddenly you can read and listen to people from all over the place and you can start selecting which ideas are important to you. And what the argument is, is that this, in addition to all the social changes, this led to the rise of individualism. We started to think of ourselves as kind of self created because we weren’t locked into the traditions and the words of people in our immediate surroundings. We kind of took control of our own intellectual lives and that changed us as individual persons. We started to think much more about ourselves as individuals, but also became another big broad force in reshaping society. When you move from very tight knit communities to a huge civilization of individuals who think of themselves as individuals.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then, you know, going on to that theory that he had as communication speeds up, everything’s more fluid. I mean, we… I think we’ve all seen that if we’ve been on the Internet for the past 25 years. It just seems like there’s just constant change because of the rapidity of digital communication.

Nicholas Carr: Right. And there’s this weird combination of individualism and also clannishness as people, you know, join groups very, very quickly. And again, following Cooley and McLuhan and Neil Postman, if you look at the technology itself, you see that the technology is there, exists to speed up the flow of information, the flow of conversation. And that has a very interesting effect on human nature because I don’t think the human psyche is well suited to exchanging information and expressing oneself in gathering information at the kind of speed and volume that the Internet and social media kind of overwhelms us with all the time.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and that’s the big argument of your book. You talk about how Cooley, you know, he sees this idea of how our communication changes cultures as it gets faster, things liquefy. And he had an optimistic view of this, like, well, this is actually a good thing.

Nicholas Carr: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And then you talk about how later social media founders like Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook, kind of, they probably didn’t know they’re picking up on Cooley, but they picked up on that idea that the more you can communicate, the more you can talk to people, to different people from different backgrounds from across the world. That is always a net positive. There’s no downside sides to it. What you’re doing in Superbloom is like, well, okay, yeah, there’s some good things that come from this ability to communicate fast in a wide ranging way. But there are downsides to this. And this is what you explore in the book.

Nicholas Carr: Right. And so if you look through the history of modern electric communications, from the telegraph to the telephone to radio, tv, fax machines, and onto the Internet and social media. Every new communication technology that makes communication more efficient is greeted as, in utopian terms. So people think, oh, since communication is the way you learn about other people and you gain an understanding of other cultures and you can negotiate or go through diplomacy and stuff, that means that communication is kind of a naturally good thing. And if communication is a naturally good thing, then more communication must be even better. And you see this again, as I say over and over again. In the book, I go through many quotes of this utopianism from the moment the telegraph was invented to the Internet came along, to Mark Zuckerberg playing up how sharing on Facebook would bring the world together. And my argument is that that gets it wrong. You can see why we believe that. It’s all wrapped up in our sense of ourselves as unique creatures, because we can communicate in ways that other animals, for instance, can’t. And it’s also wrapped up in the very popular idea of a marketplace of ideas.

The intellectual marketplace operates like a marketplace of goods. If you can create more supply, then people have more choices and they’ll get rid of the bad stuff and they’ll choose the good stuff. And so there’s all these kind of assumptions we make about more communication being better communication. But what I argue is if you actually look through history and even if you look at our own recent experience, you see a very different picture. That, yes, communication can be very, very good and in fact, society is built of communication. But when you speed up communication too much, when you increase the volume of communication too much, it starts to become overwhelming and you create a conflict, I think, between human nature and our ability to make sense of things and to deal with messages and information in the technology.

And I think that’s what we’re seeing today. But I think you can see that, as I say, throughout recent history. I mean… I’ll give you a quick story that I relayed in the book. When telegraph and telephone emerged, people like Nikola Tesla, the great inventors, Marconi, the inventor of radio, and lots of other people, religious figures, said, oh, this is gonna create a world of understanding. We’re all gonna communicate instantaneously so we can work out our problems quickly. And this is the end of war. And Marconi made that proclamation in 1912. And of course, two years later, 1914, World War I broke out. And if you read the history of World War I, one of the messages that comes out of here is that these new communication technologies, rather than kind of restraining people from going to war at that time, actually hastened the outbreak of the war.

And it’s because the war was set off by the assassination of Austrian Archduke. And when that happened, instead of going the old fashioned route where diplomats would travel to different capitals and sit down together and try to hash out the problems and come to some solution, suddenly all these messages from all the capitals started flowing through telegraph lines and telephone lines, and it kind of overwhelmed diplomacy, and it soon turned into threats and other things. And what historians say is that the acceleration of communication actually was one of the causes of the war. So exactly the opposite effect when you actually look at what happens from what everyone expected. And yet, unfortunately, we didn’t learn from that example because if you go through radio and TV and the Internet and stuff, you see that same kind of very optimistic, even utopian belief that more communication will be better for society.

Brett McKay: And we’ve all seen that play out. Faster communication is the more communication you get online. I think initially thought, oh, this will just bring new understanding, new viewpoints, new vistas. And instead we’re just really angry at each other and just, you know. And it’s funny, that idea of, you know, more communication isn’t necessarily better. I think we’ve had a marriage counselor on the podcast before talk about, there’s this idea in a marriage of a marriage is having problems, like you just gotta… More communication, you gotta communicate, communicate, communicate. And he said things like sometimes more communication isn’t actually good. You just end up talking about the problems more and more and more instead of just kind of, okay, maybe there’s some things we can’t change here. And we move on. So yeah, let’s talk about what we can do and learn from history about maybe the benefits of slowing down our communication, having a little bit more friction. And you talk about in the 20th century when we had this development of different modes of communication. There was radio, there was television, there was telephone, there was newspaper, print. There was actually a lot of variety in the 20th century in the mediums we can choose.

And I think we all picked up on that. Well, with certain mediums there were certain types of thinking we did with that, but I think we forget that because today our whole information medium is just online. And I think online mediums can kind of encourage a certain type of thinking. Can you walk us through like that variety that we once had with communication and maybe some of the benefits that came with that?

Nicholas Carr: Yeah, so now we’ve all gotten used to digital media and to the smartphone as information delivery device. And because computers, which are obviously at the center of this, are general purpose information processors, that means they can do pretty much everything that’s ever been done through communication systems and media. So, you know, basically people use their phone as their newspaper, it’s the radio, it’s their tv, it’s their camera and their photo album, it’s their post office, it’s even their telephone sometimes. And we look back to the pre digital world, I’ll call it analog media. And we… When we look back we see it as kind of a mess because you couldn’t do everything through one tool and one network. There were all sorts of networks involved in all sorts of devices. So you had… You know, you subscribe to a print newspaper that came in the morning. You got some magazines that came weekly or monthly. You had a telephone on the wall, a dial telephone that you used to call up people when you needed to talk to people who weren’t in your immediate vicinity. You had radio, you had tv, you had record players and records and tapes.

So you had all of this diverse set of specialized analog media. And as I say, we look back at that now and see it as a mess and say, oh, thank goodness the Internet came along and cleaned that all up. So we can do everything through our phone or our computer. But what I argue is that actually, I think the very messiness of analog media and particularly the specialization of networks and tools and artifacts actually had a huge benefit for us because it held back the flow of information. You know, it had been possible for, say in the 1970s, it had been possible for 100 years to transmit information instantaneously electronically. But because of various physical constraints and constraints inherent in analog media, you couldn’t do that. People had to go out and make choices. They had to say, you know, do I wanna turn on the radio now and listen to the program? Do I wanna turn on the tv? Do I wanna put a record onto the turntable? Do I wanna pick up a newspaper? Do I wanna pick up a book? And having those specialized media and requiring people to make choices actually imposed a kind of discipline on the way we consumed media.

We had to use our discretion. We had to make careful choices. You couldn’t do everything all at once, and you didn’t want to. And I think that had ramifications for how we communicate, for how we think about news, for how we think about entertainment, for how we think about art. There was separation among different forms of media. You know, some things we knew were more important than other things. Some things were truer than other things. So it gave us this discretion and this discipline that I think we’ve lost when everything comes at us in all forms, all the time, and we’ve gone from a world of messiness that was still at a human scale and required human decision making to kind of a cleanliness and efficiency that is no longer at human scale. And kind of, instead of us using the tools, the tools start to use us.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And that cleanliness or lack of friction with our digital tools, I think that’s a source of a lot of the overwhelm or information overload people feel. It’s like, man, I’ve got these feeds I subscribe to, Instagram feeds I gotta keep up with, Twitter, Email, it’s just a glut. And you just feel, I can’t keep up with this. And I remember, you know, before digital tools, before smartphones, I don’t know, I just felt like my brain was a little bit more calm, a little bit more chill. I didn’t feel overwhelmed like I do sometimes today. So, yeah, that friction, you know, we’ve been trying to get rid of it ’cause like we see the friction, particularly in Silicon Valley, as this bad thing we gotta get rid of. That friction in our communication tools or medium consumption tools. I think it just allowed us to, I don’t know, think slowly, be more contemplative about what we’re consuming.

Nicholas Carr: Yeah. And at the same time, also, because you couldn’t do everything at once and you couldn’t juggle dozens of information feeds, you actually were encouraged to pay more attention whether you were listening to a song or having a conversation with somebody on the phone or reading a newspaper or whatever, you know, that was what you were doing. You weren’t also glancing at notifications on your phone. And so it just… It’s a very different mindset or attitude that has basically been destroyed, I think, by digital media.

Brett McKay: And that’s sad. Yeah, and I think you’re right. Like it’s a… We have a very surface level attention that we even carry over not just how we consume news, but like how we interact with others. Like our emails, we just kind of glance over them. Text messages that, you know, maybe someone’s trying to communicate and reach out to you because they’re hurting. You know, that text message you’re getting could be one of you know, 20 that are in your unread message section in your smartphone. And so you just kinda glance through it and you really can’t… You can’t do that sort of deep connection with that person, with that person needs. ’cause you don’t have the ability, like your attention span can’t withstand all the influx of stuff you’re getting.

Nicholas Carr: Yeah. And it’s kind of a consequence of the technology itself. In order to kind of stay afloat with all this information that’s coming in, you have to be superficial. You have to, you know, make quick decisions and draw on your instinct rather than your reasoning and respond immediately. So it changes the depth of our engagement with information and with other people. I think it changes the way we talk and I think it ultimately also changes the way we think. There’s just… If you want to be successful in digital media, you can’t think deeply or slowly about anything.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Well, and you use this, an example of how our technology changes the way we think. Use this… Well, McLuhan talked about this. He says whenever a new form of communication is introduced, whether that’s letter writing or the telegraph or television or radio or email, we use that new form of communication the same way that we used a previous form of communication. So like you use the example of email. Talk about that. I think if people were around when email was first introduced, they might remember they probably used email differently than they use it today.

Nicholas Carr: Absolutely. And I certainly remember that. McLuhan had a great phrase. He said, we march backwards into the future. And you can see this with email, ’cause when email came along and became popular in, whenever it was for most people, in 1980s or late 1980s, 1990s, with, you know, AOL mail and Yahoo Mail and stuff, people saw it as kind of a quicker electronic version of the mail system. So they thought of emails as kind of letters in a different form. And I can certainly remember this myself. When you wrote an email to someone, you’d sit down and you’d approach it as if you were writing a letter. You know, you’d write dear so and so, and then you’d have some courtesies, and you’d write in full sentences, and you try to express yourself clearly, and you’d proofread it and then you’d send it off. And that prevailed for a little while. But then as more and more people got onto email and email began to be used for all sorts of things and displaced, you know, letters and stuff, suddenly we couldn’t do that anymore because we had to keep up with the inbox. So you just didn’t have time to sit down and compose a careful letter.

You had to write quickly and often sloppily and kind of get your message across, but get it across in kind of the most efficient way possible. So the technology itself changed the way we speak. And it wasn’t only, you know, when we were sending emails to work colleagues or for some administrative purpose, it was how we talked to friends and family members. We got blunter and blunter and more compressed and sloppier. And meanwhile, because the email was so efficient, we stopped writing letters. So the technology shaped the way we correspond with people, changed the very form of it and made it, I think, much less intimate and much less careful and much Less thoughtful. And again, it was because we had no choice. We had to keep up with a email inbox that never stopped growing.

Brett McKay: My wife talks about that. She’s noticed that. She’s always like, remember my emails that I used to write? I wrote these like just really long emails to my friends. We had these like long correspondences. And the emails would look like some letter that was written from the 19th century, like you said, had the courtesies. And then, you know, there was like a catch up of what I’ve been up to and then there would be this long like exploration of an issue. And I mean they were really well done. And she says like, I haven’t written those type of messages in a long time. And she’s like, I feel like I’m missing something because I haven’t. ’cause the act of writing a letter like that or an email like that, it forces you to be self reflective. It forces you to contemplate what you’re thinking and think about the other person in a deeper way than you do when you, you know, just send out these, you know, short bullet point missives.

Nicholas Carr: Right. And you certainly see that if you look back to when letters themselves, the mail, became cheap enough that normal everyday citizens could actually write frequent letters. This was in like 1860, 1870. There’s histories of that. And it became kind of central, not only to how people communicate, but kind of central to their lives. That when you sat down to write a letter, you kind of isolated yourself from all the business of the world and all the distractions you had to go through. And it gave you time to kind of compose a narrative about your life. You wanted to tell people what you’d been up to and stuff. So you had to kind of shape it into a story and you had to think about what was important to you. So it was really in addition to being a communication tool, this kind of long form writing to other people that you’re friendly with or family members or other whatever kind of had a deep effect on our ability to think about life and put everything that was going on in our lives into some kind of context that made sense. And in the early days of email, I think that was also true. But that’s all gone now.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And it’s only gotten worse as we shifted our communication from email to text messages or social media updates. It’s even more perfunctory.

Nicholas Carr: Oh yeah. And I… What amazes me and I have a chapter in Superbloom that’s about this because I don’t think it’s been talked about enough, is what’s happened to personal correspondence. You know, now everybody’s texting, going through messaging apps and stuff and their group texts and whatever. So even email now is going the way of the written letter.

Brett McKay: Email’s too slow.

Nicholas Carr: Email’s too slow. You know, it used to be the fast thing. Email’s too slow. And what you see is just nobody cares. It’s full of typos, it’s sloppy, there’s no punctuation. You know, the application itself is messing things up with autocomplete algorithms and stuff. And people don’t proofread it or anything. So it’s… You can understand why this happened ’cause it’s so fast and so efficient and yet it really tells us something about how we think about self expression today and how we think about other people that we can’t be bothered to proofread a note because we have to be so fast. And it’s a very apparent symbol of kind of the degradation of communication and self expression and even a kind of lack of treating other people with courtesy when you can’t even be bothered to… When you can just dash off these sloppy, strange notes full of emojis and autocomplete sentences and stuff and no punctuation. And yet we do it without even thinking about it now.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s undignified. There’s no dignity involved in it. Yeah. And you talk about this new form of communication we have with text messages that involves. It’s not just… Not just using text, but we’re also incorporating emojis, as you said, ’cause the emojis are a shortcut for emotional expression. So in a letter we would have had to write about, well, I’m feeling very sad and despondent. Instead you just put the crying emoji. Or you can use like a gif of some person looking sad. And so ’cause you just… Someone can just glance at it, you’re like, okay, I get it. This person, he’s sad. And you call this new form of quick communication tech speak. And I’ve seen other media theorists talk about it as digital orality. It’s got this mixture of text. It’s not completely oral, but we use text and other symbols as if we were speaking to someone in person. ’cause like when we speak with people in person, we do get perfunctory. Like you can shorten things, you can use slang, and you can do that because you’re in the presence of that person physically. And so you’re able to pick up on, you know, body language cues and things like that that you can’t do online. But because we’re online, we try to replicate that same sort of communication with our digital tools. And it just… Something gets lost in that translation.

Nicholas Carr: Yeah, I mean… And it’s hard to emphasize that. It’s not all bad being able to have a written communication system that is informal and casual and kind of replicates the way you’d talk to friends if you were out for an evening or something. That’s a good thing. And in fact, I tell the story of how techspeak was invented. It was kind of invented through teenagers instant messaging at, you know, in the late 1990s, sitting at the family PC with a bunch of instant message IM windows open and having all these conversations. And when you’re having that many conversations, you kinda have to compress language. So they very quickly learned how to shorten words and use initialisms and typed emoji and stuff. In some ways this is kind of ingenious and it really worked. The problem is that that kind of casual sort of oral communication has not only displaced a lot of person to person conversation, it’s moved into all forms of communication. So it’s displaced kind of the slower, more considered, more contemplative forms of correspondence. So if techspeak was just kind of digital orality and gave us the ability to chat, you know, casually with friends online, I think it would be fine. But under the pressure of having to keep up with so much information, we now use techspeak… It’s kind of our basic language. And that, to me, is the problem.

Brett McKay: Yeah, techspeak tends to be more reflexive and less reflective. Right. Like you’re kind of using that system one thinking that I guess Kahneman talked about, or just like fast. Right. It’s emotional. And that’s why, you know, sometimes text messages or group chats can kind of go off the rails ’cause people are just reflexively reacting to things and they’re not taking the time to use that sort of system two, thinking of, I need to think about this and let me contemplate a little bit about this, let me reflect to make sure that I’m putting something out there that is measured. Techspeak does not encourage that. And the problem with like techspeak or digital orality, that sort of reflexive communication, I don’t think it’s much of a problem when you’re face to face and sort of in real time with somebody because you have the thing, you might have this disagreement in a spat and then you can kind of patch things up and then you move on. And like, it’s just that thing that happened. The interaction that happened is just in the past. Like, you can’t go back to it really, except in your brain.

With digital orality or like this techspeak, you have a permanent record of that ephemeral spat. And every time you open up your text messages, let’s say you had a spat with a friend and you patched it up, but then you’re going through your text messages again, you see it, that interaction you had, like, oh, man, yeah, I don’t like this guy. I’m gonna dredge that up again. So techspeak takes something that was once ephemeral, like oral speech, and basically makes a permanent record of it.

Nicholas Carr: Right. Yeah. And that definitely makes it harder to kind of get over things because it’s always there in front of you. And also, you know, another difference between “digital orality” and actually having a conversation with a person is that when you’re having a conversation with a person, a lot of information is communicated not with words, but with gestures, with, you know, the look in people’s eyes, with how they’re standing with their smiles and everything. And, you know, we underestimate the importance of all those gestures, all those physical signals. And you strip those out when you converse online. Even if the language you’re using might be similar to what you’d use if you were sitting around a table.

Brett McKay: And it’s hard to add back with emojis or gifs or whatever. You can do maybe a little bit, but it’s not the same thing. Another thing you talk about is that social media or techspeak or this quick communication that we have, not only does it encourage us to be reflexive and just kind of have the surface level attention to the communication we’re having with others, it also allows us to be ever present in the lives of others and others to be ever present in ours. And it’s also nudged us to reveal more and more about ourselves. Like, you’re supposed to be transparent and vulnerable, sort of the ethos. What’s been the effect of that constant exposure to each other via our phones or computers?

Nicholas Carr: Yeah, so social media rewards people for talking about themselves a lot. That’s how you get likes, that’s how you get retweets and reposts and stuff. And unlike in the physical world, where if you’re quiet but in a social setting, you’re still there, you’re still present. Online, if you go quiet, you disappear. So that’s another reason we’re kind of encouraged to constantly post things, express ourselves, put up pictures and stuff. And in fact, there are studies that show that if you compare people conversing online versus people conversing in person, online, people will tend to divulge four times as much information about themselves in a given period of time. So you see that very, very much. Now here we get back to another paradox like, you know, similar to more communication means less understanding. We wanna think that the more we learn about other people and the more we divulge about ourselves, the more we’ll like each other, we’ll understand each other, we’ll have empathy and stuff. Unfortunately, if you look at the actual research, something very, very different happens. That, yeah, there are certainly times when learning more about somebody makes you like them more, but it’s equally likely, if not slightly more likely, that learning more about someone will make you like them less.

And there’s this phenomenon in social psychology pretty well documented, called dissimilarity cascades. Which shows that the more facts you learn or the more pictures you see or whatever of other people, over time, you begin to place more emphasis on their dissimilarities with you than on their similarities. And what we know from a raft of psychological research is that we tend to like people who are similar to us in some ways, and we tend to dislike people who are dissimilar. And so online, where people are constantly, you know, posting selfies or posting pictures of their vacations or talking about what they just did, or giving you their political opinions or whatever.

There’s all these opportunities to begin to be alienated by those people. And so I think what we see is, again, kind of the opposite effect that we thought we’d see, which is that, you know, talking more with everybody and showing off and giving more information about ourselves would lead to more understanding and more friendship and more liking, it actually often has the opposite effect. And I think if you look closely at that, that psychological research, I think it explains a lot of the enmity and combativeness and insults and everything else that we see online. We’ve created a communication system that doesn’t bring us closer together, but often kind of emphasizes how we’re different and makes us think of each other as not only different, but in some cases, as enemies or people to be disliked.

Brett McKay: So familiarity breeds contempt.

Nicholas Carr: Unfortunately, there are times when familiarity breeds friendship and love and everything. But I do think that old saying, which is quite a sad saying, has been basically proven true through social media and through digital communication.

Brett McKay: And I’m sure people have experienced this. Maybe they’ve got a co-worker at their office that at work they just kind of present their work self and they see the work self of the other person. It’s very collegial. And like, I get along with this guy. He does a good job at his work and he’s pleasant to be around. And then you might go home and let me look up this guy’s social media profile. And then you start seeing, oh my gosh, this guy, this is his political beliefs. And like, oh man, he likes that movie. That’s a terrible movie. And now when you go to the office the next day, you think, man, I don’t like this guy. And so your whole interaction with him, before, it was completely positive but now that you know more about him and how he’s different from you, it just makes things worse.

Nicholas Carr: Yeah, there’s this other concept also quite sad in the research called environmental spoiling. And there’s research that shows that the closer you live to another person, the more likely you are to be friends, which is sort of obvious. But the research also shows that the closer you live to someone, the more likely you are to be enemies. And in fact, that maybe again, slightly more common. And the reason is, is because you’re exposed to their habits, to their beliefs and everything. And so there’s lots of opportunities for that other person to do something that irritates you. You know, leaving their garbage cans out after garbage day or letting their dog go to the bathroom on your lawn or whatever. And once that happens, once you see something that’s irritating, that tends to build on itself. It’s very hard to forget that. And it leads to this kind of animosity. And so online, where we’re exposed to people doing all… You know, sharing their thoughts, sharing pictures of themselves, talking through videos and stuff, there’s all sorts of opportunities to see things that are not only dissimilar to you, but that are actually irritating to you. And so it’s… Just as it’s a… The digital world is a very good setting for dissimilarity cascades. It’s also a very good setting for this phenomenon of environmental spoiling.

Brett McKay: Okay, so our digital tools, the digital world encourages this vulnerability, this transparency, and of course the platforms like that because it gives them more data to sell ads. So I guess the takeaway there is maybe don’t share as much about yourself online. Leave a small digital blueprint. Give people less of a reason to not like you, potentially.

Nicholas Carr: Right. And again, you know, there’s trade offs there because as I said, when you’re not sharing, when you’re not speaking up, you kind of disappear. And so you feel kind of out of the social loop. But I do think that that is the kind of lesson to be learned here. And it’s… You know, when I was growing up and I think for a lot of people, and even today, I’m sure, you know, your mom would tell you, you know, don’t talk about yourself so much. That turns out to be pretty good advice. We forget it as soon as we look at our phone or sit in front of our computer. But maybe we should go back to that as a kind of rule of thumb.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I remember the old rule of thumb. Don’t talk about politics or religion. Like, you know, maybe…

Nicholas Carr: Which is… Certainly not what happens online.

Brett McKay: Right. That’s not what happens online. Well, here’s something I could use your help on. I’ve been trying to put my finger on this for a long time. So we’ve been talking about, you know, tech speak. It’s sort of oral, like speaking via digital tools. What is the introduction of online video? Particularly like, short form video. I feel like the introduction of this stuff has just exacerbated some of the problems we’ve talked about. And it also exacerbates kind of my contempt for people online, ’cause I mean, as soon as I see like the short form video of some head talking to me, I’m like, ugh, I don’t like this. And I can’t figure out why. Have you been able to think about this or am I just being a crank?

Nicholas Carr: No, I think there’s something to that. And I think it comes back to, in some ways comes back to like seeing too much, gives you opportunities to find elements that are irritating. But I think it’s also because when people videotape them… Or videotape is no longer the right word, but I’ll say videotape themselves and post it online. They’re performing, they’re not acting naturally. They know that they’re on camera. They know that this is gonna become media content. And I think we have a tendency to become performers and to think of ourselves as kind of media content when we’re on video. I mean, I think it’s also true often when we’re writing, but certainly when we’re on video.

And so there’s an irony that people talk all the time about, oh, you know, authenticity and relatability of people on YouTube or TikTok or whatever. And it turns out that often it’s exactly the opposite, that we convince ourselves that, oh, this person is talking about themselves, so they must be authentic and, oh, I can relate to what they’re saying. But actually, you know, the medium itself encourages a kind of inauthenticity because you are performing, you’re not talking to someone who’s there. You’re by necessity performing. And when you see that somebody is performing, you immediately kind of doubt their sincerity. You kind of feel like you’re being treated as an audience. And so I think there is this kind of strange social dynamic that happens when we see someone, you know, talking through a video that’s very different from what would happen if that person was talking to us in person.

Brett McKay: One of the things I love watching, and I think it’s interesting to observe. I love watching clips from, say, the 1950s or 1960s of when regular people get interviewed by newscasters. Sort of the man on the street thing. And it’s interesting to watch how self conscious the people were. They didn’t… Like the… People then didn’t know how to act in front of a camera. And you can tell that they were trying to be kind of professional. And so they were very professional, prim and proper. Now, since we’ve had cameras in our lives, just it’s ubiquitous. I think we’ve all developed like, oh, here’s how I’m supposed to act when there’s a camera on me. And it’s just… It’s interesting. It goes back to the idea that our tools change how we think or how we talk.

Nicholas Carr: Right. I think we know that we’re gonna be in competition with enormous amounts of other content. And so we tend to exaggerate what we say and exaggerate our gestures and kind of, in a way, become more clownish because we know that that’s the only way we’ll be able to grab attention with all this competition going on around us. So we’re very… In one way, very savvy in a way that people didn’t used to be about media and our own role in it. But it also, again, leads to kind of these kind of, I don’t know, we almost become caricatures of ourselves.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Become cartoons.

Nicholas Carr: Yeah, yeah.

Brett McKay: Something else you talk about in the book is that throughout human history, we had different concepts or different ideas of ourselves. And what I mean by that is we had a different sense of ourself depending on the context. Right. There was the work self and there was the family self and there was church self. So you behaved and thought in a certain way when you’re at work compared with your family, then when you’re at church. And the Internet has pretty much eliminated those barriers. Like, it’s all there. Your work self, your church self, your family self. It’s all there. What have been the consequences of that you think?

Nicholas Carr: Yeah, so. And this is something that, to go back to Charles Horton Cooley, where we started, he talks about this, that you have different selves for different audiences. And many, many writers, sociologists and other writers throughout the 20th century, you know, talked about this. And if you look at it from one way, you can think, oh, that’s an indication that we lack integrity, that we’re constantly changing how we present ourselves, depending if we’re with our family or with friends or with our work colleagues and stuff. But I take a different view. I think they’re all expressions of ourselves. But actually, you can look at it as this is our effort to accommodate ourselves to other people and other settings. So it’s not a loss of integrity when we go through this. It’s kind of a expansion of the orbit, the social orbit, that we’re in. And this was very much tied in the past to the fact that we socialized in our bodies. And what that meant is you could… When you went to school, say you were in a particular place at a particular time, and you were interacting with people in a particular way.

And then you’d leave and you might go home, and there’d be a gap between those two events, and you’d go home and you’d be with your parents, and you’d talk in a different way, and you’d act in a different way. And so in this, defined our social lives, they very much took place in different places at different times, and there were gaps between them when you actually weren’t socializing. So you could, you know, get in touch with your own thoughts. You could follow your own train of thought. You could think about what just happened and kind of synthesize it into your experience.

Those kind of spatial and temporal boundaries of our social lives have disappeared online. You know, everybody’s there all the time. You can use Snapchat to manage your audience. So it’s not like you’re talking to everybody all at once. But because we have all these social media platforms and group texts and other texts and emails going, there’s no longer the ability to distinguish among different social experiences and social events. And it all becomes a jumble, which becomes very disorienting and also, you know, breeds a lot of anxiety, I think. But even more so, we’ve lost those gaps between social events. Where there weren’t people around that we knew and were talking to and shaping ourselves to fit them.

Those are all gone because if you have your phone, you can socialize all the time, even when you’re alone. And that’s what people do. There’s a writer from, I think, the 1980s or something called Joshua Meyerowitz who talked about the isolation of different social events and the gaps between them as providing this kind of psychological shock absorber that meant we weren’t overwhelmed by the need to socialize all the time with lots of different people and adapt ourselves to all these different people. But we could do it kind of in a segregated, deliberate way. And I think we’ve lost our shock absorber. And that’s one of the reasons that I think people often behave in kind of strange, antagonistic ways when they’re online, because they’ve lost the ability to kind of think about who they’re with at the moment, think about what the other people are thinking, shape their own behavior to that. We simply can’t do that anymore because everybody’s out there all the time.

Brett McKay: Yeah. It’s made it harder to order ourselves or create a self. And because we’re not ordered, kind of act disorderedly. There’s no self, basically.

Nicholas Carr: Right. Mark Zuckerberg once said when he was talking about Facebook that on Facebook, you can’t have multiple selves. You have to have just one self ’cause everybody’s seeing you at the same time. And he thought that was a great thing, that gave us all integrity. But I think it’s exactly the opposite, because shaping yourself to different social situations doesn’t mean you lack integrity. It means you have a consciousness of different people in different social situations, and you adapt to them, and that actually turns out to be a good thing.

Brett McKay: So we’ve talked about a lot of the ill consequences of too much communication. So what do we do about that? Today all of our work lives and social lives are done via digital devices, it seems. And so opting out of that would basically mean you have to opt out of large swaths of life. So what can we do to sort of mitigate the contamination of the superbloom effect of online communication?

Nicholas Carr: Well, it’s difficult, as all of us who have tried know, because society really has reshaped itself at this point to the Internet. It’s hard to do anything without pulling out your phone or being online in one way or another. So backing away, you know, not cutting yourself off, but even backing away a bit is gonna entail sacrifices. You know, people will resent you if you respond to their messages less quickly or if you comment on their Instagram posts less quickly or whatever. So I wanna start by stressing the fact that, you know, you can’t do this without sacrifices. But I do think the sacrifices in the long run are probably worth it because they’ll ultimately make your life richer and more fulfilling. So, you know, if I was gonna give advice or a way to think about this, I’d go back to something old and simple. Which is that you should always use the right tool for the job. You know, my father used to tell me that when I was trying to do something haphazardly and, you know, using a screwdriver when I should have used a wrench or whatever. You know, always use the right tool for the job.

Because our computers and our phones and digital media can do everything for us. Or can be a tool for doing pretty much everything, particularly in our social lives. And it’s a very efficient tool. We’ve kind of come to the belief that, oh, it’s kind of the Swiss army knife or the Leatherman tool that we can use for everything in terms of gathering information, sharing our thoughts, communicating with others, building relationship groups. And I think it’s actually really, really bad. A really bad tool for a lot of that. I think it’s a bad tool for conversing with other people, particularly people who are close to us. I think it’s a bad tool for gathering information and gathering news, and certainly a bad tool for thinking deeply about things. So if we can step back and say, you know, what is this tool actually good for? And certainly it’s good for a lot of things. You know, I’m a big fan of computers, though I’m not a big fan of digital media. But also appreciate that, you know, it’s not a great tool for socializing. It’s actually better and more fulfilling for yourself and for the other person to sit down and write somebody a letter, something we almost never think about doing anymore than jotting down, you know, a sloppy text and sending it off, that is gonna be basically meaningless to that other person.

Or it’s better to sit down and have a conversation without also glancing at your phone all the time. It’s gonna be more fulfilling. You know, it may even make sense to subscribe to a print newspaper or some print magazine so you can get them and you can sit down with them and actually go through them quietly and carefully without being bombarded by other things on the screen. So if we step back and kind of realize that, you know, our phones and digital media are good for some things, but they’re really bad for other things and we just use them for other things because it’s quick and efficient and easy, then I think we might be able as individuals at least, I’m not sure about as a society, as individuals at least make better decisions about how we live our day to day lives and kind of realize that, you know, we need to set the phone or the computer aside for lots of things we do, particularly of a social nature.

Brett McKay: Well, Nick, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Nicholas Carr: Well, I have a website, nicholascarr.com and the book is called Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. And I also have a new substack called newcartographies.com where I fairly frequently post short essays, short articles. So any and all of those places, if you wanna learn more, are good places to go.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I subscribe to newcartographies. I really enjoy it. So I encourage people to do that. Well, Nick Carr, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Nicholas Carr: Thanks Brett. It was a great pleasure to be back on the show.

Brett McKay: My guest here is Nicholas Carr. He’s the author of the book Superbloom. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You find more information about his work at his website, nicholascarr.com also check out our show notes at aom.is/communication, where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you have heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Plenty of people have been talking about the rifts between liberals and conservatives and between men and women.

But there’s a fault line out there that is just as divisive and may be responsible for more relational estrangement than any other — despite the fact that it remains almost entirely unrecognized and understood:

The division between social initiators and non-initiators.

Every time we re-share a past article — “The 3 Reasons Friendships End” — on our Facebook page, the most common and most liked comments it receives run something like this:

Joel is representative of the social initiators of the world. Comprising perhaps half the population, these are the folks who make the first moves in getting to know a new acquaintance, send texts to check in with people, reply to messages they receive promptly, organize hangouts, and host parties.

Joel is frustrated by those folks who are happy to receive texts and invitations, but are far less likely to offer them themselves. This is the other half of the population — the world’s social non-initiators.

That friction would arise between these two groups is no surprise.

Social initiators do the lion’s share of legwork in keeping the gears of relationships turning; as a result, they often eventually become resentful about the lopsided nature of this division of labor. Because friendships are unique amongst relationships in lacking clearly defined expectations, including the expectation of talking about unmet expectations, the social initiator is unlikely to bring up his grievance with his non-initiator friend. Instead, he’ll just decide, “Well, if he doesn’t care, then I don’t care!” and stop making an effort to keep the relationship alive.

The social non-initiator, meanwhile, is typically blissfully unaware that his initiator friend is feeling resentment. One day, he may just notice that the friend has stopped reaching out and that the friendship has eroded.

While the friction between social initiators and non-initiators may be understandable, it is not inevitable. Both parties can accept and even celebrate each other’s differences, and can happily co-exist in long-lasting friendships, if they both come to understand certain things about each other:

What Social Initiators Need to Understand About Non-Initiators

Being a non-initiator is a personality disposition, not a moral failing. Social initiators tend to carry a sense of righteousness about the effort they make in relationships. Their thinking runs like this: relationships are good things, so caring about them a lot means you’re a good person. Conversely, making less of an effort in relationships means you’re more self-centered and a bad person.

But a tendency towards social initiation is more akin to liking a certain food, than it is a moral virtue.

Almost universally, social initiators are born, not made. Their inclination towards social investment is not a trait that they intentionally worked for and developed; it’s just naturally how they are. And they are not more inclined to reach out to others because of the superiority of their character, but because they find interpersonal interactions especially rewarding. Most social non-initiators very much enjoy relationships too, but initiators get more of a rise out of them. Thus the latter’s drive to make social overtures is not purely altruistic, but also self-interested.  

If someone who loves avocado is always willing to pay extra for it at restaurants, we don’t celebrate that as a virtue, and we don’t condemn someone who feels neutrally about avocado for not choosing to do likewise. In the same way, social initiators should view someone’s lack of social initiation as a matter of taste, as an inborn personality disposition, rather than a moral failing. Different people find interpersonal interactions a little more or less delicious, and where someone falls on that spectrum does not make them a better or worse person.

So too, while social initiators are apt to pat themselves on the back for their relational efforts, it is well for them to remember that personality exists as a coin with two sides: one light and one dark. Good traits are almost invariably attached to less desirable ones, and the initiatory trait is frequently part of a constellation that also includes a propensity toward being moody, controlling, critical, and unforgiving. Admit it, if you’re a social initiator, while you’re great about making an effort to sustain relationships, you’re a bit of an a-hole in other ways, aren’t you?

When it comes to the dynamics of personality, it’s necessary to humbly dismount from one’s high horse.

Non-initiators have their own traits worth appreciating. By the same (two-sided) token, social initiators need to become cognizant that the same trait that frustrates them in their non-initiator friends is almost always attached to the very things they love about those people. Those who lack the initiatory personality trait are very often fun, positive, warm, charismatic, non-critical, and forgiving. They may not throw parties, but boy, are they a good guest at them. They may not initiate hangouts, but they are a supremely enjoyable companion when you do.

Since you’re rarely going to get one side of the coin without the other, instead of focusing on what a non-initiator lacks, initiators need to concentrate on the many wonderful things non-initiators bring into their lives.  

A lack of reciprocation may, or may not, mean someone doesn’t like/care about you. Reciprocation is a large part of how we decide to act toward someone. How you act towards me tells me how I should act towards you. Thus, one of the most frustrating parts of being friends with a social non-initiator is that it makes the inherent ambiguity of friendship even more ambiguous. It makes it difficult to know if someone is interested in forming or maintaining a friendship, or not. If you’ve invited someone over for dinner twice, and they haven’t reciprocated the invitation, is that because they don’t like you, or because they’re just not someone who initiates social events?

It could be either, but don’t assume it’s one or the other. If someone doesn’t often initiate hangouts, but seems enthusiastic about your invitations, sincerely remarks upon what a good time they have when you get together, and suggests another time you could meet when an invitation doesn’t fit their schedule, they probably do like you and are just not social initiators. If someone doesn’t do these things, they probably aren’t interested in developing or sustaining a relationship.

You can come to see social initiation as a vocation and form of service. While social initiators may be more intrinsically inclined to make relational efforts because they find interpersonal interactions more rewarding, that doesn’t mean these natural motivations will always sustain them. Sometimes the effort still feels quite effortful, and initiators become frustrated that they seemingly give more than they get back. It’s at those times that initiators tend to get resentful about having to carry more of the interpersonal weight.

In such moments, initiators should take heart that in keeping the gears of relationships turning, they’re rendering a vital service to mankind. Being an initiator is a kind of vocation you’re called to. You can be the person who sustains that which is most meaningful in life. You can be the person who facilitates life-changing conversations, fosters good times, and creates the memories people will cherish most. Take up the yoke of social initiation and carry it forward proudly; you’re adding something truly valuable to the world.

What Social Non-initiators Need to Understand About Initiators

In many ways, social non-initiators have an easier row to hoe in building a bridge with initiators than vice versa. But this makes sense, since inasmuch as there is tension between the groups, it is almost entirely generated on the initiator side of things.

Initiators need effusive affirmation that their interpersonal overtures are welcome. Because people base how they act on reciprocity, and because non-initiators don’t consistently reciprocate initiators’ interpersonal efforts, initiators will be confused as to whether they should continue to make such efforts or not. It makes them feel dumb to keep reaching out to someone when they’re not reaching back.

While a non-initiator may not ever reciprocate an initiator’s overtures on an equal basis, the former can greatly ameliorate the latter’s frustrations and insecurities by effusively affirming and appreciating their efforts (if such efforts are indeed welcome). They can literally say, “I’m not very good at initiating these hangouts, but I really appreciate that you are. I really enjoy them.” This will go a long way in making an initiator feel motivated and secure in continuing to reach out to a non-initiator.  

You should make an effort to mitigate your natural bent, at least a little. Friendships work to the extent that each person comes to appreciate and accept the differences in the other, while also making an effort to meet the other person where they are.

Personality is not absolute destiny. While a non-initiator may never have the same inherent drive to instigate social interactions that initiators do, they can, now and again, override their natural instincts and intentionally push themselves to catalyze a reach out/hangout. Just like someone can push themselves to exercise on a day they don’t feel like it. A non-initiator’s efforts needn’t match those of their initiator friends on a 1:1 basis; even being the catalyzer once every ten times can be enough to satisfy an initiator friend and let them know the liking and desire to continue the relationship are mutual.

Many, many friendships have ended because social initiators and social non-initiators have failed to understand where each other was coming from. But these two groups needn’t be at odds; take this PSA to heart, share it around, celebrate what each type of person does well and brings to the table — and this is one rift that can actually be mended.  

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

America is facing a “boy crisis.” The statistics are stark: Boys are far more likely than girls to fall behind in school, die by suicide, and end up in jail.

When experts offer solutions to the problems facing the male population, most push for a fundamental reimagining of masculinity — urging boys to reject the supposed stereotypes of manhood. 

A century ago, Progressive reformers faced their own “boy crisis.” Like today, they worried about juvenile delinquency, substance abuse, and poor educational outcomes.

But their solution couldn’t have been more different from our modern approach.

While today’s experts push to make boys less traditionally masculine, these early Progressive reformers believed in working with boys’ natural inclinations rather than against them. Their most surprising conclusion?

Boys need to join gangs.

The Gang Instinct

Progressive reformers of the early 1900s observed that unlike girls, who tended to form one-on-one relationships with their female friends, boys naturally socialized in groups. They ran in packs. They formed gangs. These boy gangs could be found on street corners and in parks, getting up to adventures, games, and all manner of hijinks.

Influenced by John Dewey’s Pragmatist philosophy (which was influenced by Darwinism), these reformers hypothesized that this tendency for boys to form gangs was an innate, evolutionary adaptation.

They called it the “gang instinct.”

In a 1911 article for Lippincott Monthly Magazine, educator Luther Gulick unpacked this idea:

Those possessed of these [gang] feelings would be better fitted to survive than those who were purely selfish, and so, gradually, the egoistic man would be eliminated from the race. The man who could sympathize with the gang feelings, whose life could be molded into conformity with the rest, would have a better opportunity to reproduce himself in the succeeding generation than the individual who was sufficient unto himself.

Through the steady elimination of the more egoistic, and the survival of the more altruistic, the children would inherit social capacity, and be more and more cooperative in their tendencies and actions.

The gang instinct, then, is of evolutionary origin. It expresses itself in the individual boy in those feelings of sympathy and desire for the companionship of others of his own kind, which were elementary factors in the survival of his forefathers. Those early fighters who had not the gang instinct were so effectually eliminated, and the qualities of those with the more social natures were so thoroughly stamped upon the human race through the action of selection, that now the normal boy demands associates of his own kind as naturally as the baby cries, or the bird builds its nest.

Other writers from that time echoed Gulick. In 1912, J. Adam Puffers published a book entitled The Boy and His Gang, where he argued that boys have a “deep seated unconscious need” to join a gang with other boys. According to Puffers, the gang drive in boys begins at around age nine and intensifies through adolescence and into young adulthood. For Puffers, belonging to a gang, or group of boys, was a vital step in the healthy social development of a boy, for it is in the gang that a boy learns the art of camaraderie:

In the gang, then, we find the natural time and place for the somewhat sudden birth and development of that spirit of loyalty which is the foundation of most of our social relations. We must, in short, look upon the gang as nature’s special training-school for the social virtues.

Only by associating himself with other boys can any youth learn the knack of getting on with his fellow men; acquire and practice cooperation, self-sacrifice, loyalty, fidelity, team play; and in general prepare himself to become the politician, the business man, the efficient citizen of a democracy.

Nature, we must believe, has given the boy the gang instinct for the sake of making easy for him the practice of the gang virtues.

The impulses to loyalty, fidelity, cooperation, self-sacrifice, justice, which are at the basis of gang psychology, are powerfully reinforced, as we have already seen, by nearly all the typical gang activities.

Puffers believed that boys who didn’t have the gang experience would end up socially stunted: “they fail to pass through the normal development of human males; they lack a fundamental virtue and their fellows will not trust them, boy or man.”

Gulick argued the same thing, positing that boys who didn’t have the gang experience while growing up may turn out to be “fine individuals, in the main” but often become “incapable of social action. The give and take involved in gang activity was beyond them. . . . The period seemed to have passed for the development of those fundamental traits which make the gang teamwork and cooperative endeavor possible.”

In 1915, Albert Hines wrote in the journal Work With Boys that gangs provided a way for a boy to engage in “muscular action [and] adventure” where he could gain the “approval of his fellows which he finds in his gang.”

For these thinkers and educators, a boy’s pack of friends was the arena in which young men developed the social virtues necessary to be good citizens as well as their sense of manhood. It was the arena in which their more annoying, socially-retarding tendencies were checked and their need to feel valued was affirmed. Through their participation in a gang, Progressive reformers believed, a boy was able to begin the process of proving himself a man, and gaining the confidence that came with it.

The Way of Men Is the Way of the Gang

Modern research has confirmed this century’s-old intuition. Anthropologist Lionel Tiger documented how men across cultures naturally form cooperative groups to achieve common goals, while Harvard psychologist Joyce Benenson’s research shows that boys tend toward socializing in groups while girls prefer dyadic relationships. Both argue this male “gang instinct” evolved because group cooperation helped our ancient male ancestors hunt and fight successfully.

Writer Jack Donovan summed up this research on the male gang instinct in his book The Way of Men when he asserted: “The way of men is the way of the gang.”

For Donovan, masculinity is fundamentally about being “a man among men” — the ability to succeed within male groups is how you figure out if you’re a man. Being a man isn’t an individual task, but one that is done within a small, honor-bound community. You can’t evaluate for yourself whether you’ve achieved the masculine virtues; it’s something that has to be assessed by one’s respected peers.

Donovan’s conclusion aligns with both modern research and the principles of early Progressive reformers: the gang is fundamental to male social development.

Most men intuitively understand what these thinkers were talking about. We remember our own “gangs” — whether it was a sports team, a church group, or just a crew of neighborhood friends. My own fondest teenage memories revolve around these groups: my football teammates pushing one another through brutal summer practices; my church youth group taking on ambitious service projects; my high school friends getting into occasional mischief.

As a grown man who has spent eight years leading church youth groups and coaching boys’ sports, I’ve gained a more birds-eye view of the gang instinct as well. On the flag football team I coached, I watched 12-year-olds transform from individual players into a tight-knit unit, developing their own culture and codes. At church, I’ve seen teenage boys turn scripture memorization into a team sport, their natural competitiveness driving them to achievements they probably wouldn’t have taken on alone. Through my son Gus, I get glimpses of how modern boys still form natural packs, complete with their own rituals, inside jokes, and occasional innocent rebellion against authority.

And I’ve also noticed, just as Puffers did back in 1912, that boys who don’t have the “gang” experience end up socially stunted. Often bright and capable in other ways, these boys never quite catch the gang spirit. Despite their peers’ best efforts to include them, they remain on the periphery, missing crucial opportunities to develop social skills and emotional intelligence. They never develop the capacity for teamwork and “true comradeship.” And they become grown men who often struggle to navigate male social dynamics, keep to themselves, find it difficult to form close bonds with other guys, lean on their wives as their only friends, and have trouble understanding the unwritten rules of group dynamics.

Harnessing the Gang Instinct for Good

I am in the gang business. I believe in the gang spirit. The gang spirit is noble. It is the social spirit, the spirit of one for all. The trouble with the gang spirit is that it is not utilized by the community. —Albert B. Hines, Work with Boys (1916)

The word “gang” has a negative connotation today and is associated with “toxic masculinity.” When we think of gangs, we almost exclusively think of the urban, inner-city variety, which are often the source of violence, crime, and disorder in a community.

The same 20th-century reformers who boosted the value of the gang spirit also recognized that gang life could potentially be destructive. Frederic Thrasher published a comprehensive study in 1927 that highlighted how gangs in Chicago often led young men into criminal behavior and social dysfunction.

However, these same reformers argued that the solution wasn’t to suppress the gang instinct, but rather to channel it in positive directions.

In 1933’s The Building of Boyhood, Frank Cheley argues:

Thus the true gang spirit, which in the past has been heralded as the greatest menace of boy life, can easily be turned into the largest factor for personal growth and development. Gangs need direction, not annihilation, wise guidance, not stupid opposition, a worthwhile stream of activity, not hands-off policy.

Lyman Beecher Stowe made a similar argument about harnessing gang energy for positive ends when he wrote: “The best thing to do with a boy is to put him in a ‘gang’ — and watch the gang. . . . with supervision, even the worst gangs can become helpful agencies.”

These leaders understood and respected the energy of the gang spirit in boys. It’s like electricity. Without a proper channel, it can be dangerous. But give it a conduit, and the power becomes life-giving.

How did these reformers suggest harnessing the gang spirit for good?

Team sports was one way.

Organizations like the Boy Scouts was another.

Some of these reformers were clergymen as well, so they thought churches could also provide an arena where healthy male gangs could form.

In The Building of Boyhood, Cheley urged fathers to encourage their sons and their friends to congregate in their homes and to lead the boys in a semi-structured program of arts, crafts, fitness, character development, and skill-building.

So what would positive gangs look like in the 21st century?

For the most part, I think they can look the same way as they did in 1920.

Team sports still provide opportunities for healthy boy gangs to form, which is why I think every boy should play one.

I don’t think large organizations like the Boy Scouts and the like work in the 21st century. Those organizations were products of their time and aren’t well suited for the ethos of today’s more fragmented society.

I think if parents and teachers want to more effectively reach boys and help nurture positive gangs, it will have to be a grassroots effort. There’s not going to be some large, Progressive-era organization that will save you. Those days are gone.

That’s why I think Cheley’s vision of father-led neighborhood groups is a good one. I’ve done this with my own son and his best friend. My son’s friend’s dad and I took our boys through a modified version of the Strenuous Life Challenge a few years ago with success.

I also think male teachers can play a role in fostering positive gangs. Over the years, I’ve gotten letters from men who are teachers and have used AoM’s content to create edifying school clubs for the young men they mentor.

Your Son Is a Natural Gangster

Your boy is a natural gangster, therefore encourage him to join a clean gang. — Edwin Puller

The modern push to remake boys into less masculine beings and, in some cases, break up boy gangs altogether has largely failed because it works against, rather than with, boys’ natural inclinations. Like the Progressive reformers understood, we need positive realism: boys will form gangs whether we like it or not. Our choice is whether these gangs form in the shadows of Discord servers and unsupervised spaces or in constructive environments with adult guidance.

The goal isn’t to eliminate the gang spirit but to channel it. When properly directed, the same energy that can lead to delinquency can be used to forge strong character, teach social skills, and build future leaders. Your son’s gangster nature isn’t a flaw to be fixed — it’s a force to be harnessed.

The challenge for parents, educators, and community leaders isn’t to make boys less boyish, but to create the positive gangs that modern boys critically need. Whether through sports teams or church groups, we need to give boys what they truly desire in their hearts: the chance to belong, to achieve, and to prove themselves among their peers.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

“Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love,” Charlie Brown once said. Indeed, being spurned by one’s crush, or, for that matter, by a friend or potential employer, not only ruins the taste of one’s favorite sandwich spread, but causes great psychological distress and even physical pain.

Here to walk us through one of life’s worst feelings is Mark Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, and the editor of Interpersonal Rejection. Today on the show, Mark unpacks the experience of social rejection, including why we’re so sensitive to it and the emotions and behaviors it causes, which can be positive and prosocial or maladaptive and even violent. We discuss the role that is played by the sociometer, a concept Mark originated, in monitoring our social acceptance and rejection and what influences its sensitivity to fluctuations in your relational value. And Mark offers advice on how to remove some of the sting of rejection and civilly reject others.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Mark’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #725 — The Curse of the Self
• Simpsons’ episode where Lisa breaks Ralph’s heart
• AoM Article: Honor in the American South

Connect With Mark Leary

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.