Can Single Men Be Happy?

Do men need a partner to make sense of life?

Photo by Vicky Hladynets on Unsplash

I recently shared a post titled “If Your Life Feels Incomplete Without a Romantic Relationship, Start Here.”

(If you haven’t read it, get to it while it’s still free — all free posts go into the paywalled archive after 2 weeks).

In that post, a reader commented that my advice was much easier applied to women than men since women are “much more emotionally resilient, capable and interested in living single,” and that women don’t understand how being happy single is a “privileged position to have and it is not universal.”

There’s a lot to unpack on this young man’s comment, and I would like to thank him for the opportunity to do so in a long-form post.

First, there’s the overgeneralization of men and women’s feelings and behaviors. Yes, men and women are different, but our online discourse has been polarized to the point of radicalism with “men this, women that.”

By focusing on our differences, we often overlook our shared humanity and become obsessed with the idea that one side has it easier than the other.

Both men and women suffer from a common condition known as being human. They experience the same emotions and feelings, including love, lust, happiness, anger, loneliness, and more. Differences emerge in how men and women process emotions, and what they do when they feel frustrated, aroused, stressed, or elated, etc.

These differences, is worth noticing, also vary at an individual level. Saying that on average men and women react a certain way to stimuli is not the same as saying that a stimulus will produce the exact same response in every man and every woman.

For example, in general, women tend to score higher than men on the personality trait neuroticism, while men tend to score lower than women on agreeableness. None of that means that all women are insufferable neurotics or that all men are disagreeable a*holes.

And none of that excludes the impact of both environment and nurture at an individual level. Women’s tendencies towards neuroticism and men’s to lower agreeableness are undoubtedly influenced by cultural expectations — especially the expectation that women will make everyone around them as comfortable as possible by anticipating their every need and that men will be stoic figures, always ready to stand their ground and never yield an inch.

With that in mind, let’s explore our original question. Can single men be happy? Are unpartnered men condemned to misery on account of their gender? What kind of agency do men have to build a happy and fulfilling life by themselves?