Where do men learn intimacy now?
Over the years, a pattern has emerged in my consulting room and in conversations with colleagues. Many men struggle deeply with emotional closeness. This is not because they lack desire for connection, but because they were never really taught how to build it.
Recently, a piece by Trevor Noah circulated in which he spoke about men’s fear of vulnerability and the limited emotional intimacy many experience in their lives outside of sexual contact. What struck me most was not how novel this sounded, but how familiar it felt. His reflections echoed countless therapeutic conversations I have had with men who long for closeness but feel unsure how to reach for it. We often talk about emotional literacy as though it were innate. In reality, it is learned.
It develops through modelling, practice, and repeated experiences of safety. Without these, emotional expression becomes uncertain territory.
The emotional education gap
From a young age, many boys learn that emotional control is valued, but emotional literacy less so. Stoicism, resilience, independence and self-reliance are praised, while vulnerability is often framed as weakness. Over time, this shapes not only how boys relate to others, but how they relate to themselves.
“Rather than learning to name emotions, regulate distress, and seek comfort, many boys learn to suppress, distract, or endure.”
Emotional discomfort becomes something to push through rather than explore. As adults, this can leave men with a limited emotional vocabulary and a deep discomfort with dependency, closeness, and emotional exposure.
Many men have not been given the developmental opportunities to practise emotional expression in ways that feel safe, respected, and supported.
The sad collapse of mentoring spaces
Alongside these cultural messages, we have witnessed the steady erosion of communal spaces where boys once learned emotional and relational skills organically. In the UK, over 4,500 youth centres have closed since 2010, which is one part of broader funding cuts to youth services by local authorities (YMCA). Along with them have gone youth clubs, sports groups, mentoring schemes, and informal gathering spaces that once offered boys consistent male role modelling, emotional regulation through activity, teamwork, accountability, and belonging.
For generations, these spaces provided more than recreation. They were places where boys learned how to manage frustration, negotiate conflict, develop loyalty, cooperate, and feel part of something larger than themselves. Emotional learning happened quietly, through observation and experience, rather than instruction.
Their disappearance has left a significant gap. While schools continue to carry enormous responsibility, they cannot replace the relational depth, continuity and informal mentoring that community spaces once provided.
The result is fewer opportunities for boys to experience emotional safety outside the family home, a vital ingredient in healthy psychological development.
Father absence and emotional modelling
At the same time, family structures have changed. Increasing numbers of children grow up in households where fathers are less consistently present, often due to separation, economic pressure, or shifting work demands (ONS).
This is not a judgement. Many parents are doing extraordinary work under difficult circumstances. However, reduced daily exposure to male emotional modelling inevitably alters the emotional education boys receive.
When boys have fewer opportunities to observe men navigating stress, conflict, affection, vulnerability and emotional responsibility, they are left without clear relational templates. They may grow into adulthood with limited reference points for how emotional closeness can look, feel, and function.
In therapy, this often emerges as uncertainty: men who desperately want connection but feel unsure how to initiate, maintain, or sustain emotional intimacy.
Loneliness and emotional restraint
Men are consistently shown to experience higher levels of chronic loneliness, while also being less likely to express emotional distress or seek support. This combination – emotional need alongside emotional restraint – often leads to withdrawal rather than pursuit, silence rather than expression, and caution rather than initiation.
Seen through this lens, many of the struggles people face in dating become easier to understand. They are reflections of a wider emotional landscape with shifting expectations.
Male Loneliness and Isolation
One of the most concerning consequences of this emotional gap is male loneliness. Men report fewer emotionally intimate friendships, smaller support networks, and lower levels of emotional disclosure than women. Many men go weeks – sometimes months – without meaningful emotional conversation. And loneliness does not always look like isolation. It often looks like busyness, distraction, productivity, humour, or emotional detachment. It hides in plain sight.
The human cost of this emotional isolation is profound. Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK (The Calm Zone). While suicide is complex and multi-factoral, emotional disconnection, isolation, and lack of support remain critical risk factors.
It’s important to recognise a collective emotional inheritance shaped by stoicism, silence, and shrinking community, and understanding how deeply this shapes men’s emotional lives.
Intimacy without language
Without emotional modelling, many men grow up experiencing physical intimacy as safer than emotional intimacy. Touch, sex, humour and activity often become substitutes for emotional closeness.
This can lead to relationships in which physical connection exists alongside emotional distance. Men may care deeply, yet struggle to articulate needs, fears, hopes, or vulnerability. They may want closeness but feel exposed or overwhelmed when it begins to appear.
For many, emotional intimacy feels unfamiliar rather than unsafe. It’s an additional language they were never taught.
Relearning closeness
The encouraging truth is that emotional literacy can be learned at any age.
“Therapy, emotionally open friendships, supportive relationships, mentorship spaces, and compassionate partners can all provide opportunities for men to develop emotional understanding, expression, and safety.”
What matters most is permission: permission to be uncertain, to be slow, to not already know. Intimacy is a practised skill.
It grows through curiosity, patience, missteps, reflection, and repeated experiences of emotional safety. When men are given environments that support vulnerability rather than judge it, remarkable emotional growth becomes possible.
Rewriting emotional inheritance
Men are carrying emotional legacies shaped by cultural expectations, structural change, and loss of community. Many are navigating connections without clear maps, doing the best they can with the tools they were given rather than rewriting their inherited relationship scripts.
As our understanding of emotional health deepens, we are invited to build new pathways. Ones which allow boys and men to grow up emotionally literate, relationally confident, and deeply connected. Intimacy, like all human capacities, thrives when it is taught, modelled, and nurtured.
