Category: Pandemic

Jonathan Gordon sometimes wishes his college buddies would talk about more serious topics. The group of four men, who met on their freshman floor at the University of Virginia and are now in their 30s, have all been groomsmen in one another’s weddings. They have gone on international trips together. They all consider the other men in the group their closest friends.

So why don’t they ever actually talk about their feelings?

“I’ve always thought it’s funny that we talk about things that are completely inconsequential 80 to 90 percent of the time,” said his friend Alex Hyde, 32, over a joint Zoom call last week.

When the friends get together in person, for a beer or dinner, the deeper details “sneak in by accident,” Hyde said. Now that they can’t, the more serious topics don’t come as naturally over text. It feels more raw, Hyde said. “In general with other guys, there’s a certain amount of harassment that goes with anything you say … you got to be ready for that.”

It feels impossible not to revert to making fun of each other, Gordon said. “We have no self-restraint. … I can’t not crack up. We set each other off,” he said. “In an ideal world, we wouldn’t do that.”

The coronavirus pandemic is pushing America into a mental health crisis
These are the kinds of conversations Argueta, the 35-year-old in Falls Church, had come to expect from his friendships with other men.

On Saturday, when a couple of friends came over to help him set up his PC, Argueta expected them to roast him for looking like a “broke college student” in his new studio, where he has barely put anything on the walls and he has cords all over his desk.

But instead, the two friends asked him to talk about what led up to his breakup, and how he was handling the past few months. Argueta opened up to them — about his past relationship, the move, the pandemic, everything. He was more personal with them than he had ever been before.

One of his friends reminded him he could call the group on Discord anytime. “Just talk, just say anything,” the friend said. “Somebody’s going to answer.”

Argueta planned to send them a group text message soon, thanking his friends for coming over and for “bailing me out in more ways than you think.” He wanted to keep being honest about what he was going through.

“I’m going to be real,” he said.

He wondered if they would do the same.

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Men weren’t always like this.

As young boys, male friends tend to share their deepest secrets and most intimate feelings with each other, said Niobe Way, a professor of developmental psychology who interviewed hundreds of boys for her 2013 book, “Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection.”

But as boys begin to enter adolescence at age 15 or 16, “you start to hear them shut down and not care anymore,” Way said. They start to act defensive about their friendships, saying they’re “not gay” and that they’re not as close anymore. “You hear those expectations of manhood get imposed on them.”

Way argues the lack of vulnerability in male friendships is rooted in a misogynistic, homophobic culture that discourages emotional intimacy between men. But it’s also part of a culture that does not value adult friendship in general.

“The goal of adulthood is to find a partner, not to find a best friend,” Way said. “There’s nothing in our definition of success or maturity … that includes friendships.”

But research shows that close friendships and social networks are essential to getting by. A Brigham Young University study found that social connections — with friends, family, neighbors or colleagues — improve a person’s odds of survival by 50 percent.

In 2018, the suicide rate among men was 3.7 times higher than among women, according to statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health. But some surveys show men are less likely than women to admit they are lonely, while other research suggests men derive more of their emotional intimacy from the women in their lives. In one study, married men were more likely than married women to list their spouse as their best friend.

For months, he helped his son keep suicidal thoughts at bay. Then came the pandemic.
In this time of unprecedented isolation, Way said, many men may be forced to change the way they think about their friendships and to connect in new, deeper ways. “I think they’re being forced to for survival.”

John Bramlette, a 42-year-old father of two young children in Chevy Chase, Md., has seen these shifts in his own relationships. Before the pandemic, his closest male friends were from the softball team he has played with for 14 years, every Thursday evening. The group would often get together for a beer after a game or to watch baseball on TV after the kids were asleep.

But in normal times, it never dawned on him to ask one of his friends to go for a walk, just to chat, something his wife has been doing with her female friends for her entire adult life. In the past month, he has gone on three walks with male friends, and he plans on continuing to make it a regular thing, at lunchtime in Rock Creek Park.

“It’s totally logical,” said Bramlette, who is chief operating officer of Washington Nationals Philanthropies. “Why wouldn’t we do this?”

Dave Wakeman, a 46-year-old marketing consultant who lives in D.C.’s Forest Hills neighborhood, said many of his social interactions before the pandemic revolved around his kids’ sports or family gatherings with neighbors. But eight weeks into the pandemic, he ran into a neighbor two doors down and realized he had lost touch with him and other neighborhood dads.

The group of six men decided to start having happy hours with social distancing on their lawn chairs in their shared cul-de-sac. They created a WhatsApp group they call “The Battalion,” where they constantly share everything from Tucker Carlson jokes and political memes to frustrations with parenting and working from home.

“It’s become easier for people to say, ‘Hey look, I really am struggling right now,’” Wakeman said.

A few years ago, Stephen Davis, a 33-year-old tax manager in Alexandria, Va., joined a group text with one of his best friends and some other guys he vaguely knew from college. The conversation was, at first, solely focused on the world of professional wrestling. They called it “Five MB,” short for Five Man Band.

But recently, the group has evolved into a space to vent about so much more. It’s gotten them through multiple job changes, home moves and the births of four of their children — including two during the pandemic. When Davis was struggling with ideas for how to keep his son occupied when playgrounds were closed, one of the other dads in the group suggested an obstacle course of pillows for his son to run through. When Davis’s wife’s water broke, he texted the Five Man Band before anyone else — even before his parents.

The group has become closer than ever during the pandemic. They now send nearly 100 text messages a day, a constant stream of consciousness about what’s going on in their lives. The conversations feel more vulnerable, more honest than others Davis has ever had with friends in the past. They’re the kind of conversations he would have never been able to have while sitting at a bar and watching a game.

“There’s always too much noise to get to that next level,” he said.

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“More than 4 in 10 children live in households that are struggling to cover such basic costs as food, rent or mortgage, car payments, medical expenses, or student loans,” Llobrera said, pointing to negative outcomes associated with the psychological impact of multiple stressors on households.

A recent analysis by The Washington Post also showed that more Americans are now going hungry than at any point during the coronavirus pandemic. Experts told the publication that it is likely that there is more hunger in the United States today than at any point since 1998, when the Census Bureau began collecting comparable data about households’ ability to get enough food.

“It’s been driven by the virus and the unpredictable government response,” Jeremy K. Everett, executive director of the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty in Waco, Texas, told The Washington Post.

Daniel Chessare, owner of Saratoga’s Broadway Deli in Saratoga, New York, who began offering free hot roasted chickens to people in need earlier this month, described the families who have reached out for help with food security as not those who people would normally classify as poor or needy.

“A lot of these families are slipping between the cracks because they are not necessarily poor. They are not necessarily destitute,” Chessare told The Christian Post. earlier. “They’re not lining up for food stamps or whatever but they are not necessarily making enough money to support their families.”

“A lot of the stories coming in are, one of the spouses is sick or disabled and it’s up to the other person to provide for the whole family. We’re getting a lot of people who are making ends meet but they don’t have that extra money to do something nice. So there is this sort of forgotten middle ground where you’re making too much money to get government programs but not enough money to be able to support yourself. They are not out on the street. They are just quietly suffering without anybody really noticing.”

Randy Young, 58, who recently lined up with his 80-year-old mother with hundreds of other motorists to get a free Thanksgiving meal outside NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas, told The Washington Post he had been struggling since losing his job as a stadium cook.

“It’s a lot of people out here,” he said. “I was just telling my mom, ‘You look at people pulling up in Mercedes and stuff, come on.’ If a person driving a Mercedes is in need of food, you know it’s bad.”

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