A decade ago, popular media wrestled with the definition of the “bro.” It was a term of mild derision that had probably originated as shorthand for “frat bros,” who go around calling one another “bro.” But as neologisms tend to do in the Petri dish of social media, it multiplied, mutated, and mostly spread out its meanings.
NPR in 2013 made a map of bro-ish traits, including “stonerish-ness, dudeliness, preppiness, and jockishness.” This seemed to include all men, and by NPR’s accounting, such diverse personalities as Tim Tebow, Kal Penn, Andy Samberg, and John Mayer all fit under the bro-mbrella.
The catchall characteristic here, “dudeliness,” was “one’s propensity to do bro things with other bros.”
So, the unifying concept of the “bro” turned out to be something like a man who has male friends with whom he spends significant time.
If that’s accurate, it seems we’re in a bro recession right now. Many guys have no guys to hang out with.
“The percentage of men with at least six close friends fell by half since 1990, from 55 percent to 27 percent,” wrote Dan Cox, an American Enterprise Institute scholar, after he conducted a recent study with the Survey Center on American Life. “The percentage of men without any close friends jumped from 3 percent to 15 percent, a fivefold increase.”
We could debate the causes endlessly, and there are doubtless many of them: Social media makes us less social; all-male organizations now seem “exclusionary” or discriminatory; church attendance is falling; bowling leagues are disappearing; work and family seem all-consuming now.
Whatever the causes, the consequences seem clear. Deaths of despair were on the rise long before the lockdowns, and it’s not hard to trace suicides, overdoses, and alcohol deaths to loneliness and friendlessness. Doctors have found other conditions to be rooted in alienation and friendlessness, such as heart disease and dementia.
Men need women, as all of mammalian history has shown. But they also need other men, it turns out.
