Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the show. Got a great show plan for you. It's about relationships, making friends as an adult. This is something that comes into my clinical practice, I guess more often than I would have expected, although I do appreciate and understand the difficulty in adulthood. There's a little bit of an epidemic with men lacking close confidants.

A lot of the research shows, and this is really done on heteromen, that heteromen consistently

have the least amount of friends and that they often don't have a primary social outlet

for the processing or sharing of intimate, difficult, or vulnerable material. It's quite

heartbreaking. I think that's actually some of the patriarchy at play in our culture. Remember,

we talk about things like patriarchy, which are these problematic systems and institutions that

actually harm everyone, although they are set up by and maintained, often mostly by men.

Women are also people that can strengthen and participate in patriarchy

by expecting their husbands or male partners to be the ones that go off and work all day long

and miss out on being home with the family.

And then it's also on men's shoulders to really put a little bit of less focus on work

and to put more time and energy into their primary partnerships and time with their family and children.

So it works both ways, but we all have to be on the side of allowing men to actually have more

adaptability and flexibility within their lives. And that tends to be the case. Men are raised to

believe that their worth is tied to just leaving the house all day long and providing for the family

and nothing else seems to matter.

So I work with a lot of men that say I don't know what my hobbies are. I don't have any friends.

And I say to them, it might be time to work less.

Maybe you won't be getting that new bathroom or beach house because you're actually going to prioritize your personal life and mental life.

Maybe you're not going to get that new bathroom.

Maybe you have to change your jobs. Because I've said to some clients, you can't both work the amount of hours you're working and also be a participant in

your family and in your relationship and also in your individual life. And that's what the rubric I kind

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