Being new to town, I’m definitely feeling the structural loneliness of American manhood.

Like, I personally know how to have a conversation with someone I don’t know very well, but that doesn’t mean shit if no single person around me is capable of doing the same. It just becomes unredemptive work on my end, trying to tear down the walls that these guys all seem so invested in keeping up, rain or shine.

But the things we don’t like in other people are definitely things we were taught and do ourselves at an early age.

I keep fighting off the urge to give up entirely on making new friends because it feels like a waste of time to be the only one putting myself out there when everyone is so closed off.

But to do so would be to continue the problem of “the emotionally closed-off man.”

If we all just realized that, instead of paying other people’s rejection of our efforts with the same, then we could all just have new experiences and new friends!