When men lose their Diamond Dogs it can have a dramatic impact on their health
Conduct a Google search with the following terms “blog Ted Lasso”. The results seem endless and reflect a world of lessons that writers pulled from this charming sitcom. A sample of what my algorithm found includes newsletters, blogs, and articles about how Ted Lasso provides an effective way to “jumpstart your day”, “jumpstart your creativity”, conduct an effective 10-minute meeting, establish a code of conduct in a school community, deliver a solid apology, and countless examples of Ted’s exemplary leadership. Who knew a show about a Premier League “football” coach would be so universally relevant?
I love Ted Lasso for all those reasons and one more, the Diamond Dogs, which is a male support group that convenes on the fly. My favorite Diamond Dog scene is deep into season 2. The forever grumpy Roy Kent sheepishly asks for advice about his new relationship, which soon rolls into a disclosure of Roy’s hurt feelings and emotions, including his respect and appreciation for the woman he loves. Watching this scene for the first time, the community psychologist in me loved how the characters model positive and intimate male interaction. Yet, the novelty of their behaviors is a stark reminder that this is a far cry from the way many men (and many women) communicate challenges. Also, most adult men haven’t had a pack of Diamond Dogs to lean on since adolescence.
In her book, Deep Secrets (2013), Niobe Way writes about the role of emotional intimacy in adolescent boys’ relationships. Her work is based on repeated annual interviews with high school students. The voices in her book refute the typical portrayal of young male relationships and suggest that boys have and/or want emotionally intimate male friendships that include sharing secrets, working through problems, and divulging private feelings with one another. Guillermo, one of Way’s study participants (at the time a high school junior), described the impact of losing a close friend:
“…The friend I had, I lost it…That was the only person that I could trust and we talked about everything. When I was down, he used to help me feel better. The same I did to him. So I feel pretty lonely and sometimes depressed…because I don’t have no one to go out with, no one to speak on the phone, no one to tell my secrets, no one for me to solve my problems.”
Trust, sharing, and helping one another are core elements of friendship. Guillermo doesn’t describe “bro-culture” with its superficial shenanigans depicted in decades of research on boys’ relationships. This stereotype was portrayed in the “Straight Male Friend” skit on Saturday Night Live, describing male friendship as a “…low-effort, low-stakes relationship that requires no emotional commitment.” Guillermo describes a relationship we all aspire to but seldom achieve, and now he’s lost it. When boys face these experiences, how they express sadness is often not what the adults around them anticipate and adds to feelings of being unheard, misunderstood, and hurt.
Longitudinal research is hard to get funded. Fortunately for us, Way’s repeated interviews provide a chance to hear from the same boys over time and pay close attention to how their description of friendship changes. Here, she partially links her work to other researchers and writers of masculinity. The more popular depictions of masculine traits are being stuck in the “man box” or following the “boy code”, both of which emphasize emotional stoicism, physical toughness, sexual promiscuity, and extreme forms of independence. Some of which consider deeper, underlying (or thick) sociocultural drivers of this behavior.
The boys’ voices and the explanations in Deep Secrets may hold some universal truths for men and women. In that page-turning moment, my mind flashes to faces, feelings, and locations of interactions with important male figures in my life. I am fortunate to see some of those faces in person, but often these interactions occur in text bubbles. Being able to know someone from adolescence and early adulthood, through moves, jobs, children, the loss of parents, and challenges with their partners is invaluable. I know how lucky I am sometimes, but I also know how isolated I feel when I don’t dare to talk about what bothers me.
As boys move through adolescence and early adulthood, they grow more fearful of betrayal by and distrustful of their male peers and less willing to have emotionally intimate male friendships. Over time, the participants in Way’s research speak increasingly of feeling lonely and depressed. Lexicons come up in my research but more in the context focuses on how husbands and wives talk about their reproductive health. Way’s team identifies the loss of words like “love” and “happy” in their transcripts. Instead, the boys’ words reflect increased anger and frustration, and checking out of relationships to establish themselves as “independent” and “mature”. The voices articulate the destruction of relationships due to actual or presumed betrayal, insecurity, and worry that coincides with their assumed manifestation of masculinity rather than the development of skills related to forgiveness, open communication, and emotional risk-taking. Way describes it as “…the blunting of boys’ and men’s capacity for empathy, intimacy, and emotional expression that denies them the essential skills and relationships they need to thrive.
These data increase the gravity of Roy Kent’s Diamond Dogs request. Particularly, as we’re finding fewer and fewer Dogs in our lives and the number of close friendships reported by Americans steadily declines. In 1990, 73% of Americans said they had more than three close friends, in 2021 this figure was 51%. Although those numbers were somewhat consistent for men and women, how friends engaged was not. Less than half of the women surveyed (48%) and 30% of men reported sharing feelings or problems with a friend, and only 59% of participants reported having a best friend in 2021. This “crisis of connection” suggests that the loss of emotionally intimate friendships is not only a masculinity problem, though men have this problem. As Way suggests (from Harris, 1998), it may also be reflective that our society does not place much value on friendship, which is unfortunate as a byproduct of friendship is improved health.
Emotional intimacy and social support, components of friendship, are linked to positive health outcomes for men and women. An early study on this matter (1994) found that the reciprocal influence of emotional intimacy and social support was associated with 16 health outcomes. More recently, Holt-Lundstat, et al. (2010) found that people with stronger social relationships had a 50% increased likelihood of survival than those with weaker social relationships. The focus on boys’ late adolescence is important because this is when they are disengaging from the health system while establishing their newly found identity as disconnected from supportive relationships. The link between traditional masculinities and negative health outcomes is well documented by psychologists, policy advocates, and public health experts in all corners of the globe (Pleck, 1993; Courtenay, 2000; Mansfield, et al, 2003; Baker, 2018; Griffith, et al., 2019).
I like to hike. This afternoon, I walked six miles from my office near the Chinatown area of DC to my home in Arlington, Virginia. I wanted to process the book some more, and as I related to the boys’ experiences, I concluded that their maturation process doesn’t always equate independence with loneliness over time. Programs that promote healthy friendships and communication skills among adolescents exist. Way optimistically suggests that the boys’ behavior and awareness of their emotional needs and desires provide examples of resistance to the harms of traditional masculine norms. There is no rule that boys must stay in the “man box” forever and there are ways to help many boys avoid jumping in. Hiking through DC, I thought about different friends, ranging from new acquaintances to people I’ve known since kindergarten. I felt fortunate again as I realized that the trails often provided an opportunity to connect with someone else, talk about mundane things, and often more personal and intimate challenges. It’s on those trails that I’ve found opportunities to connect with some Diamond Dogs.
