[flagged]
[flagged]
I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic
201–210 of 728 posts
Re: I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic
#202Sometimes I wish we could have "gentlemen's clubs" of the sort that existed in Victorian Britain (not the US strip club version), third-spaces where one could go to read or converse or play cards with other men or even have a meal or a drink. Having social space that's limited to a set of people one knows, more or less, and that has rules on behavior seems like a civilizing influence that's missing today.
Remember watching the Lyon episode of Parts Unknown where Bourdain goes to a men's luncheon club. Looked real fun. Wish we had more of those.
Re: I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like our culture has a strong anti-golf bias. Now that I'm older, any reason to spend a couple hours outside with my friends sounds amazing.
> I feel like our culture has a strong anti-golf bias Golf, generally, is pretty expensive. It's like minimum $50 for an outing, you need equipment, correct clothes, etc. Some places require membership, often priced intentionally exclusively. It's pretty natural for something exclusionary to get a negative cultural bias. Oh, and it is a terrible resource hog. You can't fit many people on a golf course at any given ti…
[deleted]
Re: I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic
#204One big challenge I see with this is that it will attract people who struggle to make friends. A club of lonely men seems like a place I would be embarrassed to go to and hesitant to make friends at. Usually friends have more to recommend them than loneliness.
That's exactly how meetups always felt to me.
Re: I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are male only country clubs legal?
Why do they need to be male-only to solve the male loneliness epidemic? Why can't men socialize in public spaces in a way that isn't offensive to others? I say this as a former dude who has spent the vast, vast, vast majority of my life as a man, socializing with men and not-men, in public. I have never had a single issue.
> Why can't men socialize in public spaces in a way that isn't offensive to others?
They can, and thats not the point of having men’s groups and men’s spacing. This only reveals your assumptions and biases.
Re: I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like our culture has a strong anti-golf bias. Now that I'm older, any reason to spend a couple hours outside with my friends sounds amazing.
> I feel like our culture has a strong anti-golf bias Golf, generally, is pretty expensive. It's like minimum $50 for an outing, you need equipment, correct clothes, etc. Some places require membership, often priced intentionally exclusively. It's pretty natural for something exclusionary to get a negative cultural bias. Oh, and it is a terrible resource hog. You can't fit many people on a golf course at any given ti…
Check out disc golf!
Re: I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic
#207Congrats on your launch, that’s a truly nice issue to address.
For what I feel, boy friends doing whisky and poker night in seemingly high end places, that sounds like a boring cliché. That’s not how I would make friends so this don’t look appealing to me at all. It doesn’t feel like a setting to be natural for me. It feels cold. It’s exactly how I imagine American superficial "friendships" (I know it’s a cliché but it feels reinforced here). I understand it may be more than that but that’s what is advertised.
But maybe that’s just a cultural gap on my side and since the service is US cities only, maybe it’s fitting well there.
It also feels like you exclude half your potential market by being male only. Nowadays, women also have hard time creating relationships.
Re: I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic
#208Re: I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Having social space that's limited to a set of people one knows, more or less, and that has rules on behavior seems like a civilizing influence that's missing today. You just described a country club, right down to the innate classism and exclusivity rules.
Country club’s are really a subset of this kind of thing and tend to have an overly wide membership to the point where you’re unlikely to know every member. The VFW is another modern take that’s got a very different vibe. Similarly historically it wasn’t just elitist hangouts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_men's_club
You just haven't been to a good one.
Re: I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic
#210My mother, somewhere around 1976, told me that basically when men get married, they lose all their friends. But they get all their wife’s friends. Which seems prescient to me. Including their husbands, obviously.
I think most men do not maintain friendships unless there is some outside circumstances that keeps them in touch. School, work, church, clubs, or even just being neighbors.
Without exception the people who were my closest friends in high school didn't really keep in touch when we all went off to college. The friendships I made in college did not persist after graduation. There's a guy at work I had lunch with almost every day for years, he retired and that was the last time I saw him. There was a group of fathers I was friendly with because our kids were playing ball together on the same team. The kids got older and went their separate ways, and we really don't see each other anymore.
Maintaining friendships takes work if circumstances don't assist.
Might be largely the same for women, but it seems to me they tend to make more of an effort to keep in touch and keep getting together.
This is all just my experience so I could be way off I guess.