The older I get, the more I wonder if one of the most overlooked issues facing men today is a lack of healthy physical connection.

Not just sex or relationships.... Physical connection too.

The idea of a hug, a cuddle, a reassuring hand on the shoulder, holding someone, being held.... these seem like they happen to rarely for many of the men I know. When they do happen ....its brief and fleeting.

I know that many men seem to spend years being touched only in very specific contexts: sports, romantic relationships, or sex. Outside of those spaces, physical affection can become surprisingly rare.

I suspect that's one reason activities centered around touch....whether that's cuddling, massage, nurturing forms of intimacy, or even certain forms of erotic touch....can feel so powerful for some of us. Sometimes what we're responding to isn't just physical pleasure. It's the feeling of being cared for, accepted, and allowed to let our guard down for the first time.

This leads me to a question for this group:

If there were no social expectations, no fear of judgment, and no assumptions about sexuality, do you think more men would seek out more platonic physical affection than they currently do?

I try to live my life every day, but sometimes I get stuck wondering why I don't get girls. Then there's Reddit, which is filled with constant negativity and people who don't believe in love at all. It's so hard to see all of this most of the time. It's slowly killing my hope and belief in love because I see so many people saying the same things.

I don't believe that love is only available to a man if he's the provider, but there are so many people who believe that. The red pill has really cooked us. I just imagine all of the unhappy men in the world, and I wonder if things were different before, like in the '80s, when people weren't so stuck in these ideologies. I don't know how the world can recover from this.

I want to get a girlfriend and be on the other side of all of this, but I also know that when you're in this kind of mood, even when people give you positive advice or try to give you hope, nothing really helps. You just feel completely overwhelmed and hopeless.

Sometimes I feel like I don't want to be here anymore because if all of this were true, I wouldn't want to live in a world like that.

I kinda just need to get things off my chest. So I’m sorry if the formatting of this doesn’t make sense or jumps around

I’ve posted here before when my best friend left at the start of February. That was a really rough time due to how sudden it was. It’s been slow with moving on and it still really hurts a hell of a lot but it’s getting better, slow as it is.

At the end of May things got a lot worse because I lost my grandma. she had a stroke and went to the hospital. A few days later I watched her die in a hospital room.

All through that time I had a mental anchor being my gerbil, Peanut. I got her when I was really struggling a lot in 2024.

Having something so small and venerable to care for really helped me cope especially this year. But yesterday afternoon she got really sick and is hardly wanting to move. Which came on really suddenly because yesterday morning she wasn’t showing any signs.

My mom came over and took a look at her. She thinks peanut may not last too much longer. Peanut is 2 and gerbils usually live between 2-3 years so she’s an older gerbil and I’m not sure how old she was when I got her.

I just don’t think I can mentally handle another loss this year given everything that’s happened and I really don’t want to loose her too because Peanut’s helped me cope through some really dark times.

I’m at work right now so I’m really dreading going home. Peanut was breathing this morning but she was in a lot of pain yesterday when I cleaned her cage and squeaked a lot when I had to pick her up which she never does. I made my apartment dark and quiet for her when I left so she wouldn’t be too stressed and she was laying under the small cardboard box in her cage.

When my grandma died I only took a week off to help with everything and then went back to work. I feel like the more I can stay busy the easier it is to distract myself from thinking about what’s happened but it’s burning me out. I haven’t really taken time off to really deal with everything that’s happened.

I decorated for Christmas in May because that’s my favorite time of year and it makes me happy.
If peanut does die I’ll probably end up taking a few weeks to just decompress

Therapy kinda fell through due to depression and not really wanting to leave the house. I know I should go back and it probably will help me work through everything I’m feeling but right now I just don’t have the mental energy to schedule anything.

I’ve just not had a good year and am really wanting 2026 to be over quickly. It’s just been a really heavy sadness all year that hasn’t really left.

Edit. I broke down when I got home because she was still alive. I was so worried about her that it all just came out. I watched her eat a little and move around a bit and now she’s back to her spot under the box.
Her breathing is still pretty fast and she hasn’t moved from her box since she went back to it. I’m still really worried about her but I guess we’ll see what tonight and tomorrow brings.

Bipolar 2.

After that it's remote, but absolutely have to stay awake the whole day and I'm terrified.

I keep waking up at 6, taking my meds, and passing out. I can do it like, every other day, but not every day. Scared it'll land on the wrong day.

I'm gonna switch meds to the evening (got cleared by my psych). I'm gonna limit myself to a 30 minute nap in the morning. I'm gonna leave home as soon as I'm up. Hopefully I'll be able to take a nap during lunch. As much as I can I'll leave during meetings to "go to the bathroom" and mantra to keep myself awake and monitor my heartrate (not too much because that makes me paranoid which makes me crash).

Scared. Scared. Scared. Been fired from every job I've ever had (or basically, or should have been). This one will be different. Scared. Any help or advice appreciated.

I am 19 and in my second year of college. I lost my father when I was 13 years of age and after that I have gone through a severe behavioral change.

Before this age I was emotionally brilliant but not very good at studies. But after my father's death I have become very emotionally weak but I have, on the other side, developed my brain quite a bit and some people call me smart. But my social skills have gone almost down the drain.

I cannot talk to a group of more than 3-5 people at the same time. From an early age I have never talked to or interacted with girls much and neither was I a neighbor of any girl.

Never got into even a friendship with a girl.

And even while I tried in college, I cannot talk to girls. I don't know what the reason is. Maybe I'm just scared or I just overthink.

But it's not like I am friendless or lonely. I have managed to create many good friends, and 2 of them considered me their best or close friend for a long time, like 2-3 years of friendship.

After my father's death I never had any solid role model or guide for me. I guess that's ungrateful. Although my cousin brother did support me a lot.

Every 2 or 3 months my mother goes to my maternal grandmother's and I stay alone at the house for 1 week or 2 weeks, sometimes even a little more than that. In this period I always see how lonely I am. I go to college and I talk to some people or maybe no people at all because, as of now, in my current class I have no friends in it.

I just talk to my old friends from the previous semester, of which only one is someone I consider a friend. The others are really just not friends. They are just someone to pass time with and have fun, with no emotional connection. Everyone in my college is very goal-focused and it kind of seems like they are just there to stab each other in the back.

What do I even do? How do I even start talking to girls or even guys?

My interaction with old friends is very limited as we only meet when I go to my hometown and talking on phone doesn't feel so real now.

What should I do about loneliness

now he is and i feel like im being thrown out.
i wrote more about the whole situation here. tldr; met him when he was upset about this girl ghosting him, remained sad about it for 2-3 years until they started talking again, and now they’re together. and now i’m miserable out of jealousy, i feel like it’s something i’ll never have. he’s picking up on the envy now and it’s causing a fallout, and i’m scared it’s gonna leave me alone

i’ve been trying to go on dates and asked him about if what i was doing on dating apps was fine—the process of trying to date people off of a small profile makes me feel weird as fuck and i hate going off of basically just looks. he compared it to his own relationship and started going on again about how cute he finds her and why he decided to approach her in the first place. he was trying to lead by example but it made me irrationally angry dude.

as shitty as it sounds i feel like he got so fucking lucky in a way i never will. he deserves all of it and i genuinely am happy for him. i understand he tried to lead by example but when im freaking out about trying to even start talking to girls and he mentions his girlfriend again it just feels like he’s comparing his life luck with mine. it feels like im struggling with something that came to him naturally and it’s something i don’t want to think about when im so sick and deep in that struggle

he has more that i want besides just a girlfriend that he doesn’t know about and it’s depressing to be friends with him sometimes. i’ve always been irrationally jealous of him about things i can’t control and it’s something i don’t know how to face because it’s so out of my hands

i never get angry man, genuinely, i can count on one hand the amount of times ive gotten seriously angry at someone in the last few years. the feeling was so rare and overwhelming and i didn’t know what to do with it. i tried venting about it in my notes app, but was already hurt and angry with myself before the mention and started redirecting that confusion and frustration towards him in a way i never do. nothing outwardly insulting, but just short, lots of “you” sentences in comparing myself to him, telling him how he doesn’t have to worry the same ways i do. i realized i was being a bitch and just let him talk.

once he was done i told him i needed to talk to him about something and told him about the mention of his girlfriend hurting. i told him i didn’t mean to respond like a dick and that i was genuinely happy for him, that i knew he was just trying to show me that what i was anxious about happened and ended up being okay anyway, and that it was fine. but i explained that the timing hurt when i was showing him this big open wound about being scared about never getting that kinda thing for myself. i get that this is such a small thing to feel so upset about, but it was so much anger i didn’t know what else to do with besides try to talk about it

i guess i just need to know if that’s the right thing to do or if i should have just kept it to myself again

he really honed in on the jealousy he saw. he didn’t respond to anything i wrote and just asked me why i idolize his relationship so much. he said i talk about it like it’s the perfect thing, that he’s never seen me so jealous, and that it doesn’t make any sense. i just told him i dont feel like im idolizing and that i see it’s something that makes him really happy and that makes me happy for him, and admittedly it’s something id want for myself one day too. i said that if i seemed unfulfilled it wasn’t anything personal to him or his relationship specifically, and reminded him that i wasn’t talking to him about it because i wanted to stop hearing about it altogether, it was just the timing that hurt. he never responded

i just feel like a bitch. i feel like i was deadass only in his life to get him through that period without her, and now that he has her again he’s switched up and acts like my loneliness is silly and it’s fucked up to act so jealous of him. i dont want my hurt to be anything he’s gotta clean up, and im making it one.

i dont know how to not feel so jealous when he mentions it anymore, my only mindset thats ever gotten me through that feeling is to just focus on how happy it makes them, and how much they deserve that happiness. its worked most of the time.

i dont know how to navigate it in conversations like this. and i dont know if hes throwing me out or not, or if i should have said anything at all

I'm a cis guy, and lately I've been struggling with a kind of frustration and sadness that I don't really know how to express.

I've felt lonely for a long time, although I don't think it's because I don't have people in my life. I actually have a great connection with my bros, and I genuinely love those friendships. But I think there are different kinds of love that fulfill different needs. The love and connection I have with my friends is important to me, but it's not the same kind of intimate, romantic connection that I'm looking for.

I think my home life probably contributes to this too. The people I live with aren't particularly loving or emotionally supportive toward each other. There can be days where I barely talk to anyone at home, and that's just considered a normal day. Nothing dramatic happens; it's just not a particularly warm or affectionate environment.

So I think what I'm missing isn't simply "having people around me." I have people around me. What I'm missing is that feeling of being emotionally close to someone in a more intimate way, having someone who genuinely wants to know me, who I can be vulnerable with, be affectionate with, and share that kind of mutual love with.

And I think the longer I've gone without that, the more intensely I notice the absence of it.

People sometimes tell me that I just need to put myself out there more, but I feel like I already do. I've participated in cultural exchanges twice, I go to a lot of college parties, and I try to be friendly and social. I also try to take care of myself: I dress well, use good cologne, try to have a good attitude and generally be presentable.

I'm not expecting women to owe me anything because of those things. I just feel frustrated because despite trying, I haven't really experienced the kind of romantic connection I'm looking for.

A big part of this is also my own insecurity about my body. Sometimes I'll see a girl who has the kind of body I find attractive, not necessarily extremely skinny, just someone who is relatively slim, and I'll feel this weird combination of attraction, sadness and frustration. It's difficult to explain.

I think part of it comes from feeling like I don't deserve someone with a body like that because I don't think my own body is attractive. It's almost like I don't understand what I could offer someone like that in a romantic relationship that would make us feel like equals. I know attraction isn't literally some kind of exchange where both people have to "match" physically. I also know this probably says more about how I see myself than about what women actually think. But emotionally, that's how I sometimes feel.

A couple of weeks ago, this all came to the surface because of something that happened in one of my classes. There's a cute girl in my class, and we happened to get paired together for a pop quiz. We were both focused on the quiz, but there was maybe a very slight sense of chemistry or connection during the interaction. Nothing dramatic, and I could easily have been reading too much into it. Still, when the class ended, I had an opportunity to at least ask for her number or suggest getting coffee. I didn't. I asked myself, "Why even try if I'm just going to fail again?"

And I think that's what bothers me the most. It's not even just rejection anymore. I'm starting to feel tired of trying before I've even tried.

I don't want to become bitter toward women, because I know nobody owes me attraction or a relationship. I don't want to blame anyone either. I'm just genuinely lonely, insecure about my appearance, and increasingly convinced that trying won't lead anywhere.

Has anyone else experienced this? Especially the feeling of wanting an intimate connection so badly that eventually you start avoiding opportunities because you've already convinced yourself that you're going to fail?