Men's Loneliness & Brotherhood: The Return to Ourselves - Maurice Leavitt | Personal Essays, Travel Writing & Reflections

I spent almost 20 years participating in men’s circles at the Men’s Resource Center of Maine. One group as a member and another as the co-facilitator. Once a week, in the same room, with the same men.

Week after week, I watched something extraordinary unfold. Men carrying decades of silence, trauma, shame, and loneliness slowly learned how to be courageously vulnerable. Speaking honestly and listening with empathy. I watched men practice the art of compassionate conversation.

After two decades of listening, witnessing, facilitating, and being changed by this work, I can say this with absolute clarity:
Men need other men in a way our culture has never allowed us to admit.
Most of us are starving for real connection.
Not networking.
Not locker-room banter.
Not competitive based camaraderie.
Real Honest Connection

But most men don’t get that because it was never modeled to us growing up.

The Cost of Our Current Masculinity

Men's Loneliness & Brotherhood: The Return to Ourselves

Men’s work, at its core, is any intentional practice where men grow, heal, unlearn patriarchal conditioning, and move toward a more grounded, gentle, emotionally responsible masculinity. We don’t need more “tough guys.” We need emotionally honest, compassionate men who can be role models for other men and boys. And the truth is we don’t have nearly enough of them.

The consequences are everywhere. The current script on masculinity is collapsing under its own weight. Men are hurting. Boys are drifting. Families are strained. Communities feel the absence of emotionally attuned men.

Many think feminism is a quest to persecute men, but feminism is a movement to liberate all people from being victimized by the system of patriarchy. Patriarchy teaches dominance instead of intimacy, suppression instead of expression, isolation instead of connection. And the absence of healthy male role models — in our homes, schools, and communities — boys grow up unprepared for the emotional and relational demands of adulthood.

Here’s the quiet crisis beneath the headlines:

Over 80% of single-parent homes are led by women, and boys raised in these homes are twice as likely to be incarcerated as girls.
Only 25% of therapists and teachers are men. Boys rarely see emotionally capable men in caregiving or educational roles. Women make up 75% of recent psychology doctorates.
70 – 80% of primary school teachers are women. This isn’t wrong — but it means boys rarely encounter adult men in developmental spaces.
Boys are twice as likely to be suspended as girls — five times as likely if they are Black.
Young men are struggling academically: men make up only 40% of current college enrollments.
About 3% of American men will experience a sexual assault or attempt — a number deeply underreported due to shame, stigma, and silence.
Men commit 75% of all violent crime in the US and 99% of sexual assaults. — against both women and men.
25% of American women will experience sexual assault in their lifetime, almost always at the hands of a man.
Men make up nearly 80% of all completed suicides in the US,. Globally, men die by suicide twice as often as women.
And in the prison system? 93% of incarcerated Americans are men, despite being less than half the population.

These numbers and documentations aren’t random. They’re a result of a masculinity model that needs some drastic changes. The old model trains men to compete and disconnect from their hearts and everyone around them. We’ve been taught to suppress our emotions, be self-sufficient, hardened, unexpressed, and unreachable.

And the cost is devastating.

Men aren’t “the problem.”
Our training is the problem.
The loneliness is the problem.
The lack of brotherhood, elders, mentors, accountability, emotional education — is the main problem.

And that is exactly why men’s work matters.

The Silent Epidemic: Men and Isolation

Young men are now one of the loneliest demographics on the planet. Not because they don’t want intimacy, but because we were never taught how to build it—or even allowed to want it.

Right from childhood, boys are trained away from closeness:
“Big boys don’t cry.” –
“Be a man.”
“Handle it.”
“Don’t be soft.”
“Stop acting like a girl.”
“Shake it off.”
“You can’t depend on anyone.”

We learn from an early age that emotional expression is weakness, and weakness is dangerous. Therefore, men are less likely to seek or receive emotional support and hide their pain behind silence, addiction or anger. The consequences mean higher suicide rates and substance abuse issues.

Layered beneath all this is an unspoken fear driving the distance between men: homophobia. Not sexuality or sexual orientation — but the continuous monitoring of male intimacy. The fear of getting too close, being judged, or shamed for tenderness.

So men keep emotional distance, not because they want to, but because they’re scared of being misinterpreted. And in that distance, loneliness and isolation grows.

As we age, men’s social circles shrink. Work and family responsibilities dominate. Friendships fade. Couples isolate. Responsibilities expand. Career and economic stresses increase. Pain gets pushed underground because there’s nowhere to put it, no one to talk to.

Far too often, many men live without a single friend or having other men to be unguarded with to share our truth. No shoulder to cry on. No one to reach out to us when we have isolated for too long. No one who understands the weight we carry.

And the tragedy is this:
Men often turn to their women for all emotional labor, expecting them to carry the weight of what we can’t share with other men. But men cannot be fully held by women alone. And women cannot be the only emotional home men have.

Men heal in the presence of men. Not in theory. In practice.

Why Men Drift Into Isolation

Men are not born emotionally cut off—we are shaped into it by families, culture and society. There are many missing pieces that men have not been given to be emotionally connected to themselves and to others.

Here are a few of them:

Anger becomes the primary emotion because softer feelings were shamed.
Honesty comes out as aggression because softness feels unsafe.
Listening becomes an invitation to fix.
Asking for help feels like weakness.
Conflict becomes withdrawal or fighting.
Discomfort feels unbearable.
Being stuck feels like failure.
Affection toward other men gets labeled.
Accountability feels like humiliation.
We try to control another’s pain because we think we should know how.

No one taught boys these things. Our fathers didn’t know how. Coaches didn’t talk about it. Schools don’t teach it. Religious institutions often reinforced indifference and shame.

And so men enter adulthood emotionally stunted, relationally underprepared, and spiritually starved.

Men don’t ask for help because they’re conditioned to believe:

Help = vulnerability = weakness = loss of control = humiliation = death

So men implode privately through substance abuse and addiction. Carrying everything alone until something breaks.

What Happens Inside a Circle & What Doesn’t

When a man first steps into a circle, something shifts. I remember the first time I sat down with a group of men… awkward, guarded, unsure of what was expected of me. I remember trying to decide how much to say, how little to reveal. I had spent most of my life being self-sufficient, self-contained, and emotionally disciplined. Connection beyond that felt unfamiliar, dangerous.

The men around me began to speak honestly about what was happening in their inner world. Not their accomplishments, not their roles, but their actual inner world. I felt something I didn’t have words for at the time: relief. Not comfort, not safety. Relief. The relief of realizing I wasn’t the only man carrying things in silence.

Inside a circle, men tell the truth, and no one tries to fix it. Men listen without interrupting, without rushing in to rescue, expressing empathy because we are all human with struggles. Competition is replaced with honesty. Over time, the mask you walked in with doesn’t fall off—it just stops being necessary.

I had to learn new ways to connect. Most men do. I had to learn how to speak without hiding behind my intellect. How to feel my sadness and grief. Practice how to listen without preparing my response. I had to learn to let myself be witnessed so I can be accountable for what I wanted to do with my life. I had to understand that vulnerability and compassion… for myself and for other men… was a visible sign of strength.

Equally important was what we do not do in the circle. No unsolicited advice, no judgment, no one-upmanship. Nobody is required to speak. Vulnerability is not forced and something we grow into. No “man up” nonsense. The usual masculine armor slowly dissolving, because it has nowhere to attach itself.

The circle gave me something I didn’t know I was missing: a different way of being a man among men. Not harder, not softer—just real. And once you’ve experienced that, you can’t forget it. You can’t go back to pretending you don’t need it.

The Circle as a Counterculture for Men

A men’s circle is one of the few places where men are given the chance to stop performing. Out in the world, we’re trained to be competent and self-sufficient. We compete without realizing it. We pretend we are holding it all together and everything is fine when we are not. Most men have spent their entire lives being rewarded for silence and punished for softness.

But in the circle, I’ve watched decades of conditioning loosen and fall away. Presence matters more than performance. Connection replaces comparison. Men learn how to speak honestly about their struggles and how to listen without trying to fix or manage anyone. It feels strange at first—almost unsettling—because nothing in our culture has prepared us for this way of relating.

I’ve watched decades of conditioning fall off men like old armor. I’ve seen men who haven’t cried since childhood soften in a way that wasn’t dramatic, just real. I’ve seen conflict turn into respect because no one walked away. I’ve watched shame lose its power the moment a man says something he’s been hiding and carrying alone for years.

Circles matter because they return men to themselves. They rebuild the parts of us that we want to bring forward into the world. They remind us that tenderness and affection isn’t a sign of weakness or homosexuality. That strength without connection is just loneliness in disguise.

In that sense, the circle isn’t a meeting. It’s a small act of rebellion where men come alive… to live the life they want.

My 20-Year Journey: What I’ve Seen and What I Know

Most of what I know about men comes from the raw, uncomfortable, beautiful experience of sitting in circles with them.

I’ll never forget that night, a successful and respected man who hadn’t cried in thirty years let his tears fall. A few quiet tears, slow and hesitant at first, as if he didn’t quite trust he was allowed to feel them. Nobody leaned in, spoke or offered a tissue. We simply held the space. When he finished, he said quietly, “I didn’t know I was carrying that alone.” I’ve never forgotten that.

There have been nights when conflict showed up hard. One man having an affair with a married women while another preaching biblical passages about adultery at him. Both triggered, both defending something deeper than the argument on the surface. In most places, that kind of tension would be avoided or exploded. But they stayed. They spoke honestly. Eventually they heard each other. What started as hostility, ended with a kind of respect that only comes from going through the fire together.

Men don’t need to avoid conflict—they just need safe places to practice it.

And I’ve seen how men change each other in ways no workshop, book, or therapist ever could. I watched men call each other forward with clarity and kindness. I’ve seen apologies that cleared the weight of years of shame. I’ve watched men let go of roles—provider, leader, tough one, silent one—and show up simply as themselves. From that place, they become better partners, better fathers, better human beings—not because they were told how to be, but because someone finally saw them clearly as they are.

After twenty years, one truth has become unchangeable for me.

Men heal through other men. Not through advice or performance, but through honest connection.

The Invitation

There comes a moment in every man’s life when something inside whispers, I can’t keep going like this. Sometimes it shows up as exhaustion, a numbness towards life, or hearing ourselves say “I’m fine” when we’re anything but. Eventually we recognize our silence becomes to heavy to carry anymore. Our armoring too tight. The loneliness too familiar.

We realize we no longer want to be alone, can no longer stay silent, and begin shedding the layers of armor. Not because we became weak, but because we’ve been living inside an emotional drought.

This is where the circle comes in. Not as a cure-all, not a spiritual shortcut, but as a place that refuses to feed any bullshit to you. It’s not easy or predictable, and not always comfortable. But it is real. And these days, real seems rare.

In twenty years, I’ve seen men rebuild their lives after divorce or job loss. I’ve seen men crushed by isolation and substance use slowly come back. I’ve seen relationships repaired because men learned to become present, compassionate, emotionally generous… alive.

I’ve seen men who thought they had nothing to offer become the steady anchor for other men in crisis. Men who hadn’t cried as adults finally let go in a room of strangers who became brothers. Men who have rewritten their understanding of what it means for a man to be strong and powerful.

Men need brotherhood. Not because we are broken or fragile, but because we are human. And humanity demands connection.

If you made it this far and feel some kind of resonance. If there is a softening, a tightening, or even a sigh of relief… maybe this is your moment. Maybe you’re realizing the cost of doing everything on your own. And you’re tired of being the strong one, the capable one, the one who never needs or asks for anything.

Maybe you’re ready, finally, to be witnessed in the truth of your life.

If so, consider this simple invitation—one man to another.

You were never meant to do this alone, by silencing the heartbreaks, or living behind a mask.
You don’t have to.
If the timing feels right, you know when to step in.