Actually, Today Men Crave Love and Relationships More Than Women

On the myth of men’s ‘hardwired’ emotional stuntedness and its damaging consequences

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There aren’t many gender myths that irk me quite as much as the stubbornly persistent idea that men just aren’t into all that ‘emotional stuff.’

I suppose that’s because I’ve never really lacked examples to the contrary. My brother, male friends, and my current partner have never been shy about sharing their feelings, being vulnerable, or expressing themselves openly — yes, including when it comes to the romantic sphere, where the myth of men’s supposedly biologically ‘hardwired’ emotional stuntedness is particularly, and unfortunately, pervasive.

We so often see men portrayed as emotionally distant, unavailable, commitment-phobic lone wolves — whether in classic literature, modern rom-coms, or TikTok trends — you’d honestly think they crash-landed on Earth from some far-off place (possibly Mars) and simply can’t grasp what the creatures called women want from them, or why.

But I hardly think I’ve been lucky enough to be related to and stumble across the only emotionally attuned men on this whole planet.

Despite what society keeps telling us about men, emotions, and relationships, they aren’t inherently less emotional than women, and they crave emotional connection, intimacy, romance — and everything that tends to come with it — just as much. If not, it turns out even more.

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Romantic relationships are frequently framed as something women desperately want, while men mostly resist. That’s why stag do’s (or bachelor parties, for my American readers) are essentially treated like last rites, and why expressions like being ‘whipped’ or ‘tied down’ still get casually tossed around to describe men in relationships — while their partners, in turn, get branded ‘the old ball and chain.’

All of it reinforces the belief that commitment and feelings are somehow antithetical to ‘masculinity,’ that relationships are prisons, and women are nagging obstacles to good old male freedom and fun.

But just because men aren’t socialised to desire and value strong, intimate emotional bonds — romantic or otherwise — doesn’t mean they don’t long for them. They do.

It’s become increasingly apparent in recent years that while more young people overall are opting out of marriage and parenthood, women and men aren’t making those choices for the same reasons — or in equal numbers.

A 2022 Pew Research Centre survey found that only 35% of single American women were looking for a serious romantic relationship, compared with half of single men. More recently, a 2024 Wall Street Journal/NORC poll revealed that while 58% of women aged 18–29 said marriage was at least somewhat essential to their vision of the American dream, that number rose to 66% among men. Another Pew survey from 2023 echoed this trend: more men than women view both marriage and having children as extremely or very important for a fulfilling life — 28% of men versus 18% of women for marriage and 29% versus 22% for having children. Young men without children are also more likely than their female peers to say they want to be parents someday.

Psychological research also increasingly suggests that men and women differ in their desire for romantic relationships and how much they value them. A recent paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, drawing on more than 50 studies of heterosexual relationships — most conducted in the past two decades — found that men tend to yearn for a partner more, benefit more from being in a relationship, are less likely to initiate a breakup, and suffer more in the aftermath.

As lead author Iris V. Wahrig, a social psychologist at Humboldt University, explains:

We know from numerous studies that women typically receive more emotional support from their social environment than men. Therefore, heterosexual men are more dependent on their partners to fulfil their emotional needs than heterosexual women. In short, steady relationships are psychologically more important for men than for women.

Another new study published in Biology of Sex Differences, spanning over 30 countries worldwide, also revealed that men fall in love faster — on average, about a month sooner than women. Even when it comes to AI-generated companions — designed for emotional support and personalised interactions, including of the romantic type — men are more likely to use them. (Though you could argue that’s partly because such services are primarily marketed to them.)

While women have grown less concerned with the patriarchal stigmas around being single — that whole ‘childless cat lady’ nonsense — and no longer rely on marriage for economic stability and, as a result, are de-prioritising romance and instead prioritising themselves and other forms of love, men are in a very different boat. Although they clearly crave emotional intimacy, vulnerability, and love, they struggle to cultivate those bonds outside of romantic relationships. In fact, studies show that men’s social networks have only shrunk in recent decades, leaving them even more dependent on romantic partners to meet all their emotional needs.

And that’s not healthy — not for men, and certainly not for the women partnered with them.

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Gender socialisation, the process through which we learn our culture’s expectations around gender, begins very, very early on.

By the age of four, children already show discomfort when boys display behaviours typically coded as ‘feminine,’ which include expressing emotion or showing vulnerability. Meanwhile, adults tend to view boys described as caring and emotional as less likeable than those with stereotypically ‘masculine’ traits. These restrictive ideals then push boys to suppress their feelings before they even have the words to express them. Girls, on the other hand, are rewarded for emotional expression and taught to seek and value deep interpersonal connections.

This is bound to lead to issues later in life, especially in our romantic lives. As psychotherapist Patti Henry notes in The Emotionally Unavailable Man:

What a set up for little girls! What a set up to be taught a wonderful prince will come along and meet all your emotional needs while at the same time we are teaching our little boys not to feel. To be tough. To cut off from their emotional selves.

However, while we teach boys not to feel, or rather, not to understand and articulate how they feel, we also expect girls, and later women, to do this job for them — being mindful of their changing moods, regulating their emotions, maintaining the health of their relationships, and even helping them out in their relationships with other people. Philosophy professor Ellie Anderson called this kind of invisible and deeply undervalued emotional and mental effort ‘hermeneutic labour.’

Romantic relationships might be the only socially acceptable outlet for closeness and vulnerability for men, yes, but at the same time, many still expect women to do the work they require without reciprocating in kind.

Still, hermeneutic labour is just one of many responsibilities that disproportionately fall on women’s shoulders in relationships — alongside domestic labour, care labour, and the endless load of other cognitive work: all the planning and monitoring and remembering that keeps life running smoothly. It’s little wonder, then, that research consistently shows partnered heterosexual women get less sleep, enjoy less leisure time, and do more housework — even compared to single mothers — and that they are, on average, less happy than partnered men and other women. But this is also why single women report higher satisfaction with their relationship status than single men and, as we saw earlier, are far less likely to want to change it.

Men tend to get the better end of the relationship deal, even as they’re paradoxically taught to see relationships as traps or burdens. But that deal isn’t necessarily all it’s made out to be, either. Consider another paradox: society expects women to meet men’s emotional needs and model emotional intelligence for them while simultaneously dismissing women as overly emotional, irrational, or hysterical.

As bell hooks writes in All About Love:

Women have endeavoured to guide men to love because patriarchal thinking has sanctioned this work even as it has undermined it by teaching men to refuse guidance.

The fantasy that a woman can ‘fix’ a man through love and teach him how to ‘do feelings’ right falls apart quickly once you realise the very system that burdens her with this task also trains him to reject her efforts. And then what?

Although men benefit from outsourcing emotional work to their romantic partners, their lack of preparedness — and often, unwillingness — to engage equally in it comes at a cost, too. This includes lower relationship satisfaction, persistent communication issues, fear of intimacy, and, ultimately, loneliness. After all, men’s emotional unavailability and immaturity also mean they might struggle to form meaningful romantic connections in the first place — even if they really want them.

Recent cross-cultural studies show women aren’t particularly drawn to the self-centred, status-obsessed, emotionally constipated ‘alpha male’ types. On the contrary, they consistently value traits like kindness, sensitivity, emotional intelligence, and integrity. And yet, thanks to stale patriarchal ideals — now repackaged and sold by a parade of misogynistic coaches, gurus and ‘influencers’ — some men continue to believe these are nowhere near as important as being dominant or powerful. Men who identify as ‘incels,’ in particular, vastly overestimate the value women place on status and wealth.

Women, clearly, can’t correct this narrative for them. Only men can do that work, and yes, they’re absolutely capable of doing it.

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If you had to guess which gender of mice behaves more erratically, which would it be?

If you guessed female, you’d be wrong. Despite the persistent belief that females behave more unpredictably due to hormonal fluctuations — which has been used to justify excluding them from medical research (great for animals, terrible for female humans) — the evidence tells a different story. In mice, it’s actually the males who exhibit more erratic behaviour.

Now, that’s not to say that human men are inherently more emotional than human women; I’m no fan of drawing sweeping conclusions about human behaviour from mouse studies. But — modern research (on humans) does show men are just as capable of experiencing the full emotional spectrum as women.

Studies measuring physiological responses — such as heart rate, blood pressure, and skin conductivity — in men and women exposed to emotion-inducing stimuli have found no significant differences between the sexes. In fact, some even suggest that men may experience emotions more intensely. Similarly, empathic accuracy tests show that men are just as capable as women when it comes to using their empathy muscles. Interestingly, when participants are reminded that empathy is considered a ‘feminine’ trait — a phenomenon known in psychology as ‘gender priming ‘ — women tend to outperform men. But in the absence of such priming, and especially when there’s some sort of an incentive present, the performance of men and women evens out.

If men were truly hardwired to be emotionally detached, unavailable, or uninterested in romance, they wouldn’t be able to perform so well on empathy tests, and they wouldn’t long for love, intimacy, and meaningful relationships as much as women — if not more. But they do.

Because none of this is the result of biological hardwiring; it’s the product of patriarchal conditioning and ‘traditional’ masculine norms instead, which push men into emotional vacuums where feelings and vulnerability are seen as ‘unmanly,’ and therefore, as shameful or weak. Still, suppressing emotion doesn’t eliminate it — it only drives it somewhere deeper inside them. And it doesn’t make men stronger — in fact, it weakens them by cutting them off from the very things that nourish strength: close relationships and a deep connection to self and others.

Men, like everyone else, are emotional beings. They can be vulnerable, sensitive, empathetic, compassionate, and nurturing. They feel grief and joy, fear and love, heartbreak and tenderness — just as deeply as anyone else. And they can express, interpret, and manage these emotions just as well, too.

Infantilising men in that sphere does nothing but hold them back.

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Although men have long been positioned as the ‘default’ human — the gold standard in science, medicine, law, and society at large — they’ve also been denied the freedom to act fully human. But emotions aren’t inherently gendered. We just decided they are. (Well, some, like anger, were even rebranded as ‘non-emotions’ for reasons that aren’t exactly mysterious.)

Still, while there’s certainly nothing wrong with men wanting love, romance, or family today, there’s everything wrong with the assumption, pushed by some, that women should just then continue to selflessly serve as emotional containers for the men in their lives because otherwise, men might end up lonely. And we can’t have that, apparently.

Men aren’t any less in need of connection than anyone else — they’re not any less human, after all — but if they want it, they need to do the work of dismantling the outdated gender scripts that still leave many emotionally stunted.

And really, we all need to do that. It’s the only way to expand the range of who we can be and what kinds of futures we can imagine.

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