Why Don’t Men Text Other Men Back?
10 min read
My friend’s boyfriend, Joe Mullen, is a warm and sweet guy, a considerate person who loves dogs and babies. When I see him in person, once every month or two, he makes a point to ask me what I’ve been up to, how my life is going. Joe is a big music fan, and we share a love of music made by weird British people. I once got excited for him to check out an artist I thought he’d like. So I asked him for his number, and later I sent him a Spotify link to an album. “Hi 🙂 It’s Schnipper,” I wrote. “I think u would dig this guy’s stuff.” I figured this might be the first step into a portal of greater closeness, a relationship of our own. Man to man. Except it wasn’t, because Joe did not text me back.
Maybe asking someone to spend 45 minutes listening to an album and to then synthesize their thoughts is too much pressure. Or maybe Joe listened and he didn’t like the music and didn’t want to disappoint me. Maybe he doesn’t actually like me. There are a lot of potential reasons he didn’t respond; I imagined them all. Months later, I finally asked why he’d left me on read. “I don’t know,” Joe said. “It’s a good question.”
Then he told me a story: One of his colleagues had recently left her job, but she hoped the two of them could remain friends. One day, she texted Joe a joke. “I felt like I had to come up with a good response to it,” he said. Then enough time went by that he simply gave up. This was hardly the only other time he’d found himself at a loss. Responding to messages becomes “this looming thing that I have to do,” he said. “It turns into a source of anxiety, honestly, that I’ll always be like, I’m in text debt.” So these friendships, untended, don’t blossom. Because Joe, like many men, is bad at texting.
The stereotype that men struggle to communicate is an old one. But modern friendship’s reliance on texting illuminates how grim the problem is. Many of the places where in-person relationships previously formed—offices, bars, churches—are no longer mandatory stops. Now “texting is our social experience,” Nick Brody, a communication-studies professor at the University of Puget Sound, told me. The medium, he said, can disadvantage men, who typically socialize in a “side by side” manner—playing or watching sports, for instance. Women, by contrast, tend to socialize via conversation, which texting closely mimics. If the way we spend time with friends moves to our phones, Brody said, the “preferences that many men have for maintaining their relationships don’t necessarily translate very well.”
Exceptions exist, obviously. I myself am a man, but I am a text enthusiast. And plenty of women might be considered “bad texters.” Yet the male texting troubles are real. One guy told me he left a sports-themed group chat after his friends failed to acknowledge his mother’s death. Another said that he texts constantly with two other dads, but that it took 10 years for them to figure out how to hang out on their own, without their families. Even the mere suggestion of moving the conversation offline can be tricky. When I got asked out to dinner via text with a group of guys, I responded with two available dates. Another guy responded too, but he said he wasn’t good at planning. A few others didn’t reply at all. The dinner never happened.
This sort of breakdown is a problem—and not only because it’s irritating. The fact that many men are bad at texting might actually be making them more lonely, experts told me. Something needs to change if men want to forge meaningful, intimate friendships: They’re going to have to get more comfortable with texting.
Emotionally clueless men are culturally ubiquitous. In any given week, Saturday Night Live might have a sketch on the topic: “Man Park,” a dog park–style space where men are forced to socialize; dads who use football and car repair as veiled metaphors for their own morbid fears. Movies about lonely men who have trouble communicating their emotions make it to the Oscars (Manchester by the Sea) and endure as cult favorites (I Love You, Man). Self-effacing stand-up about the subject litters TikTok. “When men text something, it’s just a couple of words,” the comedian Tim Hawkins said in one set. “That’s all I had to say. I have nothing left … Right now, just a couple of crickets playing racquetball up there.” Then he reads an exchange he had with his wife, leaning hard into the Mars-Venus dichotomy. “Hello my darling, how are you doing today?” he asks her. He then takes a deep breath and speed-reads her response, continuing to the point of absurdity. Hawkins makes this seem like a monumental spew of words rather than benign chitchat. Is she not, I thought, simply answering his question?
It’s not as if men are incapable of communicating via the written word; it depends on the context. Evan Schleutter, a soft-spoken Iowan I found after he wrote online about his texting issues, told me that he was a frequent texter in high school and college, when he felt that there were certain social incentives to respond—like dating, or establishing a new friend group. Now 29, Schleutter finds that texting is more of a burden. “It kind of takes a lot of social energy out of me,” he said.
For some men, texting is less onerous if it’s in a group chat, a format that can stand in for real-life socializing. But these are frequently a trash heap of fleeting thoughts. My buddy Joe, for instance, described his most active group chat with two old friends as a place for free-form spouting of nonsense, a diaristic brain dump best used while waiting in line at the bagel place. (Its onetime name: “Poop Lords.”) The chat style has less in common with talking on the phone than it does with social media such as Reddit and X, both platforms where the majority of users are men.
If what men really need is emotional connection, though, this sort of communication can amount to empty calories. The psychologist Niobe Way, the author of Rebels With a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture and a longtime researcher of boys and young men, describes the conversation style typical of group forums as “parallel play.” “What technology has done is exacerbated a culture that is a me-me-me culture,” Way told me. “We think a friend is someone who self-reveals and who likes your post. It’s never a dialogue.” The attitude extends to texts, which have borrowed the “like” model—no need to meaningfully engage.
When someone in a group chat does have a genuine problem, the dynamic typically doesn’t allow for its discussion. An inverse effect of the group chat’s casual, forgettable dialogue is that switching into a more earnest mode can be difficult. On the rare occasions when Joe’s group chat turns serious, such as when one of his friends needs comfort, Joe told me that he’ll sometimes “wince at it.” He’ll respond with some empathy, then wait a requisite amount of time before going back to spewing nonsense. The chat, he said, is not the arena for talking about real things.
A text can be a catalyst—a conversation-starter, an invitation to hang out. It can also be, apparently, too much pressure for many men to even engage with.
Schleutter told me that he regularly gets overwhelmed by texts from friends. Like Joe, he wants to take time to say something worthwhile, so he puts off the task. “Then later turns into tomorrow, and then tomorrow turns into the next day, and then I forget about it, because something else pops up in my life that’s more important,” he told me. “So that’s the type of spiraling I got into.” Often, in the end, he says nothing.
Way told me that she has seen lots of this kind of behavior in men: a mental stalemate when faced with the need to communicate. The assumption that only men struggle with vulnerability, a core emotion needed to establish lasting friendships, isn’t true, she said. Everyone finds it difficult. Men, though, have an extra hurdle to overcome: the cultural “cliché of the guy who articulates his needs and then comes off as needy and pathetic and overly sensitive,” she said. The human desire to connect gets beaten back by the social norm that tells them their desire “is lame, is weird, it makes them less of a man,” Way said. In response, men don’t reach out or respond. And knowing that they’ve been silent creates “a depression,” Way told me.
I asked Way where texting fits in. Are men typically bad at it? Is it contributing to their loneliness? Her answers were pretty simple: yes and yes. It’s likely that many men are bad at texting, she said, because they’re bad at anything that prioritizes connection.
Technology and modern life have made the problem worse. The ease of texting gives the false sense that friends are always available to talk, that you can take just one more day to craft a response, just one more day to make plans. But always can easily translate into never. In making life frictionless, we have also made it more siloed—we possess the ability to instantly reach anybody we’ve ever met, from anywhere in the world, and yet none of the courage or skills to do it. I could have asked Joe to hang out, but it was nice to imagine a casual conversation over text creating an on-ramp to friendship. Maybe I was naive to imagine that it would be so easy.
Way’s research has consistently found that young boys profess great need and love for their friends until they get to adolescence, when societal pressure compels many of them to renounce their close friendships. The same is not necessarily true for girls. The basic act of talking with friends has often been gendered as female, affirmed in the culture by activities such as Girl Talk, a board game popular in the 1980s and ’90s, in which success hinged on “telling your innermost secrets.” As girls become women, those who enter into heterosexual partnerships often end up doing the heavy lifting of maintaining the couple’s social ties. “Our culture has built a world where women do a lot of that invisible social labor in relationships,” Brody told me. “Those are the norms and expectations.” In society at large, “men are kind of just let off the hook, so they don’t have to learn the skills.”
The stakes are high for the culture to shift. Research has repeatedly found that the fewer friends you have, the worse your mental health is. Studies have seen connections between loneliness and self-harm, including suicide—and men, Way pointed out, have higher rates of suicide than women. Changing the tech wouldn’t help: Texts happen to be the current venue for the same old problems that have confounded men for decades. What the culture needs instead, Way suggested, is to teach the value of empathy, of being vulnerable, of being curious about other people. That means dads and uncles, teachers and political leaders, Hollywood scriptwriters and podcast hosts—all could stand to get in on the game. Otherwise, expect men to be bad at intimacy when mediated through virtual reality, telepathy, and whatever else comes next.
Generally, I consider myself to be a thoughtful person, attuned to my own needs and open to others’. So I was surprised recently to find myself falling into the cultural trap of discomfort with vulnerability that Way had described.
I have a friend I see infrequently with whom I wish I were closer. Though I’ve known him for nearly two decades, we’ve probably socialized with just the two of us no more than half a dozen times. His father died several months ago; we texted about it briefly, but we never discussed in person how he felt. After talking with Way, I felt empowered to be vulnerable and finally invited him over. He agreed, and we set a date.
Shortly after, I realized that a mutual friend from out of town would be visiting. It would be nice to invite him too, I thought. But it would change the dynamic. A catch-up is different from a heart-to-heart, which is really what I was craving with the first friend, and what I was hoping to offer. I did not say this to him, however, because I was embarrassed.
Instead, I put the onus on him. “I don’t know if you want solo time, or whatever” was about the closest I could get to admitting that I did. I could hear myself discounting my own desire for intimacy. And so, in a short flurry of messages, I explained to him this story, how I’d been thinking about the challenge of being open, the notion that it “would be lame to suggest that two men might benefit from each other’s company.” In response, he made fun of me. I said we could hang with our friend and then, soon, see each other one-on-one. He agreed.
The three of us had a great time. I texted him the next day to say so, and then I asked if he wanted to go to a concert with me next month. He has yet to text me back. I’m sure he got busy. I should probably follow up.
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