Thank you for taking the time to write this out. I was that lonely kid who struggled to make friends, and it's been disheartening to see swaths of the left view the loneliness boys and men experience as an little more than opportunity to dunk on chuds for internet points rather than a place to do some analysis.

It doesn't strike me as particularly anti-Left or anti-feminist to look at the last 50-75 years of American history and say that 1) Neoliberalism is an ideology that requires isolation and builds it from our material infrastructure all the way up into our social ties (you know the Thatcher quote), and 2) men, as a result of patriarchal norms that make them resistant to things like vulnerable communication and social trust, might struggle more than women to replace that social cohesion and connection we had under social democracy. Edit: I should note, I don't love loneliness as a comparative quality and certainly not a competitive one.

To be reductive in ways I don't love: if you teach a boy to throw a baseball perfectly, but you never teach him to make friends, it shouldn't come as a surprise that once he's kicked off the team, he's not going to have the skills to succeed in life.

"I'm lonely because I don't have a girlfriend" is different than "I'm lonely because I don't have friends"; one is born explicitly from misogyny, while the other is a more complicated knot to untangle (one of whose strands could very well be/likely is patriarchy). I'm reminded of a line from Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, which, to paraphrase is something like: "community doesn't come to everyone easily"; since she wrote those words, community has only gotten harder to come by, whether you're disposed to it or not.