
Men Without Women: Masculinity and Emotional Disconnection
20 hours ago
10 min read
Ernest Hemingway’s Men Without Women remains strikingly relevant today. The title evokes more than the absence of romantic partners—it reflects a deeper emotional and psychological disconnection many men experience. Men continue to struggle with internal conflict, alienation, emotional isolation, loneliness, and often a deep sense of powerlessness.
Today’s men often report of feelings of emptiness, alienation, and inadequacy. They feel misunderstood and isolated, as if their authenticity was silenced by society. This can lead to a need for falseness and a perpetual chase to achieve a life of fulfilment. Their sense of weakness, despair, and feeling lost are struggles that often remain deeply hidden, preventing them from bursting the bubble of omnipotent male masculinity.
The phrase “Men Without Women,” inspired by Hemingway, is used here metaphorically. It does not imply assumptions about sexual orientation or gender identity. “Men without women” are not simply men who struggle with engaging and sustaining deeper intimate relationships due to early traumas or experiences they may not even be aware of. They are also men who may live in an abundance of relationships, from romantic to social, but experience a perpetual lack of emotional connection with themselves and others. These men feel internally silenced to the point of not even being true to themselves anymore. Many have given up, submitting themselves to the expectations of others and the society.
This internal exile is not always visible. It manifests in subtle ways: a distant gaze while watching one’s children play, a quiet bitterness in intimate relationships, or as pervasive numbness. These men wear masks—of competence, of control, of indifference—yet behind them lies a deep yearning to be seen, understood, and accepted. They live in a dark isolation and emptiness of their internal worlds, ruminating over the lives they could have had but never will. They have not come to terms with this.
Alienation and Loneliness
Alienation isn’t just about abandoning our internal truth and our connection to our real selves; it’s not merely a subjective experience of adopting fakes to protect our vulnerabilities. It also affects our external reality. While it may bring our fake exteriors closer to others, it actually isolates our real selves from the world.
While stories of internal alienation, a departure from one’s real self to a false and adapted version, are not gender-specific, there is something about male masculinity that makes men’s alienation from themselves a silent and particularly bitter form of suffering.
Alienation is not merely not being what one is in their truth, it is about not becoming what one could have become (Verhaeghe, 2019). The truth of it involves realising and coming to terms with the fact that one will never be what they hoped for, and the future will never bring what one dreamt of becoming.
For those brave enough to gain awareness of their internal alienation, this realisation will lead to the understanding that the limitations of life won’t morph into the future that they always strived for.
Societal values surrounding masculinity, such as individuality, independence, self-reliance, dominance, control, emotional detachment, toughness, and condemnation of weakness, often lead to further alienation.
While these values may provide a sense of belonging, recognition, and self-esteem, particularly within gender-centric contexts, they can also create a sense of falseness, inadequacy, and impostor feelings. Ultimately, these values may lead to feelings of numbness and resignation from any efforts towards authenticity and realness. Depression is only one of the most evident culminations of such masculine alienation (Valkonen & Hänninen, 2013).
Loneliness as an Existential Condition
Men’s alienation from themselves often leads to a pervasive sense of loneliness. This loneliness can manifest in failed relationships, a lack of emotional intimacy with friends and romantic partners, and the inability to connect with others.
Men who have had to abandon themselves often experience a particular form of internal loneliness. This loneliness, while triggered by context, is not contextual but an internal experience of not belonging, feeling ununderstood, and feeling unseen and unheard—an abandonment of one’s authentic self. It’s like being imprisoned within an impenetrable core, with only a fake smile or bitterness as connections to the outside world.
This perpetual loneliness, like an ever-present undercurrent, can pervade all aspects of a man’s life. It’s a direct reverberation of the internal alienation from one’s true self, causing a man give up on himself in the effort to belong and survive. Perhaps it is due to these contextual reasons surrounding societal dogma of hegemonic masculinity, coupled with the idealisation of individuality, independence, self-sufficiency, and sexual dominance make men more susceptible to loneliness than women (Nordin et al., 2024).
Men’s loneliness is a deeply buried secret. Men’s suffering remains unspoken, their longing for connection buried beneath layers of defensiveness and detachment.
Maternal Enmeshment and the Inability to Separate
One of the more complex and often overlooked contributors to male alienation is the phenomenon of maternal enmeshment. In therapy, we often encounter men whose early relational dynamics with engulfing or emotionally dependent mothers have left them developmentally arrested. These men, parentified in childhood, were tasked with meeting their mother’s emotional needs—roles that should never have been theirs to bear.
For instance, with mothers who may have themselves been dependent, the male child may take up the role that would normally be attributed to the spouse. This may be especially prominent with children whose mothers were either single or had emotionally absent spouses (Hann-Morrison, 2012), in which case the child substituted the role that his father should have fulfilled.
Alternatively, with mothers who may have been narcissistic, the child learns to accommodate the mother’s emotional needs, prioritising her well-being over the child’s. Narcissists often overlook others’ needs and feelings, and a narcissistic mother may be oblivious to her child’s needs, using them for her own emotional gratification without even being aware of it. These women themselves lack a sense of identity and present with unmet infantile needs of their own, stemming from their own childhoods and often rooted in their own childhood experiences of abandonment, neglect, or other forms of early trauma.
Men who were victims of maternal parentification and enmeshment tend to forever remain emotional hostages to their mothers. They will live their adult lives under the watchful eye of their mothers, who often dictate their every move, consciously or unconsciously. Their mothers may consider their romantic partners as a competition or a threat.
This sort of parentification causes the child’s identity and sense of self-worth to remain dependent on their mother’s approval, as well as that of others. They may grow up into physical adults but may feel like children seeking approval from everyone. In relationships, they often leave their partners emotionally neglected while they focus on pleasing their parents, business partners, and attend to activities that may increase their self-esteem.
Men who experienced maternal enmeshment struggle with intimate connection in their romantic relationships. They might end up alone forever, often burdened with the responsibility of emotionally or even practically caring for their mothers for the rest of their lives. This isolation and solitude persist throughout their lives, making them unable to sustain long-term relationships.
Some men may attempt to form romantic partnerships, only to become disillusioned by the realisation that their partners have their own needs and are individuals with their own lives. Others may even feel no need for romantic relationships, choosing instead to focus on their lifelong bond with their mothers.
There are also men who manage to establish long-term relationships and have families of their own. Despite this, they may remain stuck and fixated on their mothers, struggling with emotional separation and neglecting their partners and children in the process. Their lives become preoccupied with catering to their mothers, leaving their own families emotionally abandoned.
While these men may experience their mother’s impending death as both painful and freeing, the latter is rarely the case. Once their mothers are gone, the bitterness and resentment often increase as anger for the destruction of their lives surfaces. This anger can be directed at romantic partners, others, or the world. After all, anger at someone who is no longer there is unbearably painful in its futility.
Sexuality, Shame, and Control
Men who were parentified and enmeshed by their mothers often struggle with sexual intimacy in their romantic relationships. Intimacy with their partners may suffer as they cannot merge adult love and sexuality. They unconsciously equate love with caretaking. This may result in sexually impaired relationships with sexually active infidelity.
While some may resort to sexual infidelity, others may completely deny their sexual identities. Namely, experiencing any sexual strivings would subject them to more vulnerability towards rejection. Furthermore, because sexuality may be associated with maturity, these infantile men will unconsciously avoid it as they can only please their mothers if they remain children forever.
Due to their deeply rooted sense of inadequacy, these men tend to experience fears of abandonment and inherent shame, which may be conscious or unconscious. This drives them to control their women, often covertly but sometimes overtly. Their sense of inadequacy is often projected onto their partners, particularly women they perceive as threatening their abandonment.
These victims of emotionally incestuous relationships with their mothers—will become the kings of their infantile childhood castles that they replicate in their adult life. They often present with narcissism and engage in codependent relationships.
While they may seem to be attending to others’ needs, deep down they expect others to attend to theirs. This stems from childhood experiences where their needs were often denied, leading to feelings of entitlement to have them met in adulthood. Consequently, they treat their romantic partners as objects without subjectivity. As soon as their partner shows their own needs and individuality, these men tend to perceive this as a reflection or even proof of the partner’s selfishness, leaving them feeling rejected, humiliated, and unimportant.
Blinded by the Unconscious Fantasy
Hegemonic masculinity is not a state a person would adopt or their auxiliary identity. Instead, it is an ever-present process of attempting to reach an idealised image of oneself. This image is sought after to secure belonging and provide a sense of self-esteem and self-worth. As Karlsson (2014) described it, it’s a “project” – a striving for something unattained, a fantasy that will forever remain a chased ideal.
The pursuit of a fantasy, whether conscious or unconscious, can leave men alienated from themselves. It’s a denial and abandonment of one’s true self, leaving the person feeling empty and perpetually hungry for something more.
While a young adult may be motivated and enlivened—though falsely so—by the prospect of reaching their fantasy of an ideal self and an all-fulfilling relationship, those in their midlife often realise that their dreams will never come true. In midlife, the fantasy of reaching the wished-for life—often characterised by freedom, fulfilment, and love—fades, leading to frustration and disappointment.
These feelings can culminate in anger, resentment, and bitterness, along with feelings of inadequacy, powerlessness, and impotence. Resentment may be directed towards anyone these hurt men perceive as rejecting, teasing, frustrating, or abandoning—projections that their romantic partners are most often the victims of.
Men who, during their childhood, had to take care of their mother’s emotional needs will unconsciously build a fantasy based on a lie. This lie was unconsciously fed to them by their mothers: that if they meet the needs of others, particularly the mother’s needs, they will have their own needs met and be set free. Neither of these things ever happen. In adulthood, these men may find themselves living a life of meeting the needs of their spouses and families while caring for their mothers, or in a rebellious and righteous manner, meeting their own needs while perceiving others as needy and selfish.
These men are usually in their adulthood, painfully faced with reality: their efforts to meet others’ needs don’t result in recognition, attention, or fulfilment. Constant depravation under the illusion of ultimately having their needs gratified and feeling free from caring for others slowly leads to resignation and resentment.
For these men, the pursuit of masculinity may involve repudiating what is perceived as motherly (Karlsson, 2014). This causes an internal struggle: they unconsciously reject their mother’s dependency, trying to separate themselves from their mother’s neediness, while simultaneously resenting them for psychologically enslaving them. Unfortunately, attempts at emotional separation often leave them feeling powerless and impotent.
The anger that surfaces is then felt for others around them, including their partners and the world in general. To protect their mother’s image, they may lean towards cynicism and sarcasm, projecting their deep internal dissatisfaction with themselves, often blaming others, their circumstances, their partners, or even their children.
Their inability to separate from their mothers and the unconscious resentment they may feel towards them is often re-enacted in their romantic relationships, causing their partners to resent both them and their mothers for subjugating their sons.
Conclusion
The tragedy of these men lies not only in their solitude—internal and external—and the emptiness they experience, but also in the quietness of their suffering and the further erosion of their inner worlds. These worlds, once filled with potential, hopes, and dreams, are now haunted by unmet needs, unspoken grief, and the realisation of having wasted precious life. Left without themselves, estranged from the essence of who they could have become, their lives crumble under the weight of unfulfilled promises and identities that remain unformed. While they may want to escape the hopelessness that pervades their experience, it is only by confronting this hopelessness and pain that they can find themselves.
Ales Zivkovic, MSc (TA Psych), CTA(P), PTSTA(P), Psychotherapist, Counsellor, Supervisor
Ales Zivkovic is a psychotherapist, counsellor, and clinical supervisor. He holds an MSc in Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy awarded by Middlesex University in London, UK. He is also a Provisional Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst (PTSTA-P) and a Certified Transactional Analyst in the field of Psychotherapy (CTA-P). Ales gained extensive experience during his work with individuals and groups in the UK National Health Service (NHS) and his private psychotherapy, counselling, and clinical supervision practice in central London, UK. He is also a full clinical member of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP). Ales works with individuals, couples, and groups. In clinical setting, he especially focuses on the treatment of issues of childhood trauma, personality disorders, and relationship issues. A large proportion of his practice involves online psychotherapy as he works with clients from all over the world. Ales developed a distinct psychotherapeutic approach called interpretive dynamic transactional analysis psychotherapy (IDTAP). More about Ales, as well as how to reach him, can be found here.
References:
Hann-Morrison, D. (2012). Maternal Enmeshment: The Chosen Child. SAGE Open, 2(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244012470115 (Original work published 2012)
Karlsson, G. (2014). Masculinity as project: some psychoanalytic reflections. NORMA, 9(4), 249–268. https://doi.org/10.1080/18902138.2014.908631
Nordin, T., Degerstedt, F., & Granholm Valmari, E. (2024). A Scoping Review of Masculinity Norms and Their Interplay With Loneliness and Social Connectedness Among Men in Western Societies. American journal of men's health, 18(6), 15579883241304585. https://doi.org/10.1177/15579883241304585
Valkonen, J., & Hänninen, V. (2013). Narratives of masculinity and depression. Men and Masculinities, 16(2), 160–180. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X12464377
Verhaeghe, P. (2019). Lacan’s answer to alienation : separation. CRISIS AND CRITIQUE, 6(1), 364–388.