A few months ago, my phone flashed with a name I could hardly place. It was a college acquaintance I hadn’t heard from in eight years. “My girlfriend is away with her friends for the weekend,” he said, “and I just wanted to talk to my own people.”
I hadn’t realised I was one of his people. The conversation began with polite niceties, then moved quickly into a level of honesty I was not expecting. He told me he felt left behind when his girlfriend was out with friends, and lamented that he hadn’t kept up with many of his own. Soon, I was listening to an outpouring about family pressure, relationship hopes and career anxiety. In the absence of his girlfriend, feelings that had been bottled up for a long time travelled toward a woman he barely knew.
Loneliness has become a routine diagnosis of modern life. We have replaced deep conversations with scrolling, in-person connection with digital follow requests. The number of words we speak per day has declined by about 20% in one generation, with the sharpest decrease affecting those below the age of 25. Men and women utter the same number of words daily, but where they spend those words, and with whom, differs greatly.
Yash Gazula, a 35-year-old software engineer in New York, says that while he sees his male friends often, he turns to his girlfriend when something is bothering him. When he is having relationship trouble, he confides in female friends. “I don’t think I get the same validation or comfort from my guy friends. Women are more empathetic, ask questions, show compassion. Obviously, that’s more comforting than ‘do you want a beer?’”
For some men, the girlfriend becomes the primary, and sometimes only, source of emotional release. “It really does trend this way in the data we see,” says clinical therapist Bevin DeMuth. “It’s very common for men to rely on their partner for emotional support, creating a model that is often called ‘romantic partner or bust.’ We call it emotional outsourcing.”
If men are learning that their vulnerability is most safely housed in a woman, screen culture is one place where that lesson gets repeated and cemented. The absence of male friendship on screen matters because, without friends who can witness fear, failure or need, the girlfriend becomes the only place a man’s private life can go. Films do not single-handedly teach men how to be less lonely, but they do offer scripts for what male intimacy can look like, who men turn to when they are vulnerable, and whether friendship is allowed to carry anything heavier than banter.
Hindi cinema has a long history of making male friendship on screen feel narratively essential, from the mythic loyalty of Sholay to the adult friendships of Dil Chahta Hai and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, and the broad comic bromance of Dostana. These films understood friendship as more than relief from the plot. It was the plot, or at least one of its deepest emotional engines.
In the 2020s, an increasingly successful archetype has emerged: the wounded, violent male protagonist stands against the world, with a wife or girlfriend carrying their emotional baggage. In films such as Kabir Singh, Animal and Dhurandhar, the female lead becomes both the innocent, incapable of impurity and his emotional punching bag. Radhika Menon, entertainment journalist, tells me, “I haven’t seen an emotionally stable male lead in a Hindi film in a long time. Even in a romantic film like Saiyaara, we saw a lead who was possessive and protective of his girlfriend, but hardly built a brotherhood with his fellow band members. They don’t even play a real part in the movie.”