God Bless the weekly email from Substack that suggests new writers, as this week it brought me the writings of Jordan Stacey.
why men need girlfriends more than women need boyfriends
Her post from June 2025 was paragraph after paragraph of direct hits on the experience of men after the end of a relationship. She put into writing what I witness with my clients every week.
Here are some direct quotes from her writing (with my observations to follow):
“Women tend to be the only portal for men to feel truly seen in their wholeness, to feel like the focal point.” (Wives and girlfriends are often the only people in a man’s life they open up to emotionally. And when that goes away they feel invisible.)
“It is not necessarily that men are lonelier than women, it is that they disproportionately require romance with women to feel seen. Especially after having experienced a romantic relationship with a woman, single men feel unseen. They feel emotionally undigested. Feeling invisible can feel a lot like being unloved.” (Many men define themselves by their relationship status and when that goes away they are left questioning their own identity.)
“Women have outlets to air out their shame and men often do not” (Keeping this shame inside leads to what Terry Real calls covert depression in men that looks like long periods of cold silence punctuated by moments of rage when it becomes too much to keep inside.)
I love Stacey’s thesis that we all need a friend who “covers our full circumference” and that men especially need to nurture this kind of relationship with other men in their life.
And that starts with being that person for someone else. So, today is the day you look around and show up fully for someone who needs you.
