Loneliness is rife among young men. It’s time to get offline and talk to each other | Alexander Hurst

It's tempting to scoff, but don't dismiss the data. Modern man's failure to forge real, meaningful friendships is bad for everyone

At first I was startled when the psychologist Angelica Ferrara told me that most of the time it's women, not men, who want to write about her research into male loneliness. But this is the crux of the issue, isn't it? That we men need to talk, and we don't: not nearly enough, anyway.

Since 1990, there has been a sharp decline in how many people men say they are close to, says Ferrara, who is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics. In the US, two-thirds of men aged between 18 and 23 think that nobody really knows them; one third haven't seen anyone outside their household in the past week; only a fifth say they have friends they can really count on; and a staggering 69% of young men think no one cares if men are OK".

Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist