We’re taught as men to suppress our feelings, to just do it by ourselves, man up and be strong. I know for me, that was isolating.
Tyrone Marsh
Men’s circles run by trained facilitators tend to follow a similar structure.
First, the facilitator sets some ground rules for the meeting. Attendees then introduce themselves and check in with each other about how they’re feeling. They might engage in another icebreaker before eventually sharing what’s going on in their lives, discussing everything from relationship issues and career challenges to a health crisis. The men take turns listening to each other and offer each other feedback. Finally, the meeting closes with some takeaways, or perhaps just acknowledgement or gratitude for what was just accomplished.
These gatherings can help men strengthen social skills and their relationships with other men, says Pasco Ashton, co-founder and executive director of the UK-based organization Men’s Circle.
“Men don’t really have the tools,” he says. “They haven’t learned the same tools that I think women do in social situations: to have the small talk, to connect deeper emotionally, all the emotional intelligence that is part of what we practice.”
That realization is what led Ashton to start a men’s circle in 2020.
He felt helpless after losing two friends to suicide. He also wanted to work on himself after conversations with female friends about #MeToo. And generally, he felt lonely and unable to confide in most of his male friends.
That gathering of a few friends in a London park eventually grew into a larger organization spanning across the UK, with some participants in Europe and the US. His organization also offers workshops, retreats and more casual meetups.
Ashton says that while many men who attend circles come looking for social connection, they leave with much more: In an informal survey conducted by his organization, participants reported gaining mutual support and life perspective, as well as improvements in their emotional regulation, self-awareness and other key skills.
Men are improving their relationships as a result
The reason so many men seem to lack deep connections isn’t because of some innate biological difference, says Niobe Way, author of “Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture.” Rather, it’s a culture problem.
In studying adolescent development for more than four decades, she’s found that boys do want intimate friendships. But as they get older, the pressure to man up results in what Way calls a crisis of connection.
Marsh felt that acutely growing up. He was raised in the inner city of Nashville with an incarcerated father and an abusive stepfather, in a home where “there was no such thing as emotional intelligence.” Any hint of perceived softness was met with harsh discipline, treated as something to be stamped out.
Marsh tried to model another way for his two children, letting them know their feelings were valid and that their voices deserved to be heard. But some ingrained ideas proved hard to shake.
Before Marsh started attending men’s circles, his son Kapila, 20, says he felt that he and his older sister were sometimes held to a different standard when it came to showing emotion.
“At times, my emotions were valued, but her emotions were 100% of the time valued,” he says. “For me, there needed to be an extra step of ‘This is how you’re feeling, but what are you going to do with this?’ rather than ‘This is how you’re feeling’ and being able to sit back.”
Kapila says he internalized that pressure growing up, feeling like he needed to prove himself to be taken seriously. But he started to notice changes in his father once he got involved with the ManKind Project.
Marsh began asking his son more open-ended questions, trying to get to the root of why he felt a particular way. It took Kapila some adjusting to — he was used to following his dad’s advice, and it felt like his dad wasn’t interested in giving it anymore.
Kapila now realizes that his dad was training him to trust his intuition and move through the world on his own. In Kapila’s eyes, it made him a better parent.
Rick Fortier, 63, has felt the crisis of connection, too. For most of his life, he says he felt safer around his female friends.
“I’d always had a feeling of being judged walking on eggshells around other men most of my life: Was I saying the right thing? Were they doing the right thing? Was I man enough?” he says.
His first experience in a men’s circle challenged those norms. The environment was open and nonjudgmental, and the attendees pushed each other to be honest and authentic. And though it took some trial and error to find a circle that felt like the right fit, Fortier says his current group — which he’s been attending for eight years — is helping him figure out the kind of man he wants to be.
The six or so members meet biweekly, and the issues that come up run the gamut: They talk about negative self-image, romantic challenges and the pressures they feel as men to act a certain way. Two members passed away in the last year, so feelings around death have also become a major topic of discussion.
“It’s deep in our soul to have a brotherhood, and we don’t know how to do that in our society other than through sporting events, drinking, going hunting or whatever might be typical of accepted men’s behavior,” he says.
These groups aren’t perfect
Even as men commit to improving themselves, they don’t always get it right.
As Ian McElroy wrote in 2021 for The Cut, “these groups are still run by men, men with all their baggage and acculturation and gazes.”
Plenty of groups end up reinforcing stereotypical ideas about who men should be, says Angelica Ferrara, a developmental and social psychologist whose research focuses on masculinity and gender.
“Some men’s groups work by saying that a ‘real’ man is emotionally vulnerable and a provider not just through finances, but through emotional support to others,” she wrote in an email to CNN. “These frameworks still imbue men with value (and status in other men’s ideas) solely on what they provide to others—that’s a big problem.”
The ManKind Project and other men’s organizations also lean on initiation rituals and specific archetypes to help men get in touch with themselves — stemming from their roots in the “mythopoetic” men’s movement, which in the ‘80s and ‘90s brought men into the woods to rediscover their innate masculinity through drumming circles and chanting.
The ManKind Project’s circles, for example, use the labels “king,” “warrior,” “magician” and “lover” (an apparent reference to Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s 1991 book that defines four essential aspects of manhood). Its weekend retreats, which reportedly involve cold showers and blindfolding, invoke mythologist Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey.”
While Marsh and others have found these frameworks empowering and transformative, some critics note that they can present an outdated and limiting view of masculinity.
Still, Ferrara says it’s important not to let perfect be the enemy of good.
The most promising men’s circles, in her view, “explicitly name patriarchy and stringent ideas of masculinity as the root of men’s suffering, rather than something to be reconfigured or revived.”
But even if Ferrara sees flaws in some of their approaches, men building emotional intelligence and deeper community stands to benefit them and everyone in their lives — and she hopes that as a result, more men might start to question traditional ideas around masculinity altogether.
Reaching the next generation is challenging
Since President Donald Trump was said to have leveraged corners of the manosphere to help him win the 2024 US election, there’s been a lot of discussion about the resurgence of more problematic ideas around masculinity. The recent Netflix series “Adolescence” also sparked conversations about the pressures that boys face to adhere to certain norms.
In particular, many younger men seem adrift and more drawn to macho, traditional models of being a man. With hyper-masculine influencers on their social media feeds promoting self-improvement through extreme workout and diet regimens, the idea of sitting in a circle and talking about feelings might sound less appealing.
It’s a major challenge men’s circles are up against: They’re not reaching the people who might need them most.
In their current iteration, men’s circles and similar programs typically attract men in midlife. The ManKind Project does run a specialized version of its flagship retreat for men 18 to 35 (that also costs $995 to attend), and the organization says its overall age range has widened over time — still, Marsh says it struggles with getting younger men involved.
Knowing the difference men’s circles made for him, Fortier says he’s frustrated that so few young men seem interested. At 63, he’s one of the younger men in his current group.
Over the years, he says some guys have shown up eager to discuss current affairs or sports. When encouraged to dig a little deeper, he says they seemed uncomfortable and often didn’t return.
Dismantling generations of preconceptions about men is a daunting task, and men’s circles are just one intervention in the broader project of reconsidering what it means to be a man.
But whether through men’s circles or something else, Fortier says men need to step up and take accountability.
“We’ve created this situation,” he says. “It’s up to us to fix it.”
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