‘No one is talking about this’: What happens when men age

This story is part of the Good Weekend: Best of Features 2023 editon.See all 22 stories.

Pssst! I’m going to admit to something I may live to regret. I’ve got more than a dollop of empathy, you see, for ordinary middle-aged and older blokes in modern Australia. Note my use of the word ordinary – I’m not talking about high-flying CEOs, radio shock jocks, the loudmouths on Sky News after dark, the titans of the business world – but average blokes over 50, quietly heading off to work each day, supporting their families, men who would laugh at being called masters of the universe.

In a recent column for Time magazine, US author and actor Lauren Graham wrote that “everything I’ve read about ageing, whether fiction or nonfiction, has been written by a woman”. For more than 20 years now, the predominant social conversation on males has been focused, laser-like, on the trouble with boys and young men – the so-called crisis of young masculinity more recently exploited by humourless windbags such as Jordan Peterson, the former academic, and blowhard hustlers such as Andrew Tate, the former kickboxer who was detained and charged with human trafficking last December.

The playbooks of both boil down to one simple theme: modern feminism has stripped away what it means to be a man, and given a pesky amount of say to sexual minorities. Tate, in particular, has cynically exploited this sexual rage for financial gain, firing up a new war of the sexes and a new brand of misogyny.

While the social changes of the past two decades have left a proportion of young men angry, many older men have been left feeling confused. Apart from a few kooks in the men’s rights movement, who proclaim that women have a complete winning hand in everything from sexual relations to university graduations to family law, most blokes over 50 have no interest in fighting for the right to join the patriarchy party. Which isn’t to say they’re necessarily happy, healthy chappies either.

Psychologist Zac Seidler says that many men become “islands” as they age.

“No one is talking about this,” says Zac Seidler, a clinical psychologist and director of mental health training at Movember, the annual November fundraiser for men’s health issues. “It’s not a sexy topic to talk about.” Seidler, a gentle man with glasses and enviable jet-black stubble, explains why young males seize the spotlight. “A gang of misogynistic young men is seen as a social threat, which creates headlines; society doesn’t see older men as a threat. As men age and mature, the fire and vitriol tend to dissipate. But masculinity is reliant on a sense of purpose and direction; once this declines, men can feel like they’re surplus. The words ‘beyond usefulness’ and ‘disposability’ can sum this feeling up.”

There are increasing signs that all is not well in the house of older men. The most startling statistic on this goes largely unnoticed: in 2021, men over the age of 85 had the highest age-specific suicide rate in Australia, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Older men are also more likely to successfully take their own life than young men, because they prepare for it more precisely and use more deadly means. Compared to women, men are three times more likely to commit suicide and this rate increases as they get older. Alas, many men don’t reach very old age: the average life expectancy of a man in Australia is 81; of a woman, it’s 85, a longevity gap that has been pretty constant for decades and is almost universal in developed countries. After the age of 65, women start to significantly outnumber men, and this gap widens as both sexes age, so that among 85-year-olds and over, there are twice as many women as men.

As well as having longer lifespans, women enjoy better health spans: while the Aussie male can look forward to 67 healthy years, women will enjoy 70 years of “full health”. (It’s believed oestrogen carries lifespan bonuses, while testosterone increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases. A 2012 historical survey of 81 Korean eunuchs found they lived up to 19 years longer than uncastrated men.)

Zac Seidler believes that among older men, the issues of alienation and feelings of worthlessness represent a serious social concern. He has heard anecdotal reports of hospitals moving geriatric wards to the bottom floor to stop men attempting suicide. A doctor friend has told him that hospital design has had to be modified over the past 20 years to reduce access to lethal means.

There’s no single explanation for what appears to be a rampant level of ennui and unhappiness among older men. Experts point to a cocktail of causes: loss of sense of purpose, lack of connection with others, a feeling of little control over one’s life, a sense of treading water. Among older men, illness and personal loss can add to the depression, especially if they’ve lost a partner or the intimacy has died in their relationship.

“This is a difficult time, a turning point,” says Carl Nelms, manager of Blokes Psychology in Melbourne, a clinical service catering exclusively to men. “The kids are leaving, or have left, the nest. Career ceilings may have been reached. Marriages may be under stress or have broken down. Friendships with other males may have fallen away over the years. This is the time when blokes ask themselves, ‘Who am I? What have I achieved? What do I want to do with the rest of my life?’ And the biggest existential lament of them all: ‘What is the point of it all?’ ”

Carl Nelms says middle age can be a “difficult time, a turning point”.

Seidler says that, as men age, many increasingly become “islands”, which puts them at risk of depression. “Men’s social connections degrade after the age of 50. Many of their friendships have been transactional – based on work, earlier sporting connections – and so aren’t deep in nature. Women still provide the social scaffolding in most heterosexual relationships: they organise the get-togethers, the dinner parties, the milestone celebrations. Women’s social networks tend to be robust because they’ve put a lifelong effort into creating and growing friendships. To make matters worse, some men may not be close to their children, having concentrated on being providers at the cost of spending time with them.”

What I’ll call the mates drought is a phenomenon I’ve noted among most of my heterosexual friends and acquaintances, aged 45 and over, whose social lives revolve almost entirely around the friends of their wives or partners. The de-friending process tends to hasten as they get older, as arthritic knees stop them from catching up over a game of touch footy or shooting hoops. Why is it so hard to pick up a phone and organise a catch-up with an old mate? I ask a middle-aged colleague. Is it because it seems somehow … gay? “Nope, because I just can’t be arsed,” replies this married man with three teenagers. “I would feel awkward and a bit weird,” says a similarly aged married neighbour, as if that explains anything apart from men yet again tamping down their emotions. This contented alone-ness may be fine when you’re supported by a partner and family, but what happens if these relationships drift away or break down?

In his book The Buddy System, American author Geoffrey L. Greif pithily describes male friendships as “shoulder-to-shoulder” and female friendships as “face-to-face”. By which he means, male friendships tend to revolve around sporting activities and hobbies, while women prefer to sit down and chat, to express themselves in a more emotional manner, suggesting female friendships have far more depth. But male friendships don’t have to be deep and meaningful to have health bonuses: a US study undertaken in 2016 suggested that men with a wide circle of friends have higher levels of oxytocin – the so-called “cuddle hormone” – which enables them to handle stress and anxiety more effectively. And personally, I quite like the qualities that make men’s friendships different to those between women, or even between men and women: the regular taking the piss out of each other, the frequent bad-joke telling, the silences that aren’t awkward so much as oddly comforting. There are positive signs that friendships between young heterosexual men – so called “bromances” – now carry more substance than those of their fathers and grandfathers, who were more bound up by more unemotional, expressionless stereotypes of behaviour.

‘Men in this age bracket tend to be less able to express themselves. They come to us with their story – we try to tease out what the real story is.’

Carl Nelms

Of course, you could sensibly argue that men have no one to blame but themselves if they haven’t put any effort into developing meaningful friendships in their later years. Because male friendships tend to be more flexible, they’re inherently more fragile: they lack a social contract (as in marriage) and blood bonds (as in family), but then again, we do get to choose our mates, an option we don’t have with our families. Perhaps there has been no better portrayal of the mismatched expectations of two male friends than the recent award-winning film, The Banshees of Inisherin, which begins with folk musician and fiddler Colm (Brendan Gleeson) abruptly ending his lifelong friendship with drinking mate Padraic (Colin Farrell) because he’s bored with his company and wants to concentrate on his music. Being cut off by a close friend in this manner, one integral to your daily life, can be shattering whether you’re male or female, but especially so if you’re a male with few friends to begin with. Social research tells us again and again that if we want to live longer, the more social connections we have, the better.

The good news is that an increasing number of older men are now reaching out for assistance in the wake of a wider public discussion about mental health. Carl Nelms says that he’s seeing a lot more men over 45 visiting his three clinics across Melbourne: this group now represents more than 40 per cent of his clientele. “Men in this age bracket tend to be less able to express themselves. They come to us with their story – we try to tease out what the real story is.”

The Banshees of Inisherin: Colin Farrell, right, plays an Irishman whose life changes when his lifelong friend, played by Brendan Gleeson, left, abruptly ends the relationship.Credit: AP

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You don’t have to be an unreconstructed male to find the pace of social change challenging. By most objective measures, George, my personal trainer, a 54-year-old heterosexual male with a muscular physique, an easy sociability and a natural curiosity about the world, is an attractive man. He’d be among the first to march in a women’s rights demonstration for equal pay, is appalled by the brutal treatment of women and girls in Afghanistan, supports the young Iranian women challenging the Islamist dictatorship with the anthem “Woman, life, freedom” and was horrified by the recent striking-down in the US of Roe v Wade, the landmark ruling nearly 50 years ago that enshrined a constitutional right to abortion. George is also kind: when a female client busted a wooden drawer in her wardrobe, he rebuilt it for her; and, last winter, he gave his only pair of ugg boots to a local homeless man.

But even he struggles with the use of non-binary pronouns, and the way catchphrases such as “white privilege” are bandied about by people half his age, who earn three times his income in high-gloss banking and advertising professions. “We’re not only being told what not to say, but what not to think,” he complains, adding that the age-old complaint of women becoming invisible in middle-age also applies to men, although it’s never discussed by men, perhaps from a fear of sounding vain or even gay. “Women are still attractive when they get into their 50s; men in the same age bracket still have functioning cocks,” he says flatly. “Which means we both have to deal with physical ageing – men just talk about it less, or not at all.”

Does he feel invisible? The question hangs in the air for a few seconds. When he’s at the gym, he explains, he occasionally gets appreciative glances from women, but generally, yes, walking to the shops to buy milk in his trackies, he does feel invisible. The other problem he’s facing, as a 54-year-old back on the dating scene after the break-up of a five-year relationship, is that women – from their Tinder profiles and first dates – tell him they’re looking for financial security in a prospective partner, and for a man struggling to pay the rent on a run-down, one-bedroom cottage, he’s not exactly regarded as a great catch. And even worse, because he describes himself as a one-woman man, a “serial monogamist” – some women have a preconception there’s something wrong with him. “Please make it clear in your story I am not damaged goods,” he laughs.

‘Women are still attractive when they get into their 50s; men in the same age bracket still have functioning cocks … We both have to deal with physical ageing – men just talk about it less, or not at all.’

George, personal trainer, 54

But the issue that really sticks in George’s craw: the double standards he sees everywhere in popular culture. While it’s no longer politically correct to objectify women, it appears to be perfectly okay, he says, to objectify men on their appearance, from rapper Gillette’s song Short Dick Man (“Don’t want no short dick man”) in the 1990s, to photos of shirtless beefcakes in everything from towels to milk advertisements in the 2020s. I tell him about a press release from a London-based PR firm that dropped into my inbox recently, promoting a survey of the most attractive men in UK politics. “Our team analysed the physical appearance of the most notable politicians right now, comparing attributes such as height, appearance, smile and intellect,” the email declared. Their verdict? Johnny Mercer, Minister of State for Veterans’ Affairs, ranked first.

“An ex-Army officer and regular exerciser, Johnny Mercer is the best-looking male politician in the UK right now,” the press release gushed.

George nods in agreement, warming to the theme. “Now if that had been a survey about the most attractive women in UK politics, there would have been lots of complaints about sexism, right?”

Of course, the off-the-shelf response to this kind of reverse sexism is that women have been putting up with deplorable behaviour by men for millennia, and there is a very different power dynamic between, say, a hen’s night at a male strippers’ revue and a pole-dancing club in a red-light district. And the female backlash against the male gaze is continuing. A Chinese artist, 23-year-old Lin Yutong, recently fired back against a sexist artwork rating women’s looks by assigning scores to men’s genitals. Unless we can break our cultural obsession with feminine beauty and dominant male sexuality, this imbalance is likely to continue into the foreseeable future, with no amount of political correctness eroding its influence.

Tom, another friend of mine in his mid-50s, is now on testosterone replacement therapy, having been diagnosed with low testosterone while still in his 30s. He insists that men’s health issues are usually downplayed, with the possible exception of prostate cancer. “Men are just so much less likely than women to go to a doctor; we imagine we’re bulletproof,” he says, puffing on a vape (he’s trying to quit smoking). While most endocrinologists dismiss the existence of a “manopause” – the male equivalent of menopause – there’s no getting away from the fact that many men over 50 have low testosterone, with its accompanying symptoms of tiredness and lack of sex drive.

“Andropause is a real thing psychologically,” says Carl Nelms, “when you take into consideration a decline in testosterone with a general slowing-down.” By the age of 70, some men can have a testosterone level as low as that of a 13-year-old boy.

There is increasing evidence now that we are not the men our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers were, at least if you judge this by the yardstick of our testosterone levels.

While declines in the so-called “man juice” may be a natural part of ageing, these now need to be seen against a backdrop of slowly sinking testosterone levels and sperm counts worldwide. Exactly why men today have less testosterone and sperm in their tanks than their male forebears isn’t clear, but multiple studies indicate both are dropping by about one per cent a year, with the decrease accelerating, according to a recent report in the Journal of Human Reproduction (reassuringly, most men still have healthy rates of both). Decreased sexual activity and lack of sexual desire (the two aren’t always connected, of course) can lead to a suppression of testosterone levels, according to one fascinating study undertaken at the University of Sydney back in 2015. It found that a decline in testosterone levels appears to be the result of less sex, not the other way around.

‘Men are just so much less likely than women to go to a doctor; we imagine we’re bulletproof.’

Tom, mid-50s

How much of this decline in testosterone has to do with biology, with the simple processes of ageing, and how much with other environmental factors such as plastics and pollution, remains to be seen. Medicine has no cure for the life-disrupting ills of middle age in men, but it has learnt to ease some symptoms with antidepressants and lifestyle changes like resistance exercise, which can boost testosterone levels. While the use of testosterone replacement therapy has been increasing in Australia since 2000, pharmaceutical guidelines have made it more difficult to get a prescription, and for good reason. Elevated levels of testosterone may contribute to a shorter lifespan and carry an increased risk of heart disease, according to several studies.

While George, a black belt in karate who has stayed supremely fit all his life, isn’t affected by the physical ravages of most men his age – a widening waistline, diminished muscle tone, lower libido, less energy – he’s aware that in the face, at least, he no longer looks like a dewy-fresh 25-year-old. While he’s not too old for Tinder or ready for slippers by the fire just yet, he’s finding dating incredibly difficult: women his age and older lose interest once they find out about his financial insecurity, while younger women, because of his age, aren’t interested in long-term relationships, only one-night stands, which don’t float his boat.

There are indications a physical fightback against the signs of ageing might be underway – among middle-class men, at least. Christian Acuña, manager of Sydney’s Men’s Grooming Salon and a psychologist, says that when he started his business seven years ago, the people making the appointments were either gay men or the men’s wives. “Now men are coming in themselves, asking, ‘What can you do for sun damage?’, ‘Can you remove these spots and lines?’ They’re not giving up.”

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Men’s rights activists, as well as the Jordan Petersons of this world, look back longingly at a time when men were men and gender roles were clear and starkly divided. But the dads of the 1950s, ’60s and ‘70s had different burdens providing for their families, being almost always the sole providers and breadwinners. Fathers in those days, limited by the straitjacket of being a tough, stoic male, frequently had poor relationships with their children. Couples, restricted by harsh divorce laws, were frequently trapped in loveless, miserable marriages. Domestic violence was rarely talked about, much less addressed as a social disease. The idea of a happy, mid-century mum, dad and the kids was just that: a lovely ideal, captured in monochrome American sitcoms like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver. Any father of daughters now, looking at today’s young women brimming with possibility, should be grateful they were not born in the 1950s.

Andrew Tate, left, and Jordan Peterson have both become mega-rich mentors to young men, based on their belief that modern feminism has stripped away what it means to be a man.Credit: Twitter/@Cobratate; Getty Images

For fathers with teenage and 20-something sons, the challenges are a little more complex. Explains Zac Seidler: “Peterson and Tate are offering a clear if rigid doctrine on how to ‘man up’ and take charge of their lives, while society is telling them how not to be a man: ‘Don’t be violent, don’t sexually harass women.’ While young women are told ‘You can do anything,’ young men are told ‘Don’t do this’; ‘don’t f--- up.’ ”

Of course, what young men lack that older men have in spades is a sense of historical context: understanding that the good old days – when racism and blind narrow-mindedness were more socially acceptable – weren’t so great. Seidler has noticed an interesting divergence between young and older men in terms of the lifestyle effects of their social media use. “The more young men spend on social media, the higher their level of loneliness and psychological distress,” he notes. “Among older men, the reverse is true because they are more inclined to use social media to meet people.”

Seidler firmly believes that many women’s issues can’t be properly addressed without including a conversation with men. “I see domestic violence as a men’s health issue. Male suicide and domestic violence are two sides of the same coin: harming oneself and harming others due to a lack of self-reflective capacity and insight, difficulty regulating emotions and poor role modelling. Violence and anger condoned as male expressions of emotion.”

Many people ask Seidler why he works at Movember. “The simple answer is that if you can help men proactively – and not reactively – understand and respond to their emotional lives before a crisis arises, we’ll have well-adjusted, respectful men.” Which means, he adds, women will benefit as well – and substantially so.

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