We learned how to fuck before we learned how to stay

I’m not here to scold hookup culture, abolish Grindr, or pretend sex is the villain. I like sex. I like desire. I like the particular electricity of men wanting men without apology. This is not moral panic. This is a pattern recognition post.

As per usual, I went home, up north, to celebrate X-mas with my family for almost a week. While there, I fired up Grindr a few times, not to hook up but to actually chat with a few people that I usually chat with when I’m up there (and sometimes meet to catch up), and as per usual, I was met with the usual ”what’s up/hosting/looking?” tirades from headless people. These are often very mundane, and I pay little attention to them. But this time, it got me thinking about hookup culture in the gay sphere and how it contributes to involuntary loneliness.

Because something keeps surfacing among us. Quietly. Persistently. In conversations that start with dating and somehow end with a strange sense of emotional malnutrition. In jokes that get a laugh and then linger a bit too long. In that moment after sex when nobody reaches for their phone, but nobody reaches for each other either.

Gay male loneliness doesn’t look the way loneliness is supposed to look. It doesn’t look like isolation or social failure. It looks like options. It looks like availability. It looks like knowing exactly who to text at 23:47 on a Wednesday so we don’t have to fall asleep alone.

And yet, here we are.

Most of us didn’t choose emotional distance. We fell into it because the system we entered worked frighteningly well at first. Hookup culture solved a real problem: access. Access to bodies, to touch, to other men who wanted what we wanted without demanding our emotional CV upfront.

Historically speaking, that matters. Being able to desire openly, meet without code, and touch without fear is not shallow progress. It’s survival turning into pleasure. Anyone pretending otherwise is either lying or very new.

But systems that solve urgent problems tend to overstay their usefulness. And hookup culture didn’t just give us access. It trained us. Quietly, but efficiently.

Despite its reputation, hookup culture isn’t chaotic. It’s disciplined. It just doesn’t announce itself as such. Over time, it teaches us exactly what gets rewarded. Emotional efficiency is good. Desire is good, as long as it’s clear, contained, and disposable. Anything that slows things down starts to feel suspicious.

Curiosity without a sexual payoff feels odd.
Feelings without irony feel risky.
Wanting continuity feels like a vibe crime.

Nobody explains this. We learn it by watching conversations die. We learn it by noticing which messages get replies and which ones vanish into the digital afterlife. Eventually, we stop sending the messages that don’t work.

This is how emotional distancing turns into manners.

We don’t overshare. We don’t linger. We don’t ask questions that might require depth. We keep things light, horny, and moving. Always moving. Forward feels safe. Inward feels messy.

Our feelings don’t disappear in this setup. They get rerouted. Loneliness becomes horniness. Longing becomes desire. A need for connection turns into a better profile picture and a slightly more specific filter. This isn’t fake. It’s just incomplete.

Desire is easier to admit than need because desire has rules. Sex has scripts. Sex has exits. Vulnerability just stands there naked, asking what happens next.

Talking about feelings in gay male spaces is harder than we like to admit, and not because we’re emotionally illiterate. It’s because there are very few neutral zones. Straight men get to practice emotional intimacy inside friendships that are assumed to be nonsexual. That assumption does a lot of heavy lifting. We rarely get it.

Friendships between men often come preloaded for us. Attraction. Comparison. History. Projection. Missed chances. Imagined chances. Even when nothing is happening, something is happening. So when we open up emotionally, the signal gets scrambled.

Are we sharing or flirting?
Are we bonding or escalating?
Are we asking for support or auditioning?

After a while, many of us decide it’s easier not to bother. Silence is cleaner. Horny is clearer. Sex doesn’t require clarification.

Some of us go all in on this and call it freedom. No feelings. No attachment. Just sex. Just bodies. Just release. And honestly, after years of hiding, that phase can feel necessary. We’re not taking that away from anyone.

But here’s the part nobody advertises. Stripping sex of emotional context doesn’t make it neutral. It makes it louder. We stop chasing connection and start chasing intensity. Novelty replaces depth. Volume replaces meaning.

We end up with lives full of encounters and very little accumulation. Lots of touch, no continuity. Lots of intimacy, no history. Validation that evaporates the moment it’s received. We’re busy. We’re fed. And we’re somehow still undernourished.

Layer onto this the fact that many of us learned emotional self-reliance early. Not because it’s virtuous, but because it was safer. We learned to manage ourselves. To soothe ourselves. To not need too much.

That skill gets praised. We’re chill. Low drama. Independent. The kind of men people like because we don’t ask for much. Until one day we realise we’re lonely and have absolutely no idea how to say that without feeling like we’ve failed at being functional adults.

We know how to survive alone, but we don’t know how to be held.

And asking for that feels embarrassing. Like turning up late to a class everyone else seems to have completed already.

From the outside, it looks like choice. We’re active. We’re participating. We’re not sitting at home staring at the wall. But choice requires alternatives, and the culture doesn’t offer many. If we disengage, we risk invisibility. If we ask for more, we risk being labelled intense. If we slow down, we risk being left behind.

So most of us stay. Not because we’re stupid. Because the system still feeds us just enough to keep going.

There’s also a quieter consequence that sneaks up on us: emotional skill decay. If most of our relational experience is fast, sexual, and non-continuous, then slower emotional processes start to feel unfamiliar. Not terrifying. Just awkward.

How do we ask for consistency without sounding needy?
How do we express care without implying ownership?
How do we stay when leaving has always been the safety valve?

Those are skills. Skills require practice. The culture does not reward practicing them.

Friendships suffer too. Because friendships are complicated and romantic connections are unstable, emotional needs often bottleneck into one person. A partner. A situationship. Someone who becomes the sole container for everything. When that ends, the loneliness hits like a structural failure, not just because of loss, but because there’s no redundancy.

Aging sharpens all of this. Gay male culture loves youth the way startups love disruption. Loudly. Briefly. Without a retirement plan. As desirability fades, many of us discover that our social visibility was conditional. When attention dries up, so does our sense of place.

This isn’t about banning hookup culture. Sex is not the villain. Desire is not the problem. The issue is what happens when sex becomes the only socially acceptable form of closeness. When emotional honesty has to sneak in disguised as flirtation. When care is only welcome if it’s going somewhere.

The problem isn’t that we touch. It’s that we don’t stay.

Getting out of this isn’t dramatic. It’s irritatingly unsexy. It looks like building friendships that are intentionally nonsexual. Creating routines that include people without escalation. Having conversations that aren’t auditions. Letting emotional awkwardness exist without treating it like a personal defect.

It also requires killing one very popular myth: that emotional self-sufficiency is the highest form of masculinity. It isn’t. It’s a survival adaptation that overstayed its welcome.

We aren’t broken. We’re resilient, adaptive, funny, and socially fluent as hell. Many of us just learned how to survive long before we learned how to connect. Hookup culture didn’t cause that. It gave it a shape that worked for a while.

And now it doesn’t.

Most of us didn’t choose emotional distance. We adapted to an environment that rewarded it. Getting out doesn’t mean rejecting desire. It means building spaces where desire isn’t doing all the emotional labour.

And the most Roine thing to say here is this:
If we feel lonely in lives that look busy, we’re not defective. We’re just noticing the gap between being wanted and being held.

That’s not failure.
That’s awareness finally catching up.