An Intimacy Gap? Exploring the U.S. Men’s Experience with and Capacity for Physical Intimacy in Their Same-Sex Friendships
While we know that physical touch can help people feel closer and more connected, there’s still a lot we don’t understand about how this plays out in friendships between men. That’s important—especially as more men face rising mental and physical health challenges, and close friendships are known to support overall well-being.
To learn more, researchers at the Graduate Center of CUNY surveyed 467 men in the U.S., mostly White and ranging in age from 18 to 65. They asked about 62 different types of touch—like hugs or pats on the back—to understand how physically intimate men felt these actions were. The study also looked at how men’s past experiences, views on masculinity, and emotional styles (such as how secure they feel in relationships) affect the way they give and receive touch in same-sex friendships.
Granderson, R. M., Carmichael, C. L., & Berke, D. S. (2025). An intimacy gap? Exploring U.S. men’s experience with and capacity for physical intimacy in their same- sex friendships. Psychology of Men & Masculinities, 26(1),
35-48. https://doi.org/10.1037/men0000498
What were the key questions you were addressing in this article?
My broader goal with this line of inquiry is to uncover how the use of affectionate touch in men’s friendships might be better able to support men’s well-being. We were trying to accomplish a couple different things with this article to serve that broader goal.
First, we wanted to pilot this new measure of physical touch. While direct and indirect measures of touch avoidance exist, we didn’t find many affirmative measures of touch. Moreover, we found none that focused specifically on touch behaviors that men engage in with their male friends or tried to incorporate subjective perceptions of these behaviors into a measure. We thought this novel approach - focusing on subjective ratings of the intimacy of individual touch behaviors - may be able to better capture the nuanced experience with touch than an approach that simply asked about touch as a category. So, this study was fundamentally about testing this concept and gathering data necessary to improve it (e.g. additional behaviors to ensure comprehensiveness).
A second goal of this work was to begin exploring if there was a discrepancy between the physical touch men experience in their friendships with other men and the physical touch they would be open to.
Finally, we wanted to understand how men’s capacity for and experience with physical intimacy in their male friendships - and the gap between the two - was linked to masculinity and adult attachment.
What were the main conclusions of your article?
There are two important takeaways that I’d like readers to appreciate.
First, men across generational cohorts are open to a wider range of physically affectionate touch behaviors with their male friends than they currently experience - evidencing what I am calling an “intimacy gap,” that has potential implications for men’s well-being.
Second, masculinity seems to play an important role in men’s capacity for, and experience with, physical intimacy in their friendships with other men. This emerged in a few different ways across masculinity constructs. Namely, deficits in emotional identification, experience and expression (i.e., Normative Male Alexithymia), and fears about being perceived as gay (i.e., Homohysteria) were negatively correlated with men’s capacity for physical intimacy in terms of the breadth of touch behaviors they would be open to with their same-sex friends. In addition, Normative Male Alexithymia was negatively correlated with men’s experience of physical intimacy (i.e., the breadth of touch behaviors they have recently engaged in) in their same-sex friendships. Finally, the degree to which the successful performance of masculinity enhances one’s self-worth (i.e., Masculinity Contingency Boost) was associated with increased experience with and capacity for platonic physical intimacy in men’s friendships with other men. We believe this particular finding suggests a successful masculine performance can include physical intimacy between male friends and complicates narratives that frame masculinity - and related constructs - exclusively as barriers to intimacy between men.
What are the key implications of your article for research, policy, or practice?
Finding avenues to improve the emotional and mental health of men is an important goal of this work and I think there are some clear implications for how we might use this work to do so.
First, our results revealing Masculinity Contingency Boost to be positively associated with our intimacy outcomes suggest that those looking to intervene in the lives of men to improve their relationships may want to consider an affirmative approach that centers aspects of masculine performance that can be beneficial (e.g., touch between men) as opposed to a deficit model that positions masculinity as purely a barrier that must be overcome to achieve positive relational ends.
Second, we found that Normative Male Alexithymia may be barrier to physical intimacy in men’s friendships with other men. So, helping men better understand and express their feelings generally may also increase physical closeness in their male friendships, adding value to any work done in this area.
Lastly, we identified hugs as “intervention-ready” behaviors—those that participants rated above average in intimacy and showed at least a 15-point gap between their capacity to engage in the behavior and their actual experience of it. This was true for four different kinds of hugs: (1) close two-armed hugs, (2) close one-armed hugs, (3) distant two-armed hugs, and (4) distant one-armed hugs. This capacity-experience gap suggests that these behaviors could be meaningfully and acceptably increased in men’s same-sex friendships. Their strong intimacy ratings also indicate that focusing interventions on these behaviors may offer the greatest potential payoff in terms of deepening connection. Importantly, all four behaviors function as greetings—routines already built into daily life—making them especially practical targets for intervention. In contrast, the greeting behaviors men reported engaging in most often, such as handshakes, fist-bumps, and high-fives, were all rated below average in intimacy. This contrast opens the door for impactful change: by replacing or supplementing these lower-intimacy gestures with more intimate, intervention-ready greetings, it may be possible to foster greater emotional closeness among men. Of course, given the personal and sometimes sensitive nature of physical touch, further research is essential to thoughtfully design, market, and implement interventions that resonate with men’s experiences and social contexts.
Where do you see this line of research heading in the future (i.e., what’s next)?
I think about the future of this line of work as existing on three parallel tracks: (1) iterative refinement and validation of the measure; (2) exploring the practical impacts of physical intimacy and this “intimacy gap” for men’s well-being; and (3) investigating psychological phenomenon underlying the male homosocial physical intimacy gap and potential pathways for closing the gap.
We currently have work underway expanding the measure to capture frequency of touch and to explore characteristics of touch beyond perceived intimacy, such as perceived risk. These projects also include measures like touch avoidance, intimate disclosure, social support, and others that can allow us to take important steps toward validating the measure – i.e., exploring convergent and discriminant validity.
In a replication and extension of our intimacy gap findings from this study we explored relationships between men’s experience with and capacity for physical intimacy in their male friendships and key mental health outcomes (e.g., depression, anxiety, loneliness, well-being). In this same study we also sought to identify whether this physical intimacy gap exists within their closest male friendships – as opposed to just existing across all their male friendships – and to what degree it is associated with measures of relational well-being (e.g., satisfaction, closeness, perceived partner responsiveness). These studies also allow us to explore predictive validity of the measurement framework. A manuscript describing this work is currently in preparation.
In work that we currently have underway, we are exploring the degree to which men exhibit pluralistic ignorance regarding comfort with and attitudes toward physical intimacy in male friendships and investigating the effectiveness of using personalized normative feedback interventions for correcting those misperceptions and ultimately increasing physical intimacy in men’s friendships.
How did you become interested in this line of inquiry?
This line of work was deeply inspired by Niobe Way’s work exploring how boys transition out of the highly tactile and expressive friendships of their youth while still expressing a desire for such friendships. This work, combined with the scholarship showing men understand the importance of intimate disclosure but seems to still engage in it less with their male friends than they do with their female friends or than women do with their same sex friends prompted me to think about other areas of platonic intimacy where male friendships may not be reaching their full potential. Physical touch was particularly interesting in this regard given the role touch plays in popular institutions of male bonding (e.g., sports, fraternities) and its role as a means of non-verbal intimate disclosure.
Ricky M. Granderson, M.P.H., M.Phil.
Ph.D. Candidate, Basic and Applied Social
Psychology
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
rgranderson@gradcenter.cuny.edu
