Let’s Start Talking About Onlyness.
The trap that's more dangerous than loneliness — and more common than we think.
Author’s note: About a year ago I wrote a piece introducing a concept I had noticed in conversations with men — Onlyness. A lot of you responded to it. In the year since, I’ve come to understand it more fully. This piece introduces a bit more depth to how it shows up in men’s lives and kicks off a series of stories revealing what it’s like from the inside.
It all started a year ago when I heard a man say: I thought I was the only one.
Another man in the room had just shared something that happened earlier that day. It wasn’t a huge revelation. But the moment had stuck with him, and once he said it out loud, every other man in the room nodded. Some said something. Some just exhaled. All of them recognized it.
What struck me was the relief that came over the room — the discovery that others shared the same struggle. That the thing this man had been carrying alone turned out to be the thing they all had in common.
Onlyness is different from loneliness.
Loneliness is the feeling of being alone. Most men know that feeling even if we don’t always say it out loud.
Onlyness is something more specific — and in my experience more common, stubborn, and damaging. It’s the belief that what we’re carrying is uniquely ours. That nobody else would recognize it. That saying it out loud would confirm something we’d rather not confirm about ourselves. It’s any aspect of our interior lives that feels like it needs to stay inside. Because letting it out will mess with whatever we’ve built.
It shows up in moments big and small. A man wants to change direction in his career but can’t say out loud that what he’s been doing isn’t working anymore. A father doesn’t know how to talk to his kid about something that matters and carries the weight of that alone. A man wants something different from his relationship and can’t find the words — or the courage — to say what that is. A man wonders whether what he’s built actually means what he thought it would and keeps that question running quietly underneath everything else.
Different situations. Different men. The same silence underneath all of it.
And here’s the thing about that silence: it’s almost always unnecessary. The thing we’re convinced is uniquely ours — the thing we’ve been carrying alone because we’re sure nobody else would recognize it — is almost always being carried by the man across from us too. He just isn’t saying it either. Because he’s concluded the same thing we have.
That’s what makes Onlyness a trap. It maintains itself. It doesn’t need anyone to enforce it. Men do it to each other without realizing it — by staying on the surface, by keeping the scripts running, by never going first — until the silence between us starts to feel like evidence. Nobody else is talking about this. So it must just be me.
It isn’t. It never is.
At its core, Onlyness is driven by one thing.
The fear of revealing weakness.
Not weakness itself. The fear of being seen as weak. Of having someone look at what we’re carrying and decide that we’re less capable, less reliable and less of a man than they thought. That fear is so embedded in how most men move through the world that we don’t even recognize it as fear anymore. It just feels like common sense. Keep it together. I can’t let anyone see the things I can’t handle.
And so, we build barricades. We quietly block off the roads that might lead us to help or growth or connection — by convincing ourselves that nobody else is on those roads anyway. They wouldn’t understand.
Different barricades. Same mechanism. Same conclusion: I’m the only one dealing with this. So I’m not going to say anything.
What I saw in that room a year ago I’ve seen many times since.
A man says a true thing out loud. And another man responds with one of two sentiments — both of them simple, both of them the most important thing he could say:
Been there — I survived this.
In it now — I’m in it with you.
And then another man says it. And then another.
That moment is the most significant thing I’ve witnessed in years of conversations with men. Not the breakthrough. Not the resolution. Just the relief — the discovery that the thing that made a man feel alone in a room full of people is actually the thing they all have in common.
I can’t overstate how important that moment is. For men who have been carrying something alone — for months, for years, sometimes for decades — that moment of recognition is the difference between a burden that feels permanent and one that can finally be put down.
This is what makes it different from advice. Nobody is fixing anything. Nobody is offering expertise. Experience becomes the currency — not solutions. Men sharing what they’re living and realizing that most of it is more universal than they ever imagined.
In the pieces that follow I’m going to show what Onlyness looks like in specific parts of a man’s life and tell stories of men who lived inside it — and found their way out.
Onlyness and Becoming a Present Father
Onlyness and Repairing Relationships
Onlyness and Making the Hard Call at Work
Onlyness and Figuring Out What’s Next
Onlyness and Living More Authentically
Onlyness and Building Emotional Resilience
Onlyness and Being the Rock
Different men. Different barricades. The same Onlyness underneath. And in every case — when the true thing finally gets said — the same relief. The same been there, in it now. The same discovery that what we carried alone was never only ours.
Once we know it’s there, we’ll see it everywhere. Starting with ourselves.
Love this post, and look forward to the future ones in this series.
In my men's groups, I see onlyness on a regular basis. But when one man overcomes their fear to be vulnerable and share their "onlyness", or their emotions around self-doubt, or not being good enough for whatever challenge life is presenting to them, they create an opportunity for "togetherness" - because as you state above, invariably other men in the group have felt or are feeling the same thing. One man's courage to be vulnerable in a group of men creates a permission structure for other men to drop their guard, be equallly vulnerable and share their fears - and onlyness becomes togetherness - which is such an incredibly valuable place for men to be in with each other.
Jim, you're pointing to something very real. I see it in my practice too. The great thing about my work is that men hire me to be that reflection, and when they join other men and me in Tolomen—the men's group I facilitate—they experience the illusion of onlyness there too.
What confounds this work, and I hesitate to name it for so many reasons, is trauma. It's both big and little T trauma that concerns me. Trauma is the source for the development of protector parts, something men are very adept at creating, something we learn to do early in life.
These are the parts that can get in the way of this work. They're not bad. They're just doing the good work of protecting us, but the consequence is often an apparently closed-hearted person. It's only apparent, though. There is an open heart in there. It's just under guard.