How to be a better man is one of those searches that returns two opposite answers, both of them loud. One camp hands over a traditional script: provide, stay stoic, toughen up, need no one. The other hands over a critique: unlearn your masculinity, apologise for it, dismantle it. We think both miss, and the more useful answer sits between them, grounded less in ideology than in what the evidence actually shows helps men and the people around them. Most of it turns out to be quietly ordinary, and a small part of it is specific to being a man in a way worth spelling out.
Most of it is just being a better person
Start with the unglamorous truth. The large majority of what makes someone a better man has nothing to do with being a man at all. Honesty, reliability, kindness, keeping your word, taking responsibility instead of shifting blame, treating people with respect whether or not they can do anything for you: these are the bedrock of good character, and they are the same for everyone. A man who does these things well is a good man for the same reasons a woman who does them is a good woman. Any advice that skips this and races to gender-specific tips has put the decoration before the foundation.
This matters because a great deal of manhood content sells the decoration, the grooming and the posture and the dominance cues, as though character were a style. It is not. If we want a single place to begin, it is here, in the plain virtues that no one outgrows, and the honest news is that they are built by practice rather than personality. You become reliable by keeping small promises, honest by telling inconvenient truths, kind by doing the considerate thing when it costs you a little.
The part that is specific to men
Where being a better man does take on a particular shape is in a few norms that men are taught more insistently than women, and that the research links to real harm. The most studied is the ideal of total self-reliance, the sense that a real man handles everything alone and never admits he is struggling. In the largest analysis of its kind, the psychologist Y. Joel Wong and colleagues pooled dozens of studies of how strongly men conform to masculine norms. They found that conformity to masculine norms was modestly and unfavourably linked to mental health and more strongly linked to reluctance to seek psychological help, with the norms of self-reliance, playboy behaviour and power over women showing the most consistently negative associations.
Read plainly, that is a map of what to loosen. Not manhood itself, but a few brittle parts of the script: the belief that needing help is weakness, that emotional restraint must be total, that other people are conquests or subordinates rather than equals. Being a better man, in the sense the evidence supports, means keeping the strengths the tradition gets right, courage, dependability, the willingness to protect and provide, while dropping the specific habits that isolate men and damage those close to them. Asking for help when you are sinking is not a failure of manhood. It is one of its more useful skills.
Rebuild the friendships
There is a second, very concrete area where men have quietly lost ground, and it may be the highest-payoff place to act. Men’s close friendships have thinned out dramatically over a generation. Survey data show that the share of men reporting at least six close friends fell from 55 per cent in 1990 to 27 per cent by 2021, while the proportion saying they have no close friends at all rose several times over, a decline sharp enough that researchers have named it a friendship recession.
This is not a small social nicety. Friendlessness feeds loneliness, and loneliness erodes both mental and physical health. It also loads the whole weight of a man’s emotional life onto a single romantic partner, which is a heavy and often unfair burden for that relationship to carry. So a specific, unsentimental piece of self-improvement for many men is to treat friendship as something you actively build rather than something that is supposed to just happen: to text first, to organise the thing, to keep showing up, to let conversations go a little deeper than sport and work. It feels effortful because the script never taught it, and it pays off precisely because so few men do it.
Keeping it honest
Two cautions keep this balanced. The first is that the fashionable habit of treating masculinity itself as the problem tends to overshoot, and it can leave men feeling that the goal is to be less of a man rather than a better one. That framing is neither fair nor effective. The aim is not to sand men down into apology; it is to keep what is good in the tradition and shed the parts that quietly hurt. Courage, strength, protectiveness and drive are not flaws to be corrected.
The second is that self-improvement has its own trap, the endless optimisation that mistakes buying and hustling and perfecting for becoming a better person. A better man is not a more impressive product. He is someone a little more honest, a little more reliable, a little more willing to connect and to be helped than he was last year.
So the answer is layered but not complicated. Build the plain virtues that make anyone better, since they carry most of the weight. Loosen the specific masculine norms, above all the horror of needing anyone, that the evidence ties to worse lives. Rebuild the friendships the culture has let slide. And do all of it without treating your own manhood as a defect to be managed. Being a better man is mostly being a better person, plus the courage to drop the few rules that were quietly making the job harder.
