As a marriage and family counselor for more than fifty years, I have a long-time interest in improving the love lives of men and women. I am also a leader in the emerging field of gender-specific health care and specialize in working with men and their families. I first learned about the work of Dr. Leonard Sax in 2005 when I read his book Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences.
Dr. Sax also wrote the book Boys Adrift in 2007 with a revised edition in 2016. I was excited when I was sent a copy of his 2026 edition. What he shares in the book can not only help us understand the growing epidemic of unmotivated boys and underachieving young men, but the ways unhealed males impact the lives of girls and young women. More importantly, he offers practical tools for reversing this dangerous trend and helps men and women to become true and equal partners in marriage and in life.
I recently interviewed Dr. Sax who has an unusual background and skill set. He is a board-certified family physician with many years’ experience helping children and adults. He is also a PhD psychologist who has helped youth and adults with mental, emotional, and relational health problems. He has also visited more than 500 schools over the past 25 years listening and talking with students and teachers.
He shares two stories in his book that, for me, capture the essence of problem we are facing today:
“One teacher at a high school I recently visited asked the girls in his class, ‘What words come to mind when you hear the word ‘male’? He wrote the words on the whiteboard as the girls called them out.
- The first word a girl called out can’t be printed here, but it begins with the letter ‘A’ and ends with ‘hole’
- ‘Immature,’
- ‘Mean’
- ‘Self-centered’
- ‘Disrespectful’
- ‘Unhygienic’
- ‘Not emotionally connected.’”
The second story involved a young woman Dr. Sax had seen as a physician from the time she was a child and was now a 20-year-old mother of two little toddlers of her own. When he encountered her on the street one day he said,
“I bumped into Brett the other day, and he was just going on and on about how great you are, and how funny you are, and how pretty you are. He told me he’s asked you to marry him. Twice… Lynda, how come you don’t want to marry the father of your two children?”
Her answer was short and succinct and spoke to an issue I have heard many times from other women.
“Dr. Sax, I already got two babies at home. I don’t need a third,” she answered.
In the work I have been doing in recent years as a marriage and family counselor I hear from many single or divorced women who say,
“I want real lasting love with a good man, but there aren’t any out there. I’m ready to give up.”
I tell the women that there are many good men out there, but they can be difficult to find. Men are equally discouraged,
“I’m busting my butt trying to be a good man, but women are impossible to please and they piss me off.”
I tell the guy I understand their frustration and encourage them to improve their lives and become the kind of man who the woman they want won’t be able to resist.
For anyone who has visited my website, MenAlive, they see my welcome video, “Confessions of a Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor.” Finding a partner and having a passionate, long-lasting marriage isn’t easy, even for experts. People also hear that my present wife, Carlin, and I have been married for forty-six years, and our relationship gets better through the years.
When I thought I had written my last book (number sixteen), Carlin challenged me to write at least one more.
“With all the conflict these days between women and men, you need to write a book that tells guys what you’ve learned about how to become a man of value.”
The result is my book, 12 Rules for Good Men which follows my previous book, The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why the Best is Still to Come.
Dr. Sax and I are kindred spirits. In his new edition of Boys Adrift he says,
“Across the board, women are looking to marry men who are at least as accomplished and ambitious as they are, and there are no longer enough good men to go around.”
Dr. Sax goes on to offer some disturbing statistics:
- Nearly 1 in 5 young men 25 to 34 years of age is now still living at home with a parent, compared to fewer than 1 in 8 women.
- 1 in 3 American men with only a high school degree is not working and not looking for work; that’s 10 million American men who are not even in the labor force.
It isn’t just that modern mores have changed and young people are “coupling” without formalizing it with a marriage ceremony. The trend is the same for those married as well as those living together and it is not limited to the U.S.
“Looking around the world,” says Dr. Sax, “we see a marked decline in both coupling and in the total fertility rate from the 1990s through the 2020s, in countries as diverse as Finland, Mexico, Peru, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia, and Turkey.”
Dr. Sax says,
“Healthy marriages are fundamental to a healthy society.”
He goes on to offer the reasons that so many young women now find the prospect of partnering with a young man unappealing.
“As a family doctor, I heard from a young woman who said, ‘I don’t mind so much that he earns less money than I do. But he’s just a bum. He expects me to make all the meals, clean up after him. He’s not a child. I’m not his mother.”
The Six Factors That Parents, Boys, and Young Men Need to Know to Fulfill Their Potential
In previous editions of the book, Dr. Sax described the following five factors which I will detail briefly before addressing the most recent factor that is both surprising and frightening.
- Changes in the education system with schools becoming more unfriendly to boys.
- The ubiquity of video games.
- Over-medicating boys for ADHD.
- Endocrine disruptors in the water affecting males.
- The loss of male role models to teach boys what it means to be a good man.
- The new factor: Pornography, AI Girlfriends, and the Manosphere
Pornography is nothing new, but what boys and men can view freely now is more addicting and violent than anything we’ve previously seen. Dr. Sax says,
“I’m talking about digital, streaming, online pornography, pornography generated by artificial intelligence, of the kind that didn’t really exist before 2010 or in some cases 2020.”
Dr. Sax goes on to say,
“Researchers recently found that 45% of the most popular videos on Pornhub include at least one act of physical aggression against women. Spanking, gagging, slapping, hair pulling, and choking were the most popular.”
AI girlfriends create such realistic “sex partners” that boys and men can become hooked and find they can no longer get turned on by real encounters with real women.
The Manosphere is driven by equally compelling “influencers” that draw young men in and sell them false hope for fame and fortune that supposedly will make them irresistible to women.
Is it any wonder that many boys and young are drifting further away and girls and women are checking out of the dating and mating game? Dr. Sax says,
“A 16-year-old girl told me how her 17-year-old boyfriend asked for anal sex. She said no. He said that all the girls in the porn videos love anal sex. She said, ‘You idiot, those are actresses. They are being paid. They are pretending. How about we shove something hard up your behind and see how much you like it?’ The relationship ended soon after.”
Fortunately, healing is not only possible, but things are changing for the better. We all have a part to play. We invite you to join us.
Learn More Here
To learn more about Dr. Leonard Sax, his books, and his work, visit him at:
https://www.leonardsax.com/. He says he responds directly to those who reach out to him.
You can watch my interview with Dr. Sax here.
If you would like to read more articles like these, I invite you to subscribe to my free weekly newsletter at MenAlive.com: https://menalive.com/email-newsletter/
The post Boys Adrift: The Epidemic Destroying Our Families and The Man Who Knows How to Heal Them appeared first on MenAlive.