We're used to women being painted as needy, clingy and des­perate. According to every magazine ever, Jennifer Aniston is some crazy old cat lady – if you replace cats with large male co-stars. Bridget Jones taught an entire generation to mope in their pants over an unattainable-ish cad. Ulrika Johnson has turned neediness into the latter half of her career. In rom coms and chat shows, this is what women are, we're told: needy. And simultaneously we're told that the thing men are most allergic to is neediness. They're just not that into it.

But now, neediness is crossing genders. More and more, it's the boys who are being portrayed, and in turn perceived, as the needy sex – a negative hangover from the concept of 'the new man' which allowed men to, shock horror, open up and express their emotions in a way that didn't involve stilted chats with mates ending in analysis of team sports and the crushing of beer cans on foreheads.

Now that middle-class affliction, the 'I'm so troubled even though there's nothing actually wrong with me' matrix, seems to be widespread among male celebrity.

The representation is perhaps as unfair as its female counterpart, but it's also to do with the increasing feminisation of male traits. In recent decades, men have been receiving conflicting messages from the media about gender identity, something that women have been dealing with for as long as magazines have been in existence. On a whim, pop media flicks between idealising men who are new-age, stoic, metrosexual, uber-masculine, strong and silent Don Draper types, James Franco multi-taskers, laddish, sensitive, retrosexual, and a host of other categories. Whether the birth of male neediness is a result of such mixed-messaging, or just another link in the increasingly knotted chain, it's hard to figure out. All we know is that it exists.

A uniquely Irish neediness also exists. It's a trait of national male insecurity fostered by emotional overdevelopment (you could blame the Irish mammy, if you want), and it often manifests itself in a reluctance to commit in case there's anything better out there. A forceful example of this can be found in journalist Emma Forrest's memoir Your Voice In My Head, in which she writes about the end of her relationship with barrel of neediness Colin Farrell (although she never actually names him).

We set the scene when Farrell is on location somewhere. "An hour into a late-night phone call, he broaches a new topic. 'When I get back from this film, let's have a miniature human, that grows.' I freeze, look around my bedroom for witnesses. 'A baby?' 'Yeah, one of them.' We agree to a road trip across America when he gets back. He asks me to book out Christmas and my birthday for a trip to Istanbul. He's decided that we should definitely start trying for a baby in January. I want everything he wants. 'The only thing I know for certain,' he writes, 'is that I want us to be a family.' He texts me from the plane to say he'll be in my arms in a few hours and our life together will begin in earnest. Then he turns off his phone and the plane takes off. When he arrives at my door, he is trembling. 'I think I need space,' he says. It takes me a while to understand this is him leaving our relationship. A thought occurs. 'Did you think that if we had a baby, you wouldn't be able to leave? Is that why you wanted me to get pregnant?' 'Maybe. That might be true.' He can't look at me because he is crying so hard."

I don't mean to sound cruel, but you kind of want to kick him, don't you? Metaphorically that is.

A contradiction at the heart of male neediness is that it is often combined with grand gestures (Farrell used to FedEx Forrest a single Werther's toffee from across the globe). But these dramatic gestures rarely have any 'real-life' follow up. It's what we call manic romance, the art of creating high highs, which then leave a vacuum because there's no meaningful way of backing them up with the mundane stuff that forms the meat of relationships.

Robbie Williams typified neediness in men in the late 1990s and early '00s. His was a personality laden with self-sabotage and a desperate yearning for adoration and acceptance that could never be fulfilled. To understand this, you only had to look at the man, perched on the edge of stages in front of tens of thousands, cupping his ears and nodding his head faux-smugly – a modern version of Sally Field's "you like me, you really like me". Yet even that wasn't enough.

This craving for affirmation is generally a fruitless search, which anyone tethered to people like actor Christian Bale, Gaelic footballer Paul Galvin, soccer player Stephen Ireland, or Williams or Farrell – men explicit in their yearning for acceptance even though they're already accepted – would probably understand.

There's no doubt that vulnerability attracts many people, and in heterosexual relationships it's usually the woman who becomes obsessed with 'fixing' the other. In 2007, Brooke Feeney, an associate professor of psychology at the Carnegie Mellon university in Pittsburgh, won a large academic prize for her study of what she called "the dependency paradox". She explained that the only way to dispense with neediness was to give a needy partner all the support they could ever need, and like gradually removing stabilisers from a bike, they would begin to function without that constant supportive crutch. Feeney studied a group of couples for six months and found that the more supportive they were of each other, the more independent they were as individuals.

So if support breeds independence, then a lack of it breeds neediness. Someone needs to get Colin Farrell a copy of this study, stat.