Wanted: Just Male Friends?

I explore some ideas and personal experiences about making and having buddies.

My wife once told me: you don’t have any good friends.

I scoffed at the suggestion, thinking that her statement was categorically wrong. I may have asked what it meant to be a good friend. Surely I had them.

Does “good” mean you see them once a week? Per month? That you call on a frequent-enough basis?

I pointed her to many good friends in my life. There are friends from college that I don’t see or talk to frequently but feel no less close now as compared to then. We interact like we did 20 years ago every time we’re together in person.

There are close friends from various moments throughout my career. I colloquially call one group “The Gentlemen” - a group of 5 former coworkers that spent our formative early(ish) career years together. We worked a lot and did many things together. Nights out on town. Dinners. Etc.

And I have more recent close friends from common interest and pure proximity. I belong to a local running club and think of some of them as close friends. One of my neighbors, too. A former coworker of my wife that shares numerous common interests and seems to laugh at my mostly terrible jokes.

I also have mixed groups. There are men and women that I consider close friends, a trait that is sometimes perceived as misaligned. A guy with a wife isn’t allowed to be friends with women, right? So goes the myth, anyways. Plenty of women in my purview are much more interesting than many men. But there are plenty of people to like on both sides.

In a piece for The New York Times Magazine about worsening male friendships, Sam Graham-Felsen highlighted one roadblock for men (emphasis mine):

What I didn’t know is that American men are getting significantly worse at friendship. A study in 2024 by the Survey Center on American Life found that only 26 percent of men reported having six or more close friends. Polling a similar question in 1990, Gallup had put this figure at 55 percent. The same Survey Center study found that 17 percent of men have zero close friends, more than a fivefold increase since 1990.

I know I’m still capable of connecting deeply with friends, but it would be a stretch to say that I’m close to them the way I once was. I hardly ever talk on the phone with my friends, and rarely spend time with them one-on-one. On the rare occasion that I do, it’s usually in the context of — or rather, under the pretext of — watching a game. Then, with eyes directed at a screen, we discuss topics: politics, podcasts, food, fitness routines, the game itself. Maybe we’ll playfully smack-talk a fellow friend, or commiserate about some schleppy aspect of parenthood. Rarely (as in, never) do we turn to each other and ask: “How are you doing?”

And:

A buddy of mine whose family recently moved to a new town tells me he has already made several new guy friends, whom he regularly invites along for hikes. I praise him for bucking the trend of middle-aged male friendlessness, and ask him what they talk about on these hikes. “You know,” he says, “what’s going on in our lives.” I press him: “Do you talk about personal stuff, like your marriages?” “No,” he says. “No talking about wives.”

In effect, Sam’s friends were unable to talk to other men about anything emotional, or mentally-draining, or sensitive, and instead upheld ordinary discourse - the kind without many feelings.

And that makes sense. Anecdotally, in most of my male groups, conversation about some of the deepest and perhaps most challenging parts of life doesn’t happen much.

I’ll come back to my other point again here: that there is something inherently misaligned (or wrong) about an opposite sex friend. There shouldn’t be if it helps us possess enough friends. I think many women suffer from the other side of that myth.

Heterosexual relationship contracts include a clause to restrict relationships with the opposite. Friends, sure, but relationships no. Of course, other non-heterosexual relationships align to similar stay-faithful principles.

Developing a friendship is developing a relationship, too. It’s not romantic but it doesn’t have to avoid the entirety of the relationship to provide emotional and mental utility. You should be able to speak to someone - male or female - when you’re dealing with something and want a pep-talk.

But Sam’s article explicitly states that some men - probably many - don’t get what they want out of male friendships. Maybe, instead, they need female friends too.

I also think it might be worth rethinking how to make them friends of any kind

A common way revolves around situational proximity. You’re in a group together at a bar. Or standing and waiting at your kids' activity. Or something that gives you enough time to attempt to make a friend if you want to try.

What if you pay to make friends?

This was a thesis of sorts for my post about Greet, a now-defunct service that organized mixed-group meetups for several random people.

And it aligns with another adventure of mine: a group therapy session. All men.

What do we talk about? Lots of things. But each of us runs through a “check-in” of sorts, describing what’s happened over the past week and how we’re feeling.

Often, at least one guy in the group is dealing with something. Anxiety over a spat with a spouse. The crush of overwhelming work. The death or impending death of a family member. Discomfort with imbalances in friendships. A substance problem.

I joined the group last year after a lay-off and in the midst of dealing with some habitual problems that needed solving. And the group became my place for honest, open, vulnerable, accountability. How did I feel? What was bothering me? What did I intend to do? What advice did they have?

Over the last year, the group’s members have become my friends. And, sure, they are friends of a different origin and construction, but friends just like others. We see each other once a week. We haven’t hung out outside the structure of the group, but do sometimes have time before/after to chat and get along well.

Sam described some of these dynamics in his article (emphasis mine):

…Guys forget that friendship is a relationship — it requires watering.” Among the watering techniques they suggest: “TCS,” which stands for “text weekly, call monthly, see quarterly.” “The great hack about having a regular event,” Karo says, “is you don’t have to worry about calling — it happens automatically.”

Over the past year, I’ve tried to put Ritter and Karo’s tips into practice. I’m not coming close to hitting their TCS quotas, but I’m calling old friends like Rob more frequently than I used to, and I’ve been making the effort to see friends in person more too. Recently I got together with a college buddy in Manhattan. We’d had a yearslong running “we should meet up” text thread that never led to anything, and then he invited me to see a concert at one of those Greenwich Village dives I used to frequent in my early 20s. I was resistant to going. It was a long train ride on a bitter-cold night, and I worried that going to see some washed-up folk rocker would make me feel old and lame. But I forced myself to go.

Nothing extraordinary happened that night. We met up for burgers, followed them up with enormous ice cream cones, went to the show and sang along to the cheesy, wonderful lyrics that had blown our college-aged minds. Throughout the night, I caught him up on some of the struggles I’d had over the past decade, and he lent a sympathetic and encouraging ear. Buoyed by his kindness and curiosity, I asked him about his family too. And for the first time, I asked him about the intricacies of his job in finance, which turned out to be much more interesting than I imagined.

On my way home, I called my wife and ecstatically told her what a great time I had. When she asked me what, specifically, was so amazing about the night, I couldn’t really explain it. Nothing in particular stood out. We didn’t have some kind of transcendent conversation, but we had no problem talking honestly. We didn’t empty our souls, the way my wife and her friends might do with one another. That was OK; we related on our own terms. I felt free and easy the whole night, afloat in the presence of an old friend’s unjudgmental love. I watched the city whir by in ribbons of red and white light, and I knew I was on the precipice of something. I could do this again. I wasn’t cursed to some joyless Sisyphean slog. I didn’t have to crush life. I was allowed to enjoy it — had been all along. It was like some big, impenetrable door had swung open, and on the other side my friends were there, waiting.

These are the same expressions that come out of my group sessions. I usually feel a lot better overall. There are sometimes specific triggers, but often the simple act of getting together and chatting does the best work.

And, in closing with a link back to my point about mixed groups, I often most enjoy my time out with friends when the groups are mixed.

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