Men Are Losing Their Friends, and It Could Be Killing Them

A colleague of mine told me this story in a recent email and has granted me permission to repeat it. (I've changed a few details to protect his privacy.)

“For a long time, I considered Gerry my closest friend. We both liked anime, which is how we got to know each other. At first, it was just amazing to geek out with Gerry about 'Neon Genesis Evangelion' for a couple of hours. I never got the sense that he judged me for being obsessed. I couldn’t talk to anyone else like that.

"After I moved to another city, we talked on the phone a lot. Sometimes, we’d put on a DVD and watch it together in our separate homes and talk as it played through. A couple of times we visited each other and we’d spend the whole weekend talking. Not just about anime but about everything we were going through, like jobs and relationships. It was really important to me.

"But then something happened, and he stopped calling me back all of a sudden. I still don’t know why. I haven’t heard from him in years. I don’t think I’ll ever have another friend like that.”

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Reading over my colleague's statement of connection and loss, you might wonder exactly how old he was when he met Gerry and when their relationship ended. Was he a teenager, making a close friend for the first time? Was Gerry someone he lived with in college?

The truth is, he and Gerry—both American men and both heterosexual—became friends in their late 30s. In so doing, they contravened many of this country's most entrenched but unspoken rules of friendship. As you may have heard, men of a certain age do not have friends.

Maybe you've noticed this or joked about it. Maybe you've seen comedy on the subject, like a well-known "Saturday Night Live" (SNL) sketch called "Man Park." But why is it so easy to imagine close friendships among young boys (as in the 1986 movie "Stand By Me") but so difficult to find grown (generally heterosexual) men who still have deep friendships with their peers?

Niobe Way, professor of psychology at New York University and deliverer of a TED talk on the subject, finds the responsibility in us all, collectively—in those aspects of American culture that prioritize stereotypically masculine qualities (meaning strength, stoicism and self-reliance) over those that are more commonly seen as feminine; in short, those that praise thinking over feeling, independence over connection. Boys, according to Way, want and need close friendships as much as anyone else does but are socialized as they grow to suppress these needs and live in ways that are contrary to their nature.

In her book Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, Way quotes boys as old as 15 saying they love and rely on their friends and, in some cases, even feel as though they couldn't live without the ability to share their feelings with these friends. But shortly thereafter, late adolescence takes hold and seems to exert a chilling, emotionally oppressive effect.

Boys who once benefited from the love and support of other boys their age suddenly begin to fear being labeled as weak, feminine, or "gay"; consequently, they withdraw inside themselves and strive to emulate the stolid, independent, emotionless role models they find so easily in the culture.

Perhaps they've been told to "man up." Perhaps they're bullied by older boys who would distance themselves from such vulnerability. Perhaps their families aren't comfortable with boys who don't exemplify the predominant cultural model of masculinity.

Regardless, these boys somehow learn to bottle up their feelings, and the consequences aren't good. This late-adolescent change in boys' relationships occurs just as the rate of suicide among American boys balloons in size, at one point reaching a height of four times the rate among girls the same age (according to The New Yorker in 2011).

Even among less catastrophic circumstances, loneliness isn't healthy, as a 2019 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology found: the "risk presented by social isolation is very similar in magnitude to that of… smoking, lack of access to care and physical inactivity."

It doesn't get better as boys grow older. The American Sociological Review found in 2006 that adult, white, heterosexual men were the most isolated and had the fewest friends of any group of people in the United States. This lack of social connectedness comes with a 50 percent risk of a shortened lifespan; the report went as far as stating that the health risks of loneliness were as severe as those of obesity.

More recently, Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, reported that being lonely increases the risk of having a stroke or heart disease by 30 percent; in lonely people, Murthy pointed out, the odds of developing dementia also grow by 50 percent.

Some men believe they can find satisfying friendships at work or build them around hobbies. Briefer, more superficial male relationships may indeed develop this way, as Robin Dunbar, an Oxford professor of evolutionary biology, stated in a 2017 article in The Times of London. Consequently, according to Geoffrey Greif, author of 2008's The Buddy System, these friendships tend to be less oriented toward providing emotional support and more toward pursuing common activities.

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A 2021 survey by the Survey Center on American Life found similar results, noting that women are more likely to have serious conversations with their friends than men. Moreover, some writers have recently pointed out that men tend to express their feelings to women in their lives more often than other men.

Daniel Cox, in an article posted on the Institute for Family Studies website, says,

"Many heterosexual men seek out [emotional support and connection] exclusively from the women in their life, whether it's a partner or platonic friend. Thus, men's emotional development becomes an unwelcome burden that women increasingly refuse to take on."

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein echoed these sentiments in a 2018 podcast, where he lamented the diminishing number of friends most men hold onto as they age. Klein noted that it's harder to maintain common activities when life takes friends in different directions:

"If your friendship is based on activities—on hanging out, playing video games, doing sports, or whatever manly things we're supposed to be doing—then as your life changes, as you move away, have children, or you get married, and you have a job, then how do you keep those friendships up? Because the material that they were based on is no longer there. And so the friendships fall away." (Klein, 2018).

But these male-male friendships aren't only dissolving because of a lack of things to talk about. They're not enduring because they haven't been forged on intimacy or vulnerability, and they don't involve the deeper connections people can make when they're willing to be "real" with each other.

And as I mentioned earlier, this isn't only a problem for men who long for closer friendships or wish they still had someone they could play poker with every Thursday night; it's a problem for public health.

So, although some will (rightly) argue that it's quite a neat trick to find a way in which American culture mistreats men, it may also be true that this is one such way: although our boys and young men may be born with all kinds of personalities and interests, and can form many types of close relationships throughout their youth, as they grow, they will inevitably get the message that only a narrow model of manhood is valued and expected. This message is pernicious and harmful. It damages men's relationships, leaving them isolated and lonely, and in so doing, can also significantly damage their well-being.

As it is, perhaps the sudden end to my colleague's friendship with Gerry can be understood in this way: It may have ended because its closeness posed a challenge to masculinity. My colleague felt close to his friend Gerry, but Gerry may have begun to feel threatened and uncomfortable with this form of intimacy.

As unhappy as the story is, it is certainly not unusual. Few men can maintain such close relationships as they grow older. Few men, as they age, can share their feelings easily. On that point, I will allow Klein the last word, as he may be able to say it better than I can:

"It hurts our happiness in life, it hurts our health, it changes our life prospects, and it sucks… It sucks not to have people to tell you about what's going on with you. We should not be so caught up in the stereotypes of what maleness is supposed to be that we cannot have relationships with people that are about our own lives. It's just weird."

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