Men’s friendships: why there are fewer of them with the years, and what keeps them going

Your partner is going away for the weekend with her friends, and on her way out she says: “Why don’t you ring someone, go somewhere together.” You open your contacts. There is Gregor, with whom you shared a room in halls for four years; you last spoke when his father died. There is Matic from your old job, who sends you the same thumbs-up every birthday. There is the group chat “Lads, football”, where the last message is dated two years ago. You put the phone down and go and mow the lawn.

Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody fell out, nobody betrayed anyone. The friendships simply thinned, so slowly that there was never a moment when you could have noticed. In this post I would like to look at why this happens to men so often as the years go by, what we really know about it from research and what is merely convenient generalisation, and what keeps friendships alive. Without a sermon: if you are content with three people in your life, there is nothing wrong with you.

What the numbers show, and why they need careful reading

The most frequently quoted figure comes from the United States. In 2021 the Survey Center on American Life published a survey in which 15 per cent of men said they had no close friends at all. In a Gallup poll in 1990 the figure was 3 per cent. The share rose among women too, only less sharply.

A figure like that deserves a pause before we repeat it as proof of a “crisis of men”. It is one country. The 1990 and 2021 surveys were not carried out in the same way. And what counts as a “close friend” is something each respondent interprets for themselves. The figure tells us something is shifting; it doesn’t tell us why, and it can’t simply be carried over to Slovenia. I don’t know of a comparable Slovenian study of men’s friendships, so I won’t invent a number for one.

The broader picture is firmer. In 2013 Cornelia Wrzus and her colleagues combined several hundred studies in a meta-analysis of how social networks change across life. The network of friends and acquaintances grows until young adulthood and then gradually shrinks; the family part of the network stays fairly stable. This holds for men and women alike. A shrinking circle after thirty is therefore not a male peculiarity but the ordinary course of life. The question is what remains once the circle has shrunk, and that is where the differences begin.

Loneliness, solitude and social isolation are not the same

Before going further, we need to separate three words that tend to blur into one when we talk about friendship.

• Social isolation is something you can count: few contacts, few people, rare meetings. It is a description of the situation from the outside.
• Loneliness is a feeling: the painful gap between the contact you have and the contact you would like. It is a description from the inside. You can be lonely in a full house, and with few people around you, you are not necessarily lonely.
• Solitude is time you spend alone, often by choice, and which can fill you up. A Saturday in the workshop or a walk up a hill on your own is not a sign that something is wrong.

I explain the difference in more detail in Loneliness is not solitude: the difference that changes everything. It matters here because the man in the opening scene may not be lonely at all. He may be fine, and an empty Saturday may suit him. Or he may have mown the lawn so that he wouldn’t have to think about having no one to ring. From the outside those two men look the same. Only he knows the difference.

Friendship that stood on a framework

Most friendships in youth don’t come from a decision but from repetition. The same desk, the same training session, the same room in halls, the same bus. You see each other without anyone having to arrange it. Jeffrey Hall of the University of Kansas estimated that it takes roughly two hundred hours spent together to get from acquaintance to close friend; at school and university those hours pile up by themselves. How they can be accumulated later is described in How to make friends at forty: why it is harder and what helps.

When the framework dissolves, someone has to take over the work the timetable used to do: ring, suggest a date, book the court, persist after two cancellations. That is logistics, not emotion, and that is exactly why it seems unimportant. But without it a friendship lives on memory alone.

The framework can vanish without a move, too. Anyone who has started working from home has lost the corridor, the lunch break and the walk to the car, where half the conversations took place; I write about this in Working from home and quiet loneliness: what is lost when the corridor disappears. Retirement is similar: with the job go the people you saw every day and never called friends.

Shoulder to shoulder

In 1982 the psychologist Paul Wright described a difference that has been repeated often since: men’s friendships are said to run more often “side by side”, around a shared activity, and women’s “face to face”, around conversation. What is repeated less often is the other half of his article, whose very title questioned the idea that either way was inferior: the differences are moderate and largely fade in long, solid friendships.

That activity is not a poor substitute for talk is also suggested by a study by Sam Roberts and Robin Dunbar. They followed young people through the move from secondary school to university, a period when friendships tend to loosen. Among the young women, emotional closeness was maintained chiefly by talking. Among the young men, talking on the phone did not have that effect; closeness was maintained by doing things together. The study is small and was carried out on students, so I wouldn’t stretch it to all men of all ages. But the direction is useful: for many people “let’s go for a ride” is what “let’s go for a coffee” is for someone else.

You can see it in Slovenia as well. The volunteer fire brigade, a day in the mountains, the boules court, the veterans’ league, cutting firewood together, the choir. These are not places anyone goes “for a talk”, and yet a good deal gets said there, in passing, while working, with eyes on some third thing. On this idea community workshops for men grew up in Australia, known as Men’s Sheds, with the motto that men don’t talk face to face, they talk shoulder to shoulder.

The trap of this way of being friends isn’t the activity itself. The trap is when the friendship stands on it alone. When a knee can no longer take football, or the team breaks up, you find out whether there was anything else alongside.

Where it gets stuck: when things are hard

A shoulder-to-shoulder friend is entirely enough for most of life. The difference shows at a divorce, a redundancy, a diagnosis, the death of a parent. Then it isn’t enough to have someone to go to the match with. You need someone you can tell that you aren’t sleeping.

The developmental psychologist Niobe Way spent several years listening to boys in American secondary schools and wrote the book Deep Secrets about it. Boys of thirteen and fourteen spoke of their best friends with striking tenderness, about trust and the secrets they shared. Towards the end of secondary school many of the same boys described no longer having those friendships, and missing them. Way concludes that boys don’t “learn” the need for closeness late; rather, they learn to hide it.

It is worth being precise here. The point is not that men “can’t do feelings”; that is a stereotype and research doesn’t support it. The point is a rule that many absorb: you manage on your own. In a 2017 meta-analysis Y. Joel Wong and colleagues showed that this very norm, self-reliance, is among the aspects of traditional masculinity most consistently linked with poorer mental health and with less help-seeking. How this affects the road to a therapist is described in Men and therapy: why they come later and what stops them. In friendship the same norm has a quieter effect: when it is hardest, you don’t ring. Not because the friend wouldn’t come, but because you don’t want to be a burden.

Vulnerability here doesn’t mean a long confession. Often it is one sentence more than usual. “Things are hard at home.” “I’m worried about work.” A friend rarely answers that with a lecture. More often he says: “It wasn’t easy for us either.” And after that sentence the friendship is different from what it was before.

When your partner is your only confidant

Asked who they talk to about personal things, many men in long relationships answer with a single name: their partner’s. The literature on social support describes this pattern often, although of course it doesn’t apply to everyone. There is nothing wrong with it as long as it is one source of support and not the only one.

When it is the only one, two problems arise. The first is weight: one person can hardly carry everything, from work worries to the fear of ageing, and a partner who is also the organiser of your shared social life often grows tired without being able to say of what. The second is fragility. After a divorce or a partner’s death, a man loses not only her but often also access to the shared friends she kept up. Just when he would need a network most, he discovers it was borrowed.

So looking after your own friendships is also something you do for the relationship. Not in place of closeness at home, but alongside it.

What it sounds like in real life

Two old friends getting closer again is rarely a solemn affair. It is often awkward, brief, and happens in between other things. A conversation might sound something like this (composed, not a real person):

“Well, look who it is. I thought you’d lost my number.”
“I hadn’t. It’s just that every time I meant to ring, it was already too late in the evening.”
“Same here. How are you?”
“Fine. … Actually, not great. It’s been tense at home lately, and I didn’t know who to say it to.”
“Hm. Are you free on Saturday? I’m going up Krim, early. Come along, you can tell me on the way.”
“At six?”
“At six.”

Both ways of being close are in those few lines. One face-to-face sentence, “actually, not great”, and straight away a shoulder-to-shoulder offer that gives the sentence room. The friend didn’t ask “what’s going on” and didn’t give advice. He suggested a hill. For many people that is the most natural form of the sentence “I’m here”.

What keeps friendships going

A few fairly uncomplicated things follow from all this. None of them requires you to become a different person.

• Regularity before intensity. Basketball every other Thursday does more for a friendship than one big weekend every three years. A fixed slot removes the need to arrange things, which is exactly the job where everything stalls.
• Someone has to be the one who rings. Every group has one person who organises. If he is no longer there, the position is vacant. Ringing first doesn’t say you care more than the others. It only says you have taken on the logistics.
• A low threshold. “Let’s go for a beer sometime” doesn’t happen. “I’m running by the river on Thursday at six, are you coming?” does. The more concrete and brief the suggestion, the easier it is to say yes.
• One sentence more. Now and then, alongside the activity, say one thing that is true and not a joke. Not every time. It is enough for your friend to know that this is allowed with you.
• Don’t count who owes whom a call. Silence between old friends is most often mutual awkwardness, not resentment. When there really is something more behind it, I have written about that in When a friendship ends: a loss without a ritual.

Exercise: one message today

The exercise takes ten minutes. Its purpose is not to restore a friendship in a day but to take the first step, which is always the hardest.

1. Write down three names. People you once felt good around and with whom nothing happened, the contact just dried up. Not the ones you “ought” to be in touch with.
2. Choose one. The one from whom a reply seems most likely. Today you don’t need the courage for the hardest one.
3. Write a message with a concrete memory or prompt. For example: “I walked past the old gym today and thought of you. How are you?” No apologising for not having been in touch.
4. Add one concrete suggestion. A day, a time, an activity: “I’m going for a walk up the hill on Saturday morning, will you come?” If he lives far away, suggest a call at a set time.
5. Send it and put the phone down. If there is no reply within a week, send a short message to the next person on the list. One unanswered text says something about his week, not about you.

Where this post doesn’t apply

A post about “men’s friendships” risks generalising in its very title, so here are some limits.

The differences among men are greater than those between the sexes. Many men have deep, talkative friendships; many women prefer to spend time together around an activity. The patterns described are averages from research, most of it Western, and they don’t describe an individual. Among gay and bisexual men, too, friendships are often organised differently from what this post assumes.

Having few friends is not necessarily a problem. For some people two friends and plenty of solitude are enough. The measure is not the number but whether you have someone to ring when things are hard, and whether your situation hurts. If it doesn’t, you have nothing to fix.

Sometimes the cause isn’t logistics. If you have been withdrawing from everyone for months, if nothing gives you pleasure and every call is too great an effort, this may not be a friendship that has dried up but depression, which in men often shows itself differently from what we expect. I write about this in Depression in men: anger, withdrawal and silence instead of tears and Why depression makes you withdraw just when you need people most. A strong fear of social contact, or experiences that have made it hard to trust people, also need a different answer from “send a message”. Then it makes sense to talk to your GP or a therapist.

A friend is not a therapist and a therapist is not a friend. Therapy doesn’t replace friendships. It can, however, help you understand why it is so hard for you to tell anyone how you are. As a therapist in training under supervision in relational family therapy, I work with individuals, couples and families in person in Ljubljana, including English-speaking clients.

If loneliness turns into thoughts that nobody would miss you, don’t wait for the right moment. In Slovenia you can call the mental distress line on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samarijan confidential helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day), and in an emergency 112.

What to remember

• The circle of friends shrinks after young adulthood for everyone; among men a friendship often goes out because the framework disappears, not because anything happened.
• Loneliness is a feeling, social isolation is a number of contacts, solitude can be a choice. Only you know which applies to you.
• Shoulder-to-shoulder friendship is not inferior. The problem arises when a friendship stands on the activity alone.
• When your partner is your only confidant, it is too heavy for her and fragile for you.
• Friendships are kept going by regularity and a concrete suggestion. It starts with one message.