Why It's Hard for Many Men to Form Close Friendships

The men I know—most are retired now—say that making and keeping friends becomes increasingly difficult as they move through the life course. Although they recognize this, few complain. Friendship, as they see it, is intertwined with aging, health, and general vitality. Mobility and money are issues. People they care about die, move away, or transfer into retirement homes. One does well to hold on to long-standing relationships, even if that means just communicating with those people once in a while. And lucky indeed are the men who have spouses, partners, children, and grandchildren to share their life and serve as its emotional center.

I’ll add that many of the men I’m referring to are relatively active socially. They belong to lunch and garden clubs, hike with others, exercise, and play sports as health permits. They have external contacts. However, “good” or “close” friends? That’s another matter.

Close Friends

That absence of close male friends is a general feature of American society. According to a 2021 survey of 2,000 adults, 15 percent of the male respondents said they had no close friends at all. (That compares to 3 percent who said this in 1990.) Fewer than half of the 2021 men said they were satisfied with the number of friends they had.

Most readers, especially males, won’t be surprised by this information. There are periods in a man’s life when non-romantic bonding with another male is important. As in the legendary friendship of Damon and Pythias, we want someone who will stand up for us or “have our back,” even if this means compromising their own interests. Building relationships, as Erik Erikson stressed, is a fundamental commitment of young adults. All of us need peers to refine our values, confirm our identities, and help us sort through situations and their emotional implications. Acquiring or “winning” special friends is key to this process.

It helps, too, that our educational system isolates people into age-based cohorts. Dormitory living accelerates this bonding. So do largely sex-segregated activities like sports or male-dominated ones like video games. Many of us made good friends in those settings; those people continue to hold important places in our life histories. Partly because those relationships symbolize a time when we were young, fresh, and full of possibilities, we are reticent to give them up.

My father had a good friend of that sort. Young professors at the same college for several years, the two men had a close, if rivalrous, camaraderie. Later, my father’s friend moved away to take a series of administrative posts at various universities. Nevertheless, the fellow kept a photo of my dad on his desk for all his career and referred to him as “my buddy.” That commitment persisted even after my father died and the other man entered dementia.

Once again, male readers won’t be shocked to hear that the two men almost never saw one another or even communicated (that was left to their wives). But each acknowledged that the other was central to who they had become. Friendships of that kind function much as “lost loves.” In that sense, a special relationship was broken unalterably by death or other circumstance. Now it lives on as an ideal that cannot be violated. And current relationships pale by comparison.

Work Friends

Less dramatically, most of us have varieties of male contacts. Once education ends, a special source of these relationships is work: on the job and frequently after hours. Many of these are just “drinking buddies”; people we wouldn’t invite to our homes. Others make the transition from co-workers, colleagues, and associates to what we consider friends. In that light, male work friends and their spouses/partners are a common source for couples’ socializing, at least for the middle classes. The effects of the COVID era’s work-from-home model haven’t been studied fully, but it seems clear that the absence of daily face-to-face interaction can only erode male friendship.

Activity-Based Friendships

Similar in character are activity-based friendships. Perhaps we’re included in a group of fellows who golf or lift weights at the gym. More formally, there are various bowling leagues, car and motorcycle clubs, and hobbyist associations. Those gatherings punctuate our lives, provide bridges to retirement, and help us transcend the limitations of our work friends.

That said, what man has not been asked by his spouse or partner: “So, what do you guys talk about when you’re together?” The answer is as inevitable as it is evasive: “Oh, this and that” or simply, “the game.”

Instrumental Friends

Another category of friendship is the “instrumental.” Most of us need someone to assist us from time to time. That means picking us up from the airport, helping with a repair job, or watching the house while we’re away. Our friend asks us to do the same for him.

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Middle- and upper-class people may be rich enough to hire out many of these services; the working class tends to depend on like-situated friends and family. Pointedly, working-class men commonly own trucks and have skills related to home improvement. Significant also is the fact that extended families in the working-class merge kin and friendship roles. A man’s cousin or brother-in-law may also be his best friend.

How Men Socialize

It is sometimes observed that males tend not to have face-to-face relationships but instead have side-by-side ones. To be sure, many interactions are side-by-side. Think of watching a game, sitting at a bar, going down the fairway in a golf cart, fishing, or traveling somewhere in a truck. So positioned, guys talk. There are, of course, face-to-face settings. But often these are competitive occasions, as participants square off across a tennis net, chess board, or poker table.

What about face-to-face lunch conversations, that staple of female relationships? Modern men do eat together, though lunch is more common than dinner. Ideally, there is a stated reason, such as “business” or “catching up.” Often, the meal is associated with another activity such as a sport or hobby, or it's a break for co-workers. Having three or four at the table rather than two keeps the conversation going and, in general, makes for a lighter mood.

Older generations of men know that lunch customs and other face-to-face interactions historically confronted imputations of homosexuality and femininity, those twin terrors of the traditional male. Anxious to avoid such claims, men gathered in larger groups and treated each other in mildly aggressive, joking ways. The rhetoric of brotherhood—playful, physically proximate, and non-sexual—prevailed. Sports bar culture perpetuates that pattern today. Most men would say that this is the way they like to socialize, but these customs foreground only a certain range of emotions and prevent the most serious, disclosive conversations.

Male Communication

Do men lack communication skills? Most of my own friends through the years have been charming people who like to talk about their own activities. Precious few have been good listeners.

Indeed, it’s quasi-comical how short the listening tolerance is. Unless he is a gifted raconteur, the speaker has less than 10 seconds to say his piece. After that, minds wander; someone bursts in with his own account of the matter at hand. A man who drones for more than 30 seconds is thought to be socially inept; so is the fellow who goes on about a physical ailment, emotional imbalance, or the behavior of a girlfriend or spouse. For such reasons, conversations have a blurting quality. The general tenor is jovial cynicism.

Should men change their ways? One hundred years ago, a young salesman for a meat packing firm began offering lectures on communication techniques for rising businessmen. Based on stenographer’s notes from those lectures and published in 1936, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People became one of the most influential books of the 20th century.

His lectures are filled with self-help principles, but I’ll list his “six ways to make people like you” here. They are: Become genuinely interested in other people. Smile. Remember and use people’s names. Be a good listener. Talk in terms of the other person’s interest. Make them feel important.

A critic would note that these are mostly techniques to build relationships with people you don’t know well and ways to get people to buy your products and follow your orders. But the overall theme of Carnegie’s advice—listen sympathetically, acknowledge but deflect anger, offer praise and support, avoid falsehood, seek advice—is probably as useful to men today as it was back then.

Friendship-Building

My own, more sociological, sensibility is that men need to keep putting themselves in situations where friendship-building is possible. Get out of the house. Find some activity that interests you and that draws like-minded comrades. Talk with the people there about a range of topics. Take interest in their life experiences. Take some risks by inviting people you like to do something socially. Offer to support some project they’re doing and be willing to ask for their support in return.

Most friendships develop in stages and require ongoing input. Ready to perform these functions or not, my older friends know this is the task at hand.

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