Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?

New York Times

25-05-2025

The last problem I ever thought I would have was loneliness. From grade school through my late 20s, I had a wide circle of friends, and many of them were guys I'd hang with on a near-daily basis. One of these friends was Rob. We met at a sleepover birthday party when we were 10 or 11. I was nervous about going; the last sleepover party I'd been to featured 'Child's Play 2,' a film about a sociopathic, knife-wielding doll. Within five minutes of watching it, I called my mom and got a ride home, humiliated yet totally relieved.
And so, when the boys at the party gathered in the TV room for movie time, long after the pizza and sundaes were downed, I panicked. I remember being ready to call home when Rob announced he'd rather play Nintendo than watch a movie, and walked into the birthday boy's bedroom. I followed him and sat there, watching him play a relaxing, G-rated game featuring wandering elves until the sun came up. I don't remember anything we talked about, but I vividly recall the sense of having been saved by Rob, the feeling that he must have intuited how afraid I was and did this for me.
It turned out that Rob — whom I didn't actually befriend until we enrolled as seventh graders at the same big public exam school — was an exceptionally sensitive person. While almost everyone else I knew admired the elite and powerful, Rob always seemed to be scanning the room for an underdog to get behind. He was also genius-level smart and witheringly funny, especially when it came to outing liars and charlatans. He carried a fortune-cookie message in his wallet, which he loved both for its simple, solemn truth and its diabolical double meaning: 'If you promise someone something, keep it.'
For years, Rob and I were inseparable, bonding over our love of the then-hapless Boston Celtics, our disdain for posers who engaged in underage drinking, our lust for (and paralyzing fear of) girls. One summer night, after playing hours of basketball in his backyard, we climbed out of his bedroom window and onto his roof, where, under a purple and orange sky, we reflected on the physical perfection of one particular classmate, a girl neither of us would ever have a chance with, and pounded the shingles beneath us in sheer anguish.
At some point in high school, an anonymous slam book went around school, and someone wrote, 'Rob Gay and Sam Gay are swinging on each other's nuts like Tarzan.' I hated reading that, but in a way, my idiotic classmates were onto something. I never had sexual feelings for Rob, but there was an intensity to our connection that can only be described as love. I thought about him all the time, and cared, deeply, about what he thought of me. We got jealous and mad at each other, and often argued like a bitter married couple — but eventually, like a successful married couple, we'd always find a way to talk things out.
I've been going through emails Rob and I exchanged in our early 20s, and I've been amazed at how seriously we continued to take our friendship. Even in the heat of acrimony, we found the space to not only acknowledge the other's pain and point of view, but to openly affirm our admiration for each other.
This was how close I used to be with my male friends. Not just with Rob, but with nearly a dozen other dudes — dudes I spent thousands of accumulated hours with; dudes I shared my most shame-inducing secrets with; dudes I built incredibly intricate, ever-evolving inside jokes with; dudes I loved and needed, and who loved and needed me — and whom, now, I almost never talk to.
I know I'm not the only guy with this problem. The notion that men in this country suck at friendship is so widespread that it has become a truism, a punchline. 'Your dad has no friends,' John Mulaney said during an opening monologue on 'Saturday Night Live.' 'If you think your dad has friends, you're wrong. Your mom has friends, and they have husbands. Those are not your dad's friends.'
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?'
Most men I know say they'd like to hang out more but don't have time. They have little kids or demanding jobs or both, and if they have a second to breathe, they're going to spend it with their partners. One friend says, only somewhat jokingly: 'I have a family now. Why would I want to hang out with friends? What would I get out of it? What are we even going to talk about? It just feels kind of contrived.' Another friend recently transitioned out of a high-stress career. With more free time, he has been trying to see friends more, but, he says: 'There's a stigma around asking another man to hang out. It feels higher stakes for me than it does for my wife.'
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.'
To me, these conversations get at the real reason so many men struggle with friendship. It isn't that we don't have the time — it's that we don't have the energy. There are so many unspoken, byzantine bylaws to male friendship, and there's an ever-present, low-level fear of running afoul of them. For example, I've become less and less willing to tell my friends when I'm sad and suffering, because I don't want them to see me as soft and needy. But I've also become more hesitant to reach out to them, even when I know they are sad and suffering, because I'm afraid of seeming intrusive, or making them feel soft and needy.
These anxieties subside when you're constantly around your friends, as I was in high school, college and my early 20s, but when the hangs become sporadic, it's much harder to loosen up. If I haven't seen a friend for a while, even if it's an old friend, there's a clogged quality to our interactions, a vexing sense that we both want to break through but can't. Alongside the fear of emotional honesty, there's the physical discomfort too. I can't remember the last time I held onto a hug with a male friend for more than a millisecond.
This lack of intimacy among male friends may feel normal, because it's what we're accustomed to, but it isn't. Until the 20th century, it was not uncommon for men in this country to openly hold hands, sit on each other's laps in public parks and write each other passionate platonic love letters. 'You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting,' Abraham Lincoln wrote to his friend Joshua Speed, 'that I will never cease while I know how to do anything.' Herman Melville once wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne that Hawthorne's 'heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours,' and described their friendship as an 'infinite fraternity of feeling.' Today we may see these gestures as homoerotic, but men at the time — gay and straight — talked to one another this way.
Part of what changed, says Rhaina Cohen, the author of 'The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center,' is that norms around marriage shifted. For most of human history, marriages were arranged by family, or motivated by economic convenience, not driven by romantic love. Your spouse was the person you built a home with, raised kids with, went out into society with — not necessarily someone you shared your deepest fears, insecurities, desires and dreams with. That's what your friends were for. They were your soul mates.
'There was a norm around sentimentality being a core part of masculinity in the 18th and 19th centuries,' says Cohen. 'In letter-writing manuals at the time, men were encouraged to be expressive about their feelings for their friends.' Think about that: The ability to openly express affection was once a key indicator of masculinity. Nowadays, of course, manhood is measured by the opposite capacity — strong, silent repression.
We are far more likely to roast one another than to toast one another. In the buddy comedies I watched growing up, there was sometimes a moment, played for humor and pathos, when the two friends finally shed their masculine armor. But it's just a moment — and often it's immediately undercut by a cheap homophobic gag. Take 'Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure,' probably my favorite movie when I was a kid. At one point, the time-traveling besties get separated, and Bill comes to believe that Ted has been murdered by a medieval swordsman. As sad, swooning music plays, Bill falls to his knees. 'Bogus,' he says. 'Heinous. Most nontriumphant. Aw, Ted, don't be dead, dude.' But then, improbably (highly improbably), Ted re-emerges from a side door, explaining that he actually escaped before the evil dude arrived. Bill can't believe it — his friend is alive! The worst moment of Bill's life is immediately upended by the best moment of his life. Ecstatic, the friends embrace — Ted even nestles his head in the crook of Bill's neck — but then they quickly pull back. They eye each other suspiciously, and then simultaneously, disgustedly, say: 'Fag.' And then they carry on, happily bantering again, as if nothing happened.
What's funny is, of the portrayals of male friendship I grew up on, 'Bill & Ted' is on the enlightened end of the spectrum. It's an otherwise genuinely sweet depiction of two pals who can't get enough of rocking out together, who revel in their shared lingo and idiosyncratic gestures, who aren't mired in the noxiously competitive put-down culture that afflicts many male friendships. Still, that hug scene. I must have watched it a hundred times, and the message I absorbed must have been something along the lines of: If you're a dude, you can get close — but not too close — to your friends.
When I asked my friends at what point their friendships began to fall off, almost all of them said the same thing: marriage, kids. Other things happened, too — they moved, they got busier and more ambitious with their work, they got distracted by the internet — and face-to-face hangs and phone calls and long, emotional emails gradually eroded into WhatsApp replies on the fly. But really, one thing happened: Little by little, almost all of them began to prioritize their romantic lives and families over their friendships. It's certainly what happened to me.
In my late 20s, I moved in with my longtime girlfriend, whom I married soon after. Being married meant I could no longer go gallivanting around with my boys whenever I wanted to — but by then, I had largely lost the taste for gallivanting around. It was easier to stay in my warm, cozy apartment and watch prestige TV with my wife than brave the cold, filthy subways and blow money at stinky bars. I was becoming more committed to writing and wanted to wake up early, without a hangover, and get to work on a novel. My friends were still important to me, but not that important. My empathic wife (who is an editor at this magazine) was fulfilling pretty much all my emotional needs.
Then we had our first child. I had made the decision to be a stay-at-home dad, with the idea that I'd squeeze in my writing early in the morning and after bedtime. This meant that I'd have even less time to see my friends, but I didn't mind. Being a new dad and having vast meadows of time to bond with my son was exhilarating. After a while, though, the repetitiveness of our routines — playground, park, the other playground — began to take a toll on me. I was spending all day in my own head or uttering monosyllables, and I slowly became aware of a strange new feeling: For the first time in my life, I was lonely.
My wife suggested that I find some friends at the playground, but almost all the caretakers there were moms and nannies who all seemed to know one another, and I didn't want to be the one weirdo dude in their group. She suggested that I reach out to my old friends for support, but I'd always prided myself on being a fun, high-energy hang, and I didn't want to come off as some whiny downer. Eventually my loneliness started to eat into my confidence as a writer, and this made me even more reluctant to see my friends. How, I wondered, could they possibly relate to my boring creative problems? I thought about going to therapy, but I'd done plenty of that in the past, and I didn't have the time, money or interest to go back. I was seriously struggling, and my writing came to a standstill. I started to see myself as an unemployed washout, living off my wife, contributing squat to the world, increasingly unpresent for my son.
These were just the sorts of anxieties I once would have shared with a good friend, but somehow that now seemed impossible. After years of deprioritizing friendship, I felt badly out of practice. And so, instead of picking up the phone and calling someone, I picked up the phone and clicked on podcasts. I listened to so many episodes of so many podcasts, mostly to distract myself, but also looking for a life-changing cure.
I listened to Tim Ferriss's conversations with creative gurus like Rick Rubin, hoping to find the hammer to smash through my writer's block. I listened to Dan Harris's meditation podcast, seeking to hack my way to enlightenment. I soon came to see that virtually every podcast in the self-help-o-sphere featured the same rotating cast of two dozen or so guests, but I kept listening. I heard, over and over, about grit from Angela Duckworth and vulnerability from Brené Brown and 'massive breakthroughs' from Tony Robbins (a guy I ruthlessly mocked when I was a stoned teenager but now took quite seriously). Still, no massive breakthrough came.
In late 2018, I found something that finally resonated. And I found it on — alas — 'The Joe Rogan Experience.' Let me just say, when you go down any podcast rabbit hole, you are more or less algorithmically guaranteed to end up listening to Joe Rogan. And while many of his ideas made me wince, I found myself spellbound by his voracious curiosity. There was something deeply soothing about his rambling conversations, which often spanned three or four hours. The weave of these yap fests reminded me of what it was like when I had hours of open-ended time with my own friends: the way it would take us a little while to warm up and move beyond banter about biking gear, the way we would inch, steadily upward, to the most elevated terrain — debating the very meaning of life — and then come racing back down to the level of jocular jousting. The more I listened, the more I realized that 'Rogan' was yet another self-help show — specifically, a self-help show for men. The topic that came up, again and again, was how to be happier; and the solutions that came up, again and again, were psychedelics, jujitsu and, above all, working out. What all of these answers had in common was that they were not about leaning on others for support. There was one way out of despair: self-improvement.
There was a particular episode that I devoured with rapt fascination. The guest was a man named David Goggins. He was hawking his book 'Can't Hurt Me,' a harrowing saga of being brutally beaten by his father when he was a child, getting called the N-word at his predominantly white high school in small-town Indiana, drowning his sorrows in doughnuts and eventually becoming a depressed 300-pound man. But then, after a particularly bad night at his job killing cockroaches, he comes home, sees a TV show about the Navy SEALs and soon after decides to lose 100 pounds in three months so he can qualify for active service and try out for the SEALs. Not only does he shed the weight in that preposterously tiny window of time, he then survives the SEALs' infamous 'Hell Week,' enduring an unrelenting barrage of excruciating physical trials bordering on torture (and which have led to several actual deaths) despite his injuries and congenital health issues. He becomes a SEAL, and after serving in Iraq, quickly transforms himself into one of the world's premiere ultramarathoners, completing more than 70 endurance races, many of them in excess of 100 miles.
Goggins — who, in the wake of that 'Rogan' appearance, became a mega-best-selling author with nearly 13 million Instagram followers — professes to absolutely despise running. And yet he laces up his shoes and hits the road every day, because he hates it. This is his message: Deliberately suffer. Do something you hate to do, every single day, no matter what. If you feel like a victim, victimize your own body. Callous the mind, keep going and stay hard.
Listening to him was a revelation: He was raw and rude and self-lacerating, the antithesis of everything I'd been hearing from Brené Brown. He talked, without shame — with pride, even — about having no social life, about grinding alone on empty roads, about sitting in front of his TV each night and stretching for hours. His message was so grim and, somehow, so hopeful at the same time. He struck me as a kind of existential hero, someone who had embraced the absurd fate of being a lonely, emotionally caged man in America. And at that point in my life, it was exactly what I needed to hear.
I was out of shape and pouchy, having relied on IPAs and ice cream for years. But as soon as my wife arrived home that night, I went for a run around the park. It sucked, but according to Goggins, that meant I was doing something right. I ran the next day, and the day after that, and soon started lifting weights, too. Eventually I joined my local CrossFit gym. I was determined to follow the letter of Goggins's law — to work out every single day, especially when I didn't feel like it — and I did.
At one point, after a long bike ride, I got a staph infection. I had to stay in the hospital for two nights, and I still managed to do squats, lunges and other calisthenics with an IV dripping lifesaving Bactrim into my veins. I was fully aware that my behavior was extreme — and increasingly annoying to my wife — but I had no intention of stopping. After feeling stuck and ineffectual for so long, I was invigorated to see that I had near-total dominion over my body. Learning that I had these untapped stores of resilience — knowing, deep in my leg bones, that I really could keep going, no matter what — gave me a kind of swagger I had never known before. I took selfies in the mirror and saw hard-won muscles, and while I knew intellectually that none of this made me a man, I kind of felt like one, finally.
I ended up working out for over 1,000 straight days. My streak, of course, did nothing to cure my loneliness. Despite all of my self-reliant triumphs, I remained largely unhappy. I missed my friends terribly, and found myself getting emotional while watching movies about friendship that were not intended to be tear-jerkers, like 'Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.' Simply seeing other dudes having fun together — like the scene in the prematurely canceled TV classic 'Freaks and Geeks' when the dorky boyhood pals ecstatically blast off model rockets — moved me deeply. And I completely lost it watching 'Breaking Point,' an episode of the Netflix series 'Untold' about the relationship between the brash and bro-ey tennis superstar Andy Roddick and his best friend, Mardy Fish, who has a career-shattering anxiety attack right before he's set to play Roger Federer at the U.S. Open. As Fish retreats into a nearly catatonic state of shame and isolation, the surprisingly softhearted Roddick calls him again and again to check in and chat. Eventually, Roddick makes a proposal: If Fish will agree to pick up his racket, Roddick will come out of retirement, too, and they can be doubles partners. Fish takes him up on the offer, and the two old friends enter a tournament. They don't make it beyond the second round, but they have the time of their lives. Soon after, Fish publicly discusses his mental-health challenges, something that was virtually unheard-of for athletes at the time.
It wasn't as if 'Breaking Point' (which my brother was a producer on) sparked some epiphany. I knew all along that Fish and Roddick were the kinds of guys I wanted to emulate. The problem was, I also knew that in some ways what they did was more difficult than anything even Goggins had achieved. And this is what stumped me: I was hard enough to work out for 1,000 straight days, but I still wasn't hard enough to call my friends.
Eventually I discovered a different kind of podcast. It's called 'Man of the Year,' and it's hosted by the comedy writers Aaron Karo and Matt Ritter, best friends who met as second graders in Long Island. Karo and Ritter eschew talk about burpees and ketamine, and instead are laser-focused on improving men's 'social fitness.' And while the advice they give can sometimes seem obvious — that's the point. There's a Zen crispness to their formulations, like: 'Be the friend.' Don't wait around for someone else to call you — and don't assume that the friend you want to call doesn't want to hear from you, because they probably do want to hear from you and are just as mentally blocked as you are.
When I called Karo and Ritter and told them that I had many friends but was still somehow lonely, they told me this is one of the most common complaints they get from listeners. Men, says Ritter, 'wake up at 30 or 40 and say, 'I have no friends.' They actually have a lifetime of friendships. But really, the issue is that they haven't put in the effort they've needed to. 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.