Opinion: Why men lose their friends in midlife

"It’s easier to be blasé and picky [about friends] when you're young." Photo / Toa Heftiba, Unsplash

OPINION:

Five times a year. That’s how often I see the friends I have left. It feels like slim pickings for a man with my winning personality. What happens to male friendship in middle age? The question comes with a pang. Am I missing out, or deficient in some way? I mean, I have plenty of friends. Well, I have a decent number of friends. OK, I have a few friends.

I’ve talked myself into a kind of loneliness that’s hard to justify given that I’m surrounded by so much familial love. (“Poor widdle me,” as Kim Jong-il once sang in Team America.) I’m both envious of those who appear to have lots of friends and suspicious of how they’ve acquired them.

“Friends” is a dominant theme of the cliché-industrial complex, appearing in an endless feed of Facebook platitudes and Instagram posts. Taylor Swift said, “All you need to do to be my friend is like me,” which is either very profound or very stupid. Let’s assume it’s the former and that a definition of friendship is unconditional affection, rather than needy sycophancy. If I’m Billy No Mates, and Taylor is correct, then it means I don’t like many people and they don’t like me. So I appear to have brought this on myself.

This phobia of being clubbable is perhaps best expressed in a passage from Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, when Colonel Korn finally consents to send Yossarian home from the war on one condition.

“What must I do?”

Colonel Korn laughed curtly. ”Like us.”

Yossarian blinked. “Like you?”

“That’s right,” said Colonel Korn. “Like us. Join us. Be our pal… Become one of the boys. Now, that isn’t asking too much, is it?”

“That isn’t going to be too easy.”

To truly like a person, you need trust, and that requires emotional investment – an increasingly rare commodity as you age – so as old friends fade away, they cannot simply be replaced. The space to build trust with newcomers is just not there.

Most often your partner becomes your best friend by default, which is no bad thing, while an imperceptible drift from sociability takes place over the years – sometimes it’s because of children, sometimes physical distance, sometimes lifestyle choices, like religion or polyamory.

Lasting significance

It doesn’t help that three of my oldest friends are currently unavailable. Of the men I spent most of my youth and young manhood with, one is in Los Angeles, another lives an alternative lifestyle in Devon and the third joined me in a spectacular falling out that killed our 30-year relationship overnight (mostly my fault, naturally).

It’s easier to be blasé and picky when you are young. There are so many friends to choose from and so many relationships you can roll into and out of again without the sense of any lasting significance. Having so few friends can’t be foreseen at 21, but maturity nudges out the immediate need, with the hours dominated by family and work. Once-intense friendships blow up or become diffuse, yet I still see other men managing it better than me.

Moments of envy that other men my age have armies of besties are countered by the cynical assumption that to have so many must mean a decent proportion are false or flimsy in some way. If friendship means something, then how can it be so effortless for these mysteriously popular men, who dangle their mates like an ageing hipster’s neck chains?

The more I witness friendship groups treating Glastonbury like a middle-aged Christmas (“only six sleeps to Glastonbury”), the less I want to know. It’s the fun that really puts me off. I carry the remembrance of festivals past, which is enough to dissuade me now. It’s great if 250,000 people want to enjoy music and drugs in a pop-up town with less diversity than Antiques Roadshow, but don’t sell it to me as a return to Eden. This is the kind of sentiment that evinces comments such as “I feel sorry for you”. They’re not necessary. I already feel sorry for myself.

Design and necessity

Apparently there is a dire need for a safe space for men, which is a bit like saying grey squirrels need a safe space from red ones. But I would concede there is a particular state of ease that’s only possible for men among other men.

There is also consolation that with those few friends you have left, months or even years between meetings are written off with the wave of a hand. Just as well really. This is when you notice the unfettered affection and loyalty male friends feel for each other. It’s kept simple by design and necessity.

Having lost interest in football I’ve destroyed 50 per cent of my conversation options – and I wasn’t exactly Bantersaurus Rex to begin with. Male bonding is sometimes little more than a home-cooked version of a radio phone-in on an infinite loop.

True male friendship is paradoxical, in that it is intimate without intimacy. Men neither touch each other physically nor discuss anything directly – what is said out loud is trivial and everything important is unspoken. If a subtext is identified, it’s quickly ignored before moving on, since no man wants to turn a subtext into an actual text over a few beers.

Like a lot of things about getting older, acceptance is the only meaningful response. My friends are real. My loneliness isn’t. It’s a product of a faulty memory and an ego that hasn’t yet burnt itself out. At least we have yacht rock to talk about. During those occasional and precious tribal gatherings, you all become carriers of each other’s memories, like the shaman or village poets who guard the oral history of your collective lives.

If you want lots of friends, you will probably have lots of friends. Therefore, if I don’t have many, I must not need many to begin with. Either that or I’m unbearable. Answers on a postcard, please. But don’t expect a friendly reply.