Why is it so hard for to make and maintain friendships as an adult?

My name is Max Dickins, author of?Billy No Mates, a book about how I came to learn that men have a friendship problem.

A couple of years ago, I was planning on proposing to my girlfriend when I realised I had no one to call on as my Best Man.?Where have all my friends gone??I wondered. And why does this happen to so many guys??

I sought to find out the answer, talking to world-leading experts and treating myself as a human guinea pig testing their recommendations.?

Why this matters

Friendships help make life enjoyable and meaningful: that much is obvious. They are also a really important factor in our mental health.?

It’s well known by now that three out of four suicides are by men; and suicide is the biggest cause of death for blokes under the age of 45.?

What you might not know, is that the highly respected Samaritan’s suicide report cites a lack of close social and family relationships as one of the biggest risk factors in male suicide. And that men generally have less access than women to all forms of social support: friends, relatives, and the broader community.?

So, let’s get into?it?…

Why do we seem to have fewer friends as we age??

And we do, by the way: research by social network scientists suggests that our social world peaks in our late teens/early twenties, and then declines from that point. The decline being significantly more severe for men.?

In 2021, the Survey Center on American Life identified a male ‘friendship recession’: since 1990, the number of men reporting that they have no close friends jumped from 3 to 15%. Daniel Cox, the scholar who conducted the research, writes:

‘In 1990, nearly half (45%) of young men reported that when facing a personal problem, they would reach out first to their friends. Today, only 22% of young men lean on their friends in tough times.’?

There is definitely a problem. So, what causes it?

The number one limiting factor in our friendships is time. It's something you can't cheat: it's a use it or lose it situation, although research suggests that our oldest friendships seem to be able to cope better with absence - but only because we've got an awful lot of credit in the bank.?

So, time is crucial, but what happens as we get older? Well, look at this chart:

In summary: all the big scary stuff arrives. Our careers get more demanding, we often enter serious romantic relationships, many people have children. Suddenly the amount?of?time we have available for our friends decreases.?

Connected here is how we choose to balance our intimate life these days. The idea that our spouse or partner might be our 'best friend' is a fairly modern invention. For many people now, 'the one' has become their 'one and only': the person they spend all their time with, the person they lean on not just for sexual intimacy, but all their emotional needs too.?

Our romantic relationship can crowd out our friends. Yet this is a foolish long-term strategy: because we don't just need one team-mate in life,?we need a squad.

What about uniquely male causes of friendlessness?

We need to be clear on one thing first: male and female friendships?are?different.

As Professor Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Oxford, argues that these differences have their origins deep in our evolutionary past.

As he has put it: ‘[Women’s] social world has been built around personalised relationships. For women?who?you are matters much more than?what?you are. For men the opposite is true.’

While women tend to prefer one-on-one interactions and lots of personal disclosure, the model of male friendship is?the club. More casual, compartmentalized, interchangeable – and quite superficial. Ask men to name a best friend and they tend to struggle: instead they name a team of people.

Men simply seem to have less interest and ability in developing these intimate friendships.

However, without them they are at risk of loneliness and mental health problems. What to do?

Psychologists will tell you that men’s friendship problem is a male?vulnerability?problem. We lack the language, the practice and – crucially – the (imagined)?permission?to have these more personal conversations with the men in our lives.

Another important factor: men can also be, err, a bit shit. We are slack and disorganized with doing the work of running a decent social life. Professor Robin Dunbar again:

‘Because men are socially lazy, what tends to happen is the wife ends up driving the social environment for the household. The guys end up becoming friends with the partners of their wives’ friends – because they’re there.’

This gets us into trouble when our romantic relationship ends – or doesn’t come to pass in the first place.?

Men show a stronger link between marital status and loneliness than women: unmarried women are less lonely than unmarried men. That’s according to John Ratcliffe, a researcher at the Centre of Loneliness Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. ‘For men who don’t have a partner, loneliness can be particularly severe.'?

What about broader structural factors?

‘[The] problems of boys and men are structural in nature, rather than individual; but are very rarely treated as such. The problem?with?men is typically framed as the problem?of?men. It is men who must be fixed, one man or boy at a time.’?

So writes economist Richard Reeves in his best-selling book?Of Boys And Men. And he’s correct, I think, that in modern discourse we often look past big structural causes in male behaviour and outcomes and point the finger entirely at the amorphous (and vaguely offensive) concept of ‘toxic masculinity.’

Away from male relational skills, and the fates set out by men’s biology, it is also the case that the world is increasingly unfriendly to friendship.?

Robert Putnam, a social scientist, author of the legendary Bowling Alone, has studied the systematic decline of social capital across the Western world over recent decades.?

‘As a more voluntary relationship than kinship, friendship must be actively maintained. Yet the withering of public communities has lessened group support for friendships. Two friends must work by themselves to maintain a friendship.’

The language is dry and academic, but the point is powerful: it’s on us now. Relationships that last these days do so by dint of our own effort and skills.?

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that having a good social life suddenly feels as onerous as getting good abs. As Fay Bound Alberti has written:

‘We need to read loneliness like obesity, as a perceived ‘disease of civilization,’ a condition that is chronic, pathological, and associated with the way we live in the modern, industrial West.’

In summary: the old scaffolding – the social infrastructure – that used to support?our?friendships has been dismantled. To be replaced by – what? – social media?

On Facebook – writes cultural critic William Deresiewicz – our friends live as simulacra: ‘little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more our friends that a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.’?

Is it bad to only have a handful of?friends?

Loneliness is not an objective thing: it is a subjective feeling. Basically: are you happy with the level of social contact you have or not? What counts as a satisfying level will obviously be different for everybody: while we all need?some?friends, there is no right or wrong number to have.?

Personality type is also relevant here. Dunbar's studies have shown that introverts and extroverts have very different strategies when it comes to their friendship circles. As time is the limiting factor in our friendships, we make an inevitable trade-off between depth and breadth. Extroverts prefer to have lots of - often fairly shadow - friendships, while introverts focus all their time on a few much closer bonds. Neither strategy is right or wrong: it's all to do with your preferences.?

Friendship exists as a system. We require different friends, at different times, for different things - emotionally intimate bonds are not the only valuable sort. However, we do need some people in our lives - beyond our romantic partner, beyond our family ties - with whom we feel safe to confide in about anything. Friends who we feel know us down to our deepest nooks and crannies, and whom we feel we know as profoundly in return.

Do you have them? Who are they? When was the last time you were together?

Friendship and Male Mental Health

We need a different model of resilience as men. How do we often react to set-backs, problems, stress?

While women ‘tend and befriend,’ we often isolate ourselves. I know I certainly do. Life gets hard, and I pull myself away from others. Steep in silence. Drink too much. Disappear into work: lose myself in an infinite conga of projects. (Busyness – the thinking man’s addiction.)

About 10 years ago, a group of psychologists at the University of Virginia did a study which asked participants to stand at the bottom of a hill, look up and guess how steep it was. Some people were alone, others paired with their friends.?

The hill the psychologists chose for this experiment had an incline of 26 degrees. But to the people there with friends it looked a lot less. Compared with those who were alone, they significantly underestimated the gradient. Scientific proof of a principle that we all know in our hearts: challenges seem less overwhelming with our friends at our side. We just need a few more of them.

Billy No Mates - out now in hardback, e-book, and audio book (which I read, bad luck.)