The Problem of Male Friendship

Why we don't have male friends today and what to do about it

The lack of male friendships was the subject of a great article in the NYT Magazine (that link should bypass the paywall). The piece, by Sam Graham-Felsen, doesn’t just have great content. It’s also well-written, something that in itself helps explain the enduring dominance of the Times in America.

He explains the 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.

This not only describes the problem, but it conveys an important truth that I keep hammering. Too many men only have the illusion of friendship. They think they have friends, but those people are actually just the husbands of their wives’ friends.

By the way, the Survey Center on American Life is part of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Yet here it is being cited as an authoritative source of information in the New York Times without any qualifiers or disclaimers.

This is another example of what I’ve highlighted before, namely that AEI made a series of strategic moves that successfully repositioned it as “legitimate” in the eyes of center-left dominated elite institutions.

He also talks about why men don’t hang out together:

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.”

While he prefers other explanations this paragraph is interesting in that it implicitly sees male friendships in terms of purely social “hanging out,” and specifically contrasts that activity with career.

In the past, work would have been one key venue where male friendships were forged and sustained. The work world used to be largely sex segregated. Men worked primarily or even exclusively with other men. As women entered these occupations, their dynamics changed considerably.

The loss of all-male spaces has made male friendship enormously difficult to create and sustain because it destroyed the milieux of that friendship. If you want to be friends with other men, it’s now something you have to do outside of everything else in life. No wonder so few men have the time or energy for that.

There also remains deep hostility in some quarters to all male spaces in our society, something that needs to be confronted.

Greater male involvement with family has also played a role.

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.

The piece talks about the development of modern marriage in which there’s much more emphasis on the emotional bond between the husband and wife than in the past. Indeed, in today’s cultural and legal environment, it’s the only raison d’être for marriage.

Add to this a shift towards a high investment parenting model and the demands on men to invest time and energy into relationships with their family members have perhaps never been greater. This plays a role in making male friendships more difficult to sustain because family requires more of men’s time than it used to. (There are definitely some good parts to this as well).

Although not in the piece, it’s also the case that some women in practice do not want their husbands to have male friends or spend time with them. It’s perhaps an extreme case, but look at how Meghan Markle has severed Prince Harry from his pre-existing friend network.

The author also shows how cultural norms around male friendship have shifted such that male intimacy is no longer allowed and is coded as “gay.” He notes:

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.

I think about, for example, people today saying that David and Jonathan must have been gay lovers because David said things like, “I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; You have been very pleasant to me. Your love to me was more wonderful than the love of women.” (2 Samuel 1:26).

I have noticed that in opera (e.g., Don Carlo) and other historic pieces of culture you sometimes see this type of highly intense male friendship and brotherhood. This in eras where any public expression of homosexuality would have been verboten, so obviously the public did not interpret them this way.

Graham-Felsen doesn’t really trace how this change in cultural norms came about. I don’t know either thought would love to read something on it anyone has a good reference. My impression is that the decisive changes did not come until after World War 2.

This cultural shift is another inhibitor of male friendship. A David and Jonathan type friendship today is essentially culturally impossible.

The piece also has some great insights into the nature of the online men’s sphere. He identifies the basic self-improvement/self-reliance ethos of this world.

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.

…

[David] 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.

…

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.”

I should point out that from a Christian perspective, a distinguishing characteristic of the manosphere is reliance on the self. The secret to life is to be found inside the self, both in its goals and desires, and the self-discipline and hard work necessary to achieve them.

In this framework, there’s no need for God. And as the author points out, there’s no need for friends either. Or at least they are secondary to everything else you are doing.

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.

I was not familiar with this show prior to reading the article. The idea of “be the friend” is a point I’ve made in the past. If you are lonely and need a friend, an almost sure fire way to make one is to find someone who is even lonelier than you and be that person’s friend.

A principle we could take from the business advice landscape is the idea that you have to give to get. You have to add value to other people without a specific quid-pro-quo arrangement.

Lots of people say they want friends. But how many people want to be a friend to others?

Although I quoted liberally, there’s a lot more in the piece. I recommend clicking over to read the whole thing.