It all started with a podcast.
Sometime last year, I was listening to this episode on the Art of Manliness podcast on how adult men find it increasingly hard to make genuine friends. The podcast guest was Billy Baker, the author of We Need To Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends. Baker shared how a journalist assignment made him realise that even though he was surrounded by people, he had no close male friends.
My first reaction was to feel really smug about myself. Sure, there might be some losers who don’t have any friends, but I’m not like that, right?
After all, I hung out regularly with my JC friends for beers. But then again, the last time I saw them was over 3 months ago. And there was one of them whom I hadn’t seen for over 6 months… or was it a year?
Well, my wife and I were also friends with other couples. We’d meet for dinner, have a few drinks, and I’d discuss business or investing or whatever with the guys. But these guys were usually husbands of my wife’s friends, and we usually met in a group. Without their spouses, it was unlikely that we’d ever hang out by ourselves.
Okay, there were also my ex-colleagues. We were super close in my previous job, and we’d regularly hang out for after-work beers (I’m starting to see a concerning pattern here). We shared loads of laughs. But then again, ever since I switched jobs, I hadn’t seen them for months. I had no idea what was going on in their lives, beyond the shiny, curated pictures on Instagram.
Come to think of it, when was the last time I had a genuine, heart-to-heart conversation with another guy? I’m not talking about busting each other’s balls or discussing investments or making dumb jokes. I’m talking about sharing a genuine, vulnerable, “dude-I-actually-like-you-and-don’t-worry-because-I-got-your-back” moment with another guy. It had been months, maybe years, since I’d been there.
Crap. I realised that I’m the loser middle-aged guy with no friends that the podcast was talking about.
The Loneliness Is Real
We’re in a modern-day crisis of friendships – particularly male friendships. NYU Professor Scott Galloway found that only 20% of US men received emotional support in the past 7 days, compared to 40% of women. Men were also way less likely than women to tell a friend that they loved them, or share personal feelings or problems.
A 2019 study found that 61% of Americans are measurably lonely, based on the UCLA Loneliness Scale, the “gold standard” loneliness scale in psychology research. Loneliness isn’t just a shitty feeling – it’s linked to mental health issues such as anxiety and depression, and impacts your physical health too.
While these are US-focused studies, but I’m pretty sure that we Singaporean males are as vulnerable – if not more vulnerable – to loneliness. Our culture prides itself in hard work, leaving less time for friends. Fatherhood is a wonderful thing, but many of my dad friends are struggling to stay awake most of the day, let alone connect meaningfully with another male friend.
But having true, genuine male friendships is important. As Baker cites in the book:
The reality is that there are no successful loners in the history of social evolution. Being a solo survivalist is arduous and inefficient. Survival has only been accomplished in groups.
What about our spouses or girlfriends? Partners are, of course, our closest confidants and pillars of support. But there are plenty of areas which are much easier to discuss with other men: Struggles with addiction, pornography, anger, financial insecurities, etc. Sometimes, you just want to talk to someone who knows exactly what it’s like to go through these shitty parts of a man’s life.
Or sometimes, you just want to know that another dude has your back, and is willing to jump into a fight for you. Someone who’ll be there when the proverbial shit hits the fan.
I wanted to get to a place where I could confidently name the guys who’d do that for me. But first, I had to understand why the hell it’s so difficult for a Singaporean dude like me to make – and maintain – true male friendships.
Reason #1: We’re Freakin’ Busy. All The Time
Most of my week revolves around work. If there was ever a soundtrack that describes my life, it would be that annoying Rihanna song that goes work work work work work (Okay, I know it’s not really about work, but you get the point). I wake up, go to work, come home from work, and then spend the weekend recovering so that I can go back to work. I’m trying to get better at work-life balance this year, but this unhealthy focus on work for the past couple of years definitely hindered my friendships.
For example, I could almost never muster the initiative to get the guys together. Most guys are like that: We’ll complain that “we never hang out”, but none of us will take the initiative to actually organise something. When someone does text “When are we meeting up?”, that’s an automatic WhatsApp conversation-killer.
Besides, coordinating schedules suuuuucks. Between work, parent duties, and overseas travel, any attempt to schedule a guys’ night out often turns into a 2-week conversation of “This Fri can?” “Cannot I’m travelling. Next Fri?” “Cannot – got work”.
This is also why experts recommend having some sort of regular routine when it comes to developing friendships. For all you lucky guys who play football or cycle together weekly – cherish what you have. You’ve landed on a winning formula which consistently gets guys together without the need for painful scheduling back-and-forths.
But for weirdos like me who don’t play football, the most consistent way for me to hang out with other guys was through (there’s that word again) work. In my previous job, one of my colleagues would ping me at 5.30pm on random days and go, “QP?” which stands for “quick pint?” and we’d go for a beer (or 10) at the bar across the street.
Having a routine or a common context helps tremendously when it comes to making male friends. But the downside is, once you take that routine away, that friendship also dissolves. Ever since my ex-colleagues and I switched jobs, we haven’t managed to sustain our friendships in the same way.
Reason #2: Men Don’t Know The Art of Deep Connection
“So what’s the most personal thing that you’ve ever written in your journal?”
My wife and I were out on a couple date with Sarah and Ricky, and we were playing Twenty Questions, which is exactly the kind of game that Americans like them would play. It’s also completely foreign to us Singaporeans.
When Sarah directed that question at me, I just sat there like an idiot. I was completely stunned. I had absolutely no freakin’ idea how to answer that question, or if you’re even allowed to ask that sort of question (which is exactly the kind of thought that Singaporeans would have).
Sarah explains that she’s insanely curious about other people, so when she’s out with her friends, she’ll ask crazy personal questions like these. She won’t push the other person to answer if they’re not comfortable, but when it happens, they’ll share a deeply intimate conversation. They’ll delve into super deep discussions about their emotions, childhood traumas, passions, and they’ll walk away feeling like they really connected. For people who are vulnerable enough to engage with her this way, they stay in touch for years, despite being in different countries.
I suspect that Sarah is not the only one. Women tend to be better at connecting with other women. They’ll sit face-to-face and talk for hours. My wife can hang out one-on-one with a girlfriend for an entire night, chatting over a bottle of wine until the bar owner tells them that he’s closing.
In contrast, it’s a miracle if I can make a one-on-one conversation with another guy stretch for more than an hour. Inevitably, the chats will drift towards an awkward silence, and someone will go, “Okay man, I gotta get back to work/wife/kids” and it’ll end there.
The quality of my conversations isn’t super deep either. My friends and I will talk about everything, which is another way of saying that we don’t talk about anything important. We update each other on when I’m moving to a new place, or how my friend’s business is doing, or what investments they’re making. It’s all great fun, but I wouldn’t say that we really connect the same way that Sarah – and women in general – connect with their friends.
A big part of this might be evolutionary. In the book, Baker cites how the task of gathering in modern hunter-gatherer tribes is mainly undertaken by women. Since the most efficient foraging occurs in teams of socially-bonded individuals who communicate constantly, women might have evolved more highly-advanced social skills to stay connected to each other.
In contrast, men were traditionally involved in hunting, an activity not known for its chattiness. So men were used to walking side-by-side in silence while zeroing in on a kill, which is exactly what my friends and I do when we’re looking for a restaurant. Therefore, maybe the reason why we suck so much at talking is because our ancestors never had that much practice at it.
Reason #3: Dumb Social Expectations
There’s a really old Ryan Higa music video called Bromance which starts off with Ryan telling his guy friends that he has to head out. They all take turns to hug and go, “I love you man!”, until one of his friends pushes Ryan away and retorts, “Why are you showing so much affection man? It’s… weird.” And then Ryan and cast jump into an epic number educating the viewer about what “bromance” is.
The “bromance” label puts a finger on a general ickiness that guys feel (or at least, think that they have to feel) towards any sort of vulnerability or tenderness towards another guy. Today, the term is mainly used almost in a mocking, disparaging way, like “awww look at those 2 dudes hanging out all the time, they totally have a whole bromance thing going on”. It’s almost like society feels it’s just super weird for two heterosexual guys to be really close to each other.
If you think about it, it’s kind of sad that close male friendships are so rare that we have to apply a label on it. It also speaks towards how over-sexualised everything has become. It’s like saying two guys can’t be close unless they are somehow romantically or sexually attracted toward each other.
On the other end of the spectrum, hyper-masculine guys also sabotage their abilities to get close when they get competitive.
I was once at dinner with my wife in a fancy restaurant where we were engaging in our favourite dinner activity: Eavesdropping. This particular group of guys in the next table basically had an entire 30-minute conversation humblebragging about how shitty their respective supercars were. What is this deep-seated trait within us males that compels us to jostle for alpha position all the time, even when the stakes are low?
But if we’re always competing with each other, we’re also less likely to open ourselves up and be vulnerable to each other. Dogs will only roll over and ask for a belly rub when they feel safe, and there’s no way I’m asking those guys for a belly rub.
So Where Do We Go From Here?
Maybe I’m imagining the problem here. Perhaps I’m the only loser guy with a sorry state of male friendships. But if the research is anything to go by, I suspect that I’m not the only one.
And the problem may not be immediately obvious: You could be surrounded by people, but still be lonely. You could be hugely popular, but have no one to turn to during a crisis. You could have a loving spouse and family, but still realise that you’re missing a band of brothers in your life.
It was something that I needed to fix, before I found myself completely friendless in my mid-forties. And so began my journey towards finding new male friendships, and rekindling old ones. I’m still on that journey, but I’ll share with you a couple of things that worked in my next post.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts: If you’re a man, what is the state of your friendships? If you’re a woman, how are the men in your life doing? Let me know in the comments or by sending me an email.
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