There was a time back in 2010 when I gathered with my college friends nearly every week at our local campus bar. Most of us in our twenties, we kicked back over the bar’s weekly trivia nights, chicken wings and pints of Guinness until 1am. But now, that seems like a distant memory.
Now, at 36, my social circle is merely a fraction of what it used to be. My college friends are scattered across the country, and I lost touch with the majority of my high school chums. It makes sense as priorities shift as we get older, and most of us find ourselves preoccupied with our careers and families. But, nevertheless, it’s a sad realization as it had been months — even years — since I had connected with people whom I once considered close.
That’s the thing: when you’re a boastful child or an energetic adolescent, it’s much more organic to make friends as you can approach your peers on the playground or hang out with your classmates after school.
But, as a thirty-something, it’s not as easy to immerse yourself into a social group and make platonic friends. As an adult, the whole concept of making new friends is almost foreign. And making plans with friends is not unlike the process of scheduling a dental hygiene appointment — you have to make it six months in advance .
A testament to the issue is the fact that discussion of “how to make friends as an adult” has percolated across the internet. There are ongoing conversations on Reddit, as well as a swarm of apps — such as Bumble BFF and Meetup — which are designed to help you form new platonic relationships.
In the last few years, I’ve tried to make more attempts at reactivating my fledgling social life. It included reviving old WhatsApp group chats with existing friends and sending text messages to old chums apologizing for losing touch with them.
But I also made it a priority to try to introduce new people into my life. This took me on a quest to try to make platonic friends, not unlike Paul Rudd’s efforts for male platonic companionship in the 2009 comedy film I Love You, Man.
After meeting my fiancée in 2020, I thought I was done with the whole concept of online dating. But my I Love You, Man-esque adventures quickly rejuvenated the need to put myself out there on the apps and start swiping again — this time for pals. I downloaded Bumble BFF but it was to no avail. Much like online dating, the conversations were fast (and perhaps furious) and superficial, as we swapped messages about weekend plans, reasons for being on the app, and our latest binge watches on Netflix.
I expanded my efforts to Reddit, where there is a flurry of subreddits dedicated to the nearly impossible task of finding friends. So, I started posting ads, introducing myself and putting myself out there for potential friends who shared my interests. While I was able to exchange some messages, the conversations were short-lived. Plus, in one exchange, I was sure that I was being catfished.
But the authentic discussions, not to mention, the amount of posts from men, proved to be valuable as they confirmed to me that loneliness — and consequently, the shame of talking about it — has become pervasive among men. So, clearly, it wasn’t just me.
It’s not necessarily a gendered issue, as my fiancée too struggles to make friends and loneliness — especially during the pandemic — is a universal issue. However, as I watch my other half go out of her way to give people the perfect card or gift, I’m reminded of how much better she is than me at forming attachments with people, with her reflecting that “making connections is part of [her identity].”
Therefore, while the struggle to make friends as an adult is a universal issue, there are certainly gender factors in play as women like my fiancée are prone to connect easily with people — and research has corroborated these feelings. The Survey on American Life posits that the number of men across the U.S. who once reported having five or more friends had dropped by half since 1990.
Loneliness among men is an alarming reality, especially when you consider the broader implications that it has on mental health. While correlation doesn’t necessarily suggest causation, it’s not hard to draw a connection between the lack of friendships and the alarming statistics on suicide in men.
Daniel A. Cox, Executive Director of the Survey Center on American Life, calls it a “friendship recession,” and it proves that trying to make new friends isn’t enough. The issue also highlights the need to stay in touch with existing connections, regardless of distance, and maintain those friendships. Virtual movie nights. Online board games. Better yet — if money isn’t an obstacle — annual get-togethers to stoke the friendship fire.
My card-writing, gift-giving fiancée does this well. She immigrated to Canada from Moscow in her adolescence, but she strives to maintain connections with people from her childhood — old friends, classmates and former teachers from the Russian capital — while she encourages me to do the same.
“Have you talked to David recently?”
I haven’t, unfortunately, and I tend to rely on her as my sole source of social support.
This gendered dichotomy makes sense as the same survey indicates that women are more prone at maintaining connections than men, who are historically socialized into thinking that they cannot reach out and ask for help, and must, instead, be independent. That’s toxic masculinity for you. “Compared to women, men feel less comfortable sharing their feelings, being vulnerable, or seeking emotional support from their friends,” Cox.
For men in heterosexual relationships, this dependency on their significant other for social support isn’t uncommon, according to a 2019 Harper’s Bazaar article by Melanie Hamlett, who refers to these men as “emotional gold diggers.” They don’t mean to be, but, basically, the lack of emotional support in their lives prompt them to depend on their significant others.
“As modern relationships continue to put pressure on ‘the one’ to be The Only One (where men cast their wives and girlfriends to play best friend, lover, career advisor, stylist, social secretary, emotional cheerleader, mom—to him, their future kids, or both—and eventually, on-call therapist minus the $200/hour fee), this form of emotional gold digging is not only detrimental to men, it’s exhausting an entire generation of women,” Hamlett wrote.
Naturally, this can create an emotional toll for both parties. Thankfully, it hasn’t reached this point in my relationship with my fiancée — but, sometimes, I worry that it will, which gives me further reason to expand my horizons and try to make new friends, as well as keep in touch with my older chums from those college pub nights.
As I processed the failures that emanated from my digital attempts at making friends, I came to a realization about my loneliness — that it’s been more about feeling a lack of connection rather than being alone. You can be alone and not feel lonely. Further, because we live in a hyper-digitized world where many of us would prefer to slide into people’s DMs or text a series of emojis, that lack of connection is more pronounced than ever.
So, I took my quest to the streets — or rather, IRL, as the digital natives would say. Last year, I decided to bite the bullet and attend a film club gathering, organized through Meetup and held at a local pub a few blocks away from my apartment. After that, I expanded my efforts even more by signing up for a French class for adults under the pretense of wanting to learn the language. But everyone went their separate ways after the course culminated.
But while all that was going on, I regularly met my personal trainer at the gym for our weekly sessions. After we started opening up about our personal lives in between reps, we eventually met up for lunch. While fitness was the aim of our association, the fact that it blossomed into friendship on its own suggested to me that making friends can still happen organically if I open up about myself.
It’s still a challenge for me to make new friends — and the unnerving data about loneliness and mental health in men makes it more important than ever — but as I sat in Moxies with my trainer, chugging my pint of lager and eating my salad, it dawned on me that this was a good start.
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