Scroll through some dating app profiles these days, and “ENM” or “ethical non-monogamy” is just as prolific as “dog lover” and “looking for a travel buddy” as just one more attribute that you are expected to accept. How often it is a genuine descriptor rather than a hopeful entreaty I’m not sure. But the pitch underneath, once you strip away the physical yearnings, is about abundance. More partners means no single relationship has to carry all the weight.

I’ve written before about the moment someone admits that a single partner was never going to meet every need they had, and how a clinical sexologist framed non-monogamy as an honest response to that admission rather than a failure of the relationship:

“...no single person can carry someone’s entire emotional life alone, however well chosen they are. Ethical non-monogamy just makes that admission explicit, building agreements and check-ins around it instead of leaving it unspoken.”

I still think that’s true. There is great power and vulnerability in honestly naming your needs, but taking action and closing the gap is a whole other thing once you move past the base abundance pitch. Does having more intimate partners actually touch the loneliness underneath, or does it just spread the same unmet need across more people?

After reading through a bunch of research and articles and talking with friends, it is no; it does not, at least on its own. Structure is not what alleviates loneliness. No number of partners will change your relationship with yourself. Non-monogamy done well carries real logistical weight: shared Google calendars, negotiated time, check-ins that have to happen even when maybe some are low in energy. People in it often describe this stage, half-joking, as running a small business.

It’s a form of busyness that can masquerade as connection because your diary is full. But it doesn’t always leave space for the slower, less scheduled closeness that is needed to calm a nervous system. A week full of dates and commitments is not the same as a paced, regulated relationship.

No matter the relationship form, there is the commonly accepted idea of new relationship energy (NRE), that high that comes from a new intimate relationship - whether monogamous or not - and it’s easy to accept that as the salve rather than solving an underlying emotional need. If your loneliness has led to a pattern of protecting yourself against deeper connection to the point where you’d rather exit than dive deeper, loading up more partners to keep chasing the NRE is no different to a drug addict hunting for the next high. Your avoidance is just spread across multiple people instead of one, and the NRE novelty fades just as predictably, leaving you still unresolved.

Jessica Fern, the psychotherapist who wrote what many consider one of the ENM bibles, Polysecure, makes a version of this argument that runs counter to the abundance pitch rather than backing it, after years of clinical work across every relationship structure.

“You are the source of your happiness, love, courage, emotional regulation and purpose, and the sooner that you can release your partner from being the source of these experiences the better for everyone involved.”

That holds whether you have one partner or five. Outsourcing your sense of self to other people doesn’t get safer as the headcount rises. It gets harder to track, if anything, because there are now more people whose moods can register as a verdict on your worth.

I’m not arguing for non-monogamy either way; that’s up to individuals to decide. But if you’ve spent years feeling like the typical relationship-escalator script doesn’t sit well with you, finding a community that shares your values and vocabulary can be a real relief. Non-monogamy might solve an ache of not having one single bond that makes you feel fully secure, instead of living uneasily in a one-to-one couple.

Loneliness doesn’t care about your relationship status; it comes with you into whatever intimate relationship structure you choose, whether monogamous or otherwise. It’s up to you to do the work; your happiness is your responsibility, not that of those around you. You need to be someone who can stand on your own two feet. So change the structure; at least explore what possibilities exist; just don’t expect changing the headcount to solve a problem that is yours only.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

Subscribe now

Read more like this

Is Monogamy the Only Grown-Up Way to Love?

Can One Person Really Meet Every Need You Have?

Loneliness in Relationships: When Being With Someone Isn’t Enough

Thirty minutes before my guests were due to start arriving for my 60th birthday party, I walked into the venue, a bar in inner Melbourne, to be confronted by an immaculately decorated room, tables set, balloons floating, everything in place. I looked around and asked where we were planning to lay out the food, and was told: “It’s all sorted”. This was a very new experience for me, because I let other people organise everything for something dedicated to me.

I like to say I have had a real job since 1997; that was when I started running or co-founding my own businesses. When you start a business, you are responsible for every detail; you are both the chief and the bottle washer, so it becomes ingrained that you check everything and hold everyone to their commitments. After a couple of decades, that habit becomes part of your DNA, and it’s very difficult to reengineer.

If I had been organising my party, I can imagine exactly what I would have been like. Spreadsheets at dawn. Messaging suppliers and the venue. Choosing helium balloon colours and worrying that the weights used to hold them down were heavy enough.

Of course I knew my party was approaching; I had been the one to organise the venue, discuss general arrangements - a drink on arrival, the snacks and pizzas that would be needed. And over a couple of months, I’d had general conversations with friends about fun ways to ensure everyone had a good night.

But then a couple of close friends made it clear that they were taking over. They made it clear to me that it was all under control, so even when I asked a few questions, they pushed back: “Leave it to us.” I think I surprised them - and very definitely myself - how easily I acquiesced. What made the difference is that I trusted them completely, and that’s another very new experience for me.

Plenty of people in the room for the party likely would have been quite surprised by that. A couple of years ago, when I moved house, I did the whole thing myself along with my son. We rented a van and packed and moved everything apart from the large furniture items - we hired a couple of guys and a truck to come to move those. A while after, one of the same friends who organised my party firmly took me to task for not asking for help - the irony being I had been one of half a dozen people who helped someone else move only a few months ago. So I was happy to help someone else when they asked! It wasn’t that I chose not to put the call out for help; it literally did not cross my mind, the DNA runs so deeply.

I wrote about it at the time, in an article called Why Don’t We Ask for Help When We’re Lonely?:

“I have a track record of being rubbish at asking for help. More than one friend has pointed this out to me recently. My instinct is to go it alone.”

The habit that made me good at running companies was the same one keeping people at arm’s length, and it’s taken a birthday and some true friends to properly interrupt it.

The psychologist Steven C. Hayes, who developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, calls the capacity I was missing psychological flexibility.

“Psychological flexibility is the ability to feel and think with openness, to attend voluntarily to your experience of the present moment, and to move your life in directions that are important to you, building habits that allow you to live life in accordance with your values and aspirations.”

Standing in the room surveying everything just before guests arrived, I found it interesting that I felt wonderment, not relief nor surprise. I think my brain quickly realised that, of course, these amazing people would do a wonderful job. They’d curated a playlist, a running order, organised a giant card for everyone to sign, and baked a truly gorgeous cake. Then they’d figured out a couple of surprises through the evening based on occasional conversations over the past few months about what might be cool activities during the party.

Brené Brown writes about this kind of exposure directly.

“Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome.”

Handing over the physical and emotional weight of organising the party felt so vulnerable for me. Maybe there wasn’t a business or marriage on the line, but I don’t think I’ve had such a big hullabaloo made about me since I was a child; the emotion of the evening was palpable. For once I let people do something for me instead of the other way around, and I’m actually quite impressed at how comfortably that made me feel.

Of course there’ll be plenty more tests to come; my DNA means I don’t release control easily, this one party won’t undo the habits built over such a long time, but I believe this time I walked into a room for a major life moment and let it all be built by people who loved me, and I passed. Next time someone offers to help with something important to me, I’m definitely saying yes.

Read more like this

How Does a Friend Move On When You Just Disappear?

I Have ‘Kindness Respect Love’ Tattooed on My Arm. I’m Working on the Joy

Friendships Can Have A Shelf Life

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

I’m not great at weddings. There are so many tropes bandied around - he’s not just my husband; he’s my best friend. She’s not just my wife; she’s my whole world. And all that “in sickness and in health til death do us part” really rubs me the wrong way. I know it’s meant as praise, as a heartfelt expression of how the happy couple feel about each other. But if you strip away the flowery language, what’s actually being asked of the two people standing at the altar is that they will provide each other with the equivalent of a support network that once spread across a village, an extended family, or a whole street of people. Especially today, those external supports often simply don’t exist in our Western cultures.

I have written before about the fantasy of expecting a hardware store to sell you oranges, the frustration of walking into a relationship wanting those tropes, but coming out with a shifting spanner and a reciprocal saw, then blaming the shop for not stocking oranges. In that article, I concentrated on accepting what an individual was actually built to give you. But I wanted to dig a bit deeper: even in a relationship that mostly is working, how can one person ever be expected to supply everything a human being needs?

Esther Perel has spent a career answering that with a fairly blunt no. In her TED talk The Secret to Desire in a Long-Term Relationship, she names exactly what modern couples ask of each other.

“So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide: give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise.”

If you look down Esther’s list, it looks like a heck of a job description; the only thing missing, although I reckon it’s implied, is “any other duties as directed”! Is it any wonder so many couples find that the actual job seems so much harder once they are hired? It’s not because either is inadequate, but because the role was never built for just one person. For most of human history, it wasn’t. Elders, siblings, neighbours and the wider extended family absorbed different pieces of what we now expect a single spouse or partner to carry alone. The nuclear household that replaced all of that for many of us is, historically speaking, a recent invention, and a container that struggles to hold a very large set of needs.

Historian Stephanie Coontz has spent decades studying how marriage changed, and she put the modern version of the problem plainly in an interview with Greater Good magazine.

“The healthiest families are those families that don’t try to be everything and do everything.”

When a relationship says you need to be a best friend, a lover, a co-parent, a therapist, a cook, an exercise partner and a financial planner, is it any wonder so many relationships buckle under the workload - and when it is not acknowledged, the resentment on both sides builds until something inevitably gives? Meanwhile, both sides wonder why the whole dream is falling apart, when, and I really hate to say it, the whole endeavour was set up to fail in the first place.

I want to make it clear: none of this is about loving someone less; rather, we need to acknowledge that we might need to build a wider circle around that love. It could be close friendships, a chosen family, a non-monogamous network, or simply admitting that your partner doesn’t have to be your gym buddy, your therapist, and your only confidant; the shape isn’t the point. What matters is working out which needs are truly load-bearing for you: safety, honesty, respect, and which ones you have been quietly outsourcing to one exhausted person.

Some might see this conversation as evidence that a single relationship is not enough, indeed, that needing others in your life is a betrayal of the one you walked down the aisle with. But I think it is the opposite: if your partner does not need to fulfil the whole role description, they have space for the parts of you they are actually suited to. Think of it as job sharing! And thus you stop mistaking a hardware store’s stock limitations for your or your partner’s limitations.

When a partner disappoints you, it is rarely proof they do not love you enough. More often, it proves you handed them a role built for several people and never got around to telling anyone else they were needed too.

Read more like this

Maybe One Person Was Never Going to Be Enough

Is Monogamy the Only Grown-Up Way to Love?

Loneliness in Relationships: When Being With Someone Isn’t Enough

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

Subscribe now

I watched The Invite the other evening, Olivia Wilde’s dinner party film about two couples and one invitation with an ulterior motive. Four sharply drawn characters carry it: a man who has been quietly miserable for years, a woman who put her art dreams aside to raise a child, a man who changed his name after his wife died of cancer, and a psychotherapist who has perhaps misjudged her own relationship as thoroughly as she assesses everyone else’s. The plot turns on the real reason for the dinner: one couple is angling to draw the other into a sex party, and once that is out in the open, each of the four gets dragged into a raw accounting of their partner’s failings, and then, worse, their own.

None of it resolves neatly. Most of the arguments stay exactly where they ended - unresolved. One couple simply vanishes at the end, and the film closes on the other couple, together twenty years, playing their piano together.

I will point out there are some laugh-out-loud moments in the film!

But it’s a reminder that any couple who says they’ve never had an argument is probably lying. There are loads of curated social media couples who espouse the notion that they are authentic with each other, without friction, because two people who have found the right fit should not have much to fight about. I just don’t believe this.

American psychologist John Gottman has studied the arguments of thousands of couples, and his findings are instructive - and make sense to me. He found that couples who stayed together over time weren’t avoiding conflict, but finding ways to resolve it together. He calls the mechanism a repair attempt, which he defines as

“any statement or action — silly or otherwise — that prevents negativity from escalating out of control.”

Repair techniques include using humour, validating your partner’s feelings, asking if you can both take a break, showing empathy, and explaining how you were triggered. Surprise, surprise, notice how this is all about communication!

How often do you stage your relationships for an audience? For your family? For your friends? For your Instagram followers? What sets The Invite apart is that couples openly fight in front of others at the dinner party. The conflict reveals truths they’ve hidden for years. Ruptures otherwise kept private come out into the open. It’s rare to see this. We instead put on our brave faces in front of guests, even if we’ve been at it hammer and tongs just before our visitors ring the doorbell.

Unless one or both of you honestly try to repair it, constant conflict is exhausting; it wears you both down over time, resentment builds without resolution, and it leads to more arguments.

There’s another side of the coin: when constant calm might not seem genuine. If disagreements are rare and resolved quickly, maybe it starts to feel like something is missing - is the lack of conflict a signal of something? The psychologist Mark Travers has looked into why this happens:

“When someone used to high emotional salience meets a calm, stable partner, they may mistake consistency for dullness simply because there are fewer emotional clifftops to grab onto.”

When your partner doesn’t have blow-ups, it’s not evidence that your relationship is less than strong; it means you’ve repaired things in a timely way, and it may have become so smooth and automatic that you don’t even notice anymore.

I know my relationships have become less dramatic and grown more honest. Conflict is rare, and I’d like to think it's resolved quickly. I don’t believe an argument today threatens the whole connection; rather, it’s proof the connection is worth fighting for. If you think a frictionless relationship is an indicator of a strong relationship, then you likely are looking for the wrong signal. Instead, watch how you dissipate that friction, and celebrate that you both have embedded repair techniques in your relationship, rather than letting something fester quietly with neither of you prepared to reach out.

Read more like this

10 Ways to Reduce Relationship Fragility

Loneliness in Relationships: When Being With Someone Isn’t Enough

We are not mind readers

Was it you or them? Did you inadvertently offend them? Was it because they weren’t truly a friend but more an acquaintance? Losing contact with someone you counted as a friend can be disheartening. How do you react? Do you mourn, or do you just move on? I wrote recently about being ghosted by friends:

“They went quiet because vanishing felt easier than explaining, and they probably couldn’t put the reason into words, even to themselves.”

Compiling the invitation list for my 60^th birthday party was an interesting experience, and it brought me back to this discussion about friends losing touch. My previous article was more about how it makes us feel when a friend disappears; I’ve also considered how, at the end of the day, friendships can have a shelf life:

“Most friendships don’t end in a screaming match, stomping of feet, and the protagonist striding away. More likely the opposite, there’s no great climax, no cinematic denouement, just a slow, silent receding of the friendship tide.”

My invitation list started with me scrolling through two lists. The first was a group of people I invited to drinks at my place last Christmas. The second was my WhatsApp – which gave me a bit of a jolt, because my WhatsApp messages are ordered by most to least recent. So the people I have messaged lately are at the top, and scrolling down takes me back in time to see names I haven’t talked to for weeks, months, or, in some instances, more than a year.

Similarly, looking at the Christmas list of maybe 30 people, I see names of people I have drifted away from and haven’t kept in touch with. Some are for good reason – at least in my estimation. I felt they’d taken different paths, diverging from mine. Notably, they also hadn’t maintained contact with me. So I can literally put dates on when those connections started to fade – the date/time stamps tell the story. Equally, there are new people in my life, who I’ve met in a variety of ways, and who I now am in touch with regularly.

But I’m drawn back to those who seem to have been lost by the wayside. I found myself wondering whether there was a kind of grief I should be feeling. Had I perhaps misjudged? Had I listened to the wrong people telling tales? There’s an ambiguity. Family therapist Pauline Boss spent decades with families living inside exactly this gap, and she gave it a name: ambiguous loss, a loss with no confirmation and no edge. Her research kept returning to the same finding: people in this position never get handed an ending. They have to build one themselves.

“Without a verified ending to their story of loss, family members and friends experiencing ambiguous loss are left to create their own ending.”

Reading this made me realise that perhaps I’ve been imagining the disconnections from those way down my message list. I’d hope I’ve not been the one to go quiet on a friendship, but maybe I have. We’re all responsible for letting something, or someone, fade away - maybe not deliberate avoidance, but at least not taking action when we should. If a friend seems to have changed in a way that you think is divergent from your life, why unilaterally ignore them? Why not seek to understand instead?

I need to remember that, from their perspective, I’m the one who has dropped off the planet; they don’t know whether my silence is intentional or accidental. The not-knowing is what causes the discontent. Maybe they’ve been scrolling their older messages as well, checking my socials to see what I’ve been up to? Seeing me tagged in photos with new faces rather than their own? None of that skulking around online will close the gap; it just adds evidence to their preconception because they don’t have the whole story.

Pauline Boss’s later work names this directly. When there’s no way to verify what happened, she and her co-author, Donna Carnes, argue the only real option left is to stop chasing verification and look for meaning instead.

“When working with ambiguous loss, we shift from the goal of closure to the search for meaning because there is no other choice.”

So if you’ve let go of a friend, they have to decide how much credence or weight to give to your disappearing. What if your name comes up when they are talking with a mutual friend? How will they frame an explanation in their own head? What would it be like for them if you showed up again a few months later acting as if nothing happened? Do you owe them an explanation? Is an apology necessary, or an explanation?

I suspect the real reason is likely messy and complex – we only have enough spoons to maintain a certain number of relationships; if the person was in the ‘Water Park’ of your friendship constellation, it might simply be that your energy was drawn elsewhere for a time. But I can understand if the person you reconnect with feels a range of emotions, including both resentment and relief.

Psychologist George Loewenstein has spent years studying what he calls the hot-cold empathy gap: the finding that people are consistently bad at predicting their own behaviour across emotional states.

“When people are in an affectively ‘cold’ state, they fail to fully appreciate how ‘hot’ states will affect their own preferences and behaviour. When in hot states, they underestimate the influence of those states and, as a result, overestimate the stability of their current preferences.”

I took a punt on a number of ‘lost’ friends when making my birthday invitation list. Some have re-emerged; others haven’t responded to the invitation or a subsequent reminder. So reconnecting has gone a couple of different ways. They might have decided that no amount of explanation and apology will rekindle the zombie connection that’s resurfaced. But it looks like some of the friendships have survived a disappearance, and I hope they’ll be rekindled at the party. Others won’t, and that’s okay. It simply means the friendship, as it was, has ended. They are entitled not to reply now I have resurfaced; silence is fine for them, even if it is me who went silent first – and I need to live with that; they get to choose.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

Subscribe now

Read more like this

Ghosting, Fading, and the Unfinished Endings of Modern Friendship

Why Is It So Hard to Make Friends as an Adult?

Good Person, Bad Friend: What’s the Difference?

I’ve sat in many meetings, both personal and professional, where one or more people are owning a mistake or misstep – sometimes it’s me. One person who championed an idea or plan explains that it didn’t work out and maybe reflects a little on why. They speak calmly and logically, and everyone acknowledges it; it prompts a discussion about how to avoid the issue next time, and after a while the group moves on.

In contrast, another person explains a similar misstep, but their body language is closed and awkward. Their voice drops, their shoulders hunch, they avoid eye contact, and others around the table start to manage the confessor’s feelings; the discussion stays on the error. Both people made an error, but it’s the second person who makes it about the error.

I’ve spent twenty-five years running companies, which mostly means I’ve spent twenty-five years watching people decide, in the space of a single sentence, what a mistake says about them. I’ve written before about accountability:

“We cannot control everything around us, however hard we try. We cannot control everything that happens to us. There’s no point blaming our upbringing, circumstances, or other people’s behaviour for our problems. But we can control how we respond. If problems are ours to own, then they are also ours to solve.”

Some people can say “It’s my fault” and move on. Others hear themselves say it and immediately start building a case for why they’re still a good person; they seek to reinforce their character to counter a perception of shame. Brené Brown’s research on shame names this reaction:

“Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is ‘I am bad.’ Guilt is ‘I did something bad.’”

In this framing, guilt is useful. It points at a specific action, and a specific action can be fixed, apologised for, or avoided next time. Shame is an emotion that embraces the whole person, and leads to a desire to defend the feeling. A more emotionally secure person can label the emotion; they still feel the discomfort, maybe the guilt, but they can take the step back from the emotion without encouraging others, and themselves for that matter, to make it the basis of a verdict on their character.

It’s perfectly natural that our instinct to protect ourselves from negativity comes to the fore, but when we try to hand off the blame – to pass the buck - it’s a futile attempt to cover up. Brown’s other observation, from Daring Greatly, is that

“Blame is simply the discharging of pain and discomfort. It gives us some semblance of control.”

Shame and blame are the opposing strategies; shame is internalised, and when we do, we likely call it self-awareness. Blame, on the other hand, moves outward and probably gets labelled as honesty. But neither is useful because it distracts us from what we should be doing: looking clearly at what happened and considering how we might change next time.

Have you heard someone say “I’m sorry, but you have to understand”? That’s them passing on the discomfort. Or, “I’m sorry you felt hurt”, which I don’t think comprises a real apology. What is really needed is to state the problem and why it was wrong, name the remedial action, and stop talking! Less performance, more accountability.

We must be careful not to fake accountability; visible anguish (“Oh dear me what have I done?”) and self-flagellation (“Oh woe is me!”) can give the impression of accountability. The performance is all about how much this is costing me, so a quest for reassurance, rather than an actual fix. Real accountability is not a performance nor an apology tour.

We mustn’t, though, diminish a mistake; if we are not uncomfortable after getting something wrong, then we are not demonstrating maturity, but when discomfort is pointing to what we did, it’s doing the right job, and not seeking to pass a verdict.

I’m pretty sure I haven’t nailed this all the time, but what I’ve learned is that you can tell pretty quickly which way someone is leading the conversation - are they going to fix the problem, or are they needing you to tell them they are still a good person? The first means you can both move on; the latter floats discomfort into the room looking for shoulders to carry it.

Read more like this

Owing Our Mistakes

The High Cost of the Scapegoat

Speaking Kindness to the Mirror

This is Part 2 of a two-part series - I’d recommend you read Part 1 first.

Simon, the co-owner of my cafe, has just brought me another long black and pointed out the excellent crema on top. I’m surrounded by chatter as I plug away on my MacBook. Next to me are three mums, yakking about school, their kids, and the awfulness of parent WhatsApp groups. One exclaims she’s now delegated the WhatsApp to her husband; she doesn’t want to get involved in the endless nitpicking and micromanagement some of the others expect in the chat.

I’m trying to hide a smile of self-satisfaction at the Mum-chatter; I’ve left school behind with my youngest finishing a couple of years ago. But I’m loving how they’ve taken the time to come together, share coffee and food, and natter about their parenting challenges - one of them has a husband who works in the mines somewhere as an electrician and is away for a couple of weeks at a time, leaving her to manage the kids and the home.

It’s midmorning and the ‘brunch’ crowd is intermingled with groups of workers from the level crossing removal project nearby, in their big boots and fluro workwear. I am solitary, but not lonely. This is solitude I have chosen; I often write better with the white noise buzzing around me than sitting in my quiet house. The noise triggers memories, thoughts, reflections and feeds my words as they spill onto the keyboard. As I type, I’m looking back, not litigating, rather more dispassionately examining a bunch of moments in my life as I look for the language to describe my life after six decades.

It’s my 60th birthday this Sunday, 23 August 2026. In Part One of this two-part series, I wrote about a range of emotions through my life: shame, dismay, regrets. Looking back over more than five years of Alone Rangers, I can see anger and shame surfacing repeatedly. Yet most pieces move, however imperfectly, towards equanimity. Writing has rarely resolved an emotion completely, but it has helped me understand what I was carrying. I have tried to be honest in everything I write, although I still self-censor sometimes, cautious about exposing all aspects of a situation or moment in my life.

I promised in my previous article that this series was not going to be all doom and gloom, because my life so definitely is not, even if I have had, and continue occasionally to have, low moments. I doubt anyone is happy 100% of the time, but I do have a great deal of joy in my life. I am also sure I am not alone, that moments that once felt like crises are now just great after-dinner stories.

I’ve written a great deal about, and around, loneliness over the years, because this was my starting point. There is an escape from loneliness, but until you give that emotion better lighting, hold it up for inspection, you’re unlikely to see the path through. I started turning the light on at 54.

My life today is so different to 50 or 54. Half the month I am alone at home; the two eldest kids are launched and living their own lives, with their own careers, partners and interests. My youngest is with me half the time, leaving me bounding around my three-bedroom house every other week. It’s a curious existence, living solo. I’ve not lived by myself since leaving home back in the 80s. I’ve always shared a home, whether with housemates or partners.

As a family of five under one roof for many years, life was dominated by all the usual practicalities - schools, sport, shopping, housework - combined with running our own businesses. That’s not to say I was lonely; looking back, I definitely was, but I had an ersatz sense of people in my life beyond my family through socialising with other parents and working with small teams in the businesses.

Sitting in solitude in my cafe today is not the same; in a household of five, solitude is rarely achievable, rather loneliness creeps up on you as you go through the routine of domesticity.

Let’s look at the evidence. Start with the physical. Six years ago, I had a number 1 all-over buzz cut. I’d never worn nail polish. I was a clean slate - no tattoos. Today I have long hair, held up in a ponytail. My nails are painted purple (my favourite colour), although they’re often black. I have multiple visible tattoos; the largest is a phoenix covering my entire lower right arm, a symbol of new beginnings. On my other forearm is tattooed the words Kindness Respect Love - three words that underpin how I feel about life. Both of these tattoos are, in a fashion, a promise to myself, a reminder in front of me every day about what’s important.

At 54 I failed the pub test; I didn’t have three friends I could call to ask if they’d like a beer. Today there’s 60+ people on my birthday party invitation list; I’m punting maybe 50 or so to turn up.

I have learnt to decouple my self-worth from output; given my semi-retirement, I do have days where I am not sure what I am going to do - that’s a new feeling; I’m so conditioned to be busy that having nothing to do still takes some processing. I still do some consulting with the company I helped build. It keeps me connected to its future without requiring it to consume my identity as it once did.

Money is still a stress. I do live a pretty quiet life; I have no expensive ambitions, although a recent message from a Melbourne friend travelling through Europe and about to arrive in Berlin did make me a little sad that I couldn’t commit to an impromptu plane ride to meet her there. The car needs a fairly expensive repair, but I’ve got a workaround that should hold things together for a while longer. I have enough for a quiet life, but not enough to feel entirely free.

Part One allowed me the indulgence to wallow a little in how directionless I was earlier in my life. The idea of settling into a long-term career, building financial stability, seemed unimportant, even if I had thought about it at all - which I’m pretty confident I didn’t. Perhaps I regret not being in a better financial position today. But it is what it is.

I’ve learnt so much from my children. When our eldest daughter was born, I don’t think I’d ever held a baby. We’re a very narrow family tree; I don’t have any cousins, and our daughter was the first child in my sibling generation. Today she’s 29, lives on the Gold Coast with her partner, and has an amazing career. I’m in awe of her resilience, independence, and care for her partner and friends. Her brother is 25, lives up the road from me, works for the government, and has put his hand up as a candidate in the forthcoming state election. I’m so proud of the young man he has grown into. My youngest just turned 20; she is intellectually disabled, she can’t read or write, and has poor communication skills, yet shows great artistic talent which is being enthusiastically nurtured by a number of amazing people, and one of her paintings has just been selected to hang in Parliament House in Canberra.

I joke sometimes that having a child who will turn 30 next year is making me feel old. But really, I mean I live in amazement at everything all three have achieved, how each has become their own version of a good human, having strong friendships - some stretching back to primary school. There’s a twinge of jealousy on my part; I wish I had that, but that’s overshadowed by my joy at seeing them embrace adulthood and life with verve and independence.

I’ve pondered happiness a great deal, including in my writing. For a very long time, I thought unhappiness was a consequence of others in my life. Today I know it is my responsibility. Your partners and friends are not the source of your happiness, but they can trigger it. The rest is up to you. And possessions, money and titles mean nothing. I’ve known unhappy rich people and happy poor people.

What of my life today? Am I a fully resolved human? Goodness no. But we’re getting there.

I was lost after my 23-year relationship ended. Blame was easy to ascribe, harder to own. It was a profoundly challenging experience; our cultural imprinting tells us that this is a failure of your life, and it leads to feelings of isolation and loneliness. You question your self-worth. It doesn’t really matter ‘whose fault’ it was. Many relationships run their course. Decades ago, a couple probably would stay together because ‘that’s what you do’, and they both would be unhappy indefinitely. Relationship breakdown is now common enough that few families remain untouched by it.

I had two breakthrough, life-altering moments. I sat down and wrote about my loneliness. It was an impulse that I still cannot source, but clearly a synapse in my brain connected and fired. I am deeply grateful. Secondly, I started therapy with someone who didn’t take my shit shallow responses as legitimate, forced me to dive deeply into my emotions, and kept me accountable week after week.

I learnt to label my emotions, take a step back, and examine them to understand what was surfacing them. I learnt that negative emotions like shame and anger have root causes, and that they are part of being human. I learnt to accept them and seek out their counterparts: joy and love. This is not to say I am a sea of tranquillity today - you should see me in the car and the expletives at other drivers for their rubbish driving!

Six years ago I had almost no friendships in which I felt fully known. Today I have dozens, of all shapes, sizes, types and colours. A rainbow of a constellation. With ending full-time work, that constellation has largely replaced my professional network of tenuous connections and semi-friendships. Is connection at 60 actually different? Probably not; it’s just better lit, more examined, more purposeful. I socialise regularly. I volunteer at events around town that attract people from all walks of life, giving me an invaluable lesson that ‘normal’ is whatever you decide, not the chattering of commentators or society.

I mentioned earlier my Kindness Respect Love tattoo; I intended to add the word Joy at some stage, when I felt I had earned it. That morphed on a Bali trip last year to ink the first small part of what I hope will be a large tattoo; the first piece is a cluster of frangipani flowers, a reminder of tropical childhood in Darwin. Frangipani, bougainvillea and other images are symbols of joy to me.

I have a small coterie of people I am extremely close to, who hold me up when I am down and who, in return, know they can call me at any time for anything. They have reminded me that our capacity for love may be infinite, but trust and closeness are built through what we repeatedly do. It’s led to more complex relationships than I could ever have envisaged, but gives me much joy. Friendship and human connection are everything. There’s an Alexis Jordan song ‘Happiness’ with the chorus lyric ‘In time, I found myself in happiness with you’; I love that idea.

What does the next 10 years hold?

2026 has been a year of flux, with some shifting sands and uncertainty. I do not know what the next ten years will ask of me. I hope for a simpler, more creative life, one shaped by purpose, connection and contentment. Above all, I want to keep growing the joy in my life, and to earn whatever comes next in that unfinished tattoo.

Read Part One:

"You Think You're Such Hot Shit": The Girl at the Sailing Club Was Right About Me (Part 1 of turning 60)

Read more like this

The Work of Being an Older Human

Life Beyond the Facial Hair

What Did I Learn in 2025?

We’re at my uncle’s house in Liverpool in the late 1970s; it’s cold, and one of us kids - probably me - has turned up the gas heating. We’re on exeat from our English boarding school; it’s a short mid-term break, so of course it’s not possible to return home to the heat of tropical Darwin for what is effectively a long weekend, which means we’ve been farmed out to close relatives. Other exeats were spent staying at the houses of friends from school whose parents presumably offered to help us antipodeans out.

My uncle was deeply unhappy walking to such a warm room, and explained in very clear language how expensive it was to run the heating on such a high setting. I don’t remember exactly my reaction, but I do believe that it was subsequently suggested that I’d need to find alternative accommodation for future exeats.

I can remember a number of times as a child when my emotions welled up, breaking through the stiff facade that I’d modelled from those around me. The situations and triggers were varied, but each resulted in someone else copping a serve of tears from me.

With hindsight, I can see this was a pattern I perpetuated for many years. I remained stoic much of the time; once in a while, I lost the plot through what I now understand was a deep frustration; I just didn’t know why I was frustrated. So I took it out on the people around me.

I turn 60 on 23 August 2026, and I’ve found myself in a deeply reflective mood in the last couple of months, including some quite low days. Turning 50 was an anticlimax; it passed by with barely a mention; we were deep in parenting and building the business; I had no party or big celebration; I just woke one morning and realised I’d been on earth for half a century. Now, a decade later, it’s very different. I’ve been vacillating between regret, a smattering of shame, a concern about decisions made in the past, and decisions that will need to be made in the coming year or two.

I’m a typical ‘nine-ender,’ someone approaching the end of a chronological decade. Researchers have found that people approaching the end of a decade are more likely to pursue meaning-seeking behaviours, from running a first marathon to making far more consequential decisions. Apparently, the final year of a decade feels like a reckoning, a time to reevaluate, recalibrate.

Am I disappointed with my life? I’ve definitely been litigating my past, and it seems this is common. Have I done enough? Have I achieved enough? What comes next?

I’m not sure I ever really had a clear vision for my life. I’ve been on and off the relationship escalator. Once for five years and then again for 23. I’ve arrived on the doorstep of 60 with many LinkedIn achievements. But how about personally? What did I think 60 would look like? Career, marriage, children, money and a settled shape to life as I moved into my final decades? A love of gardening and tennis?

Sometimes I feel angry, not with others, but with myself. It’s always easy to second-guess after the fact, but I look back especially at personal relationships and friendships and realise I was often rubbish at being an authentic human to those around me. All too often I presented inauthentically, and people rightly called me out. My inauthenticity led to an ego that told me I must be right, and others were wrong - even when patently I was not right. Even in my early teens, I didn’t read the signals, like the girl who during a gathering at the sailing club in Darwin exclaimed ‘you think you’re such hot shit’; I can’t recall what prompted her very accurate diagnosis, but she was right.

I struggle sometimes with some feelings of shame. When I was young at the English boarding school, I suspect Mum and Dad were calling in favours, asking for help constantly as they endeavoured to manage a brood of three young kids at school on the other side of the world. And this in the days before email or FaceTime, when international phone calls were fabulously expensive, and the best way to send a message was via a telegram. As the parent of three kids - one of whom turns 30 next year - I cannot begin to comprehend just how much they were giving up back then. And all I did was reward them with poor behaviour and pissing off relatives. If my kids did that, I’d be ropeable.

I feel disappointment in myself. I have a litany of regrets: my relationships, my behaviour, my financial and work decisions. I realise I drifted from one opportunity to the next, especially in my 20s and 30s; I made short-term decisions without a vision or a purpose. By my 40s, with three children and work roles that required significant time, energy and travel commitment, it was more a question of going with the flow, so equally directionless other than trying to make sure everyone was fed and housed year to year. Looking back, I can see that I often was using work as an excuse to fill my life, rather than being braver about how I allocated my time, so definitely an element of selfishness to feed my ego.

It wasn’t until the end of my long-term relationship at 54 that I finally bit the bullet and had therapy and addressed my feelings of being lost and friendless. I’d seen a therapist a few times many years before that in the late 1990s, but I can see then I was not completely honest; I didn’t have the language or the tools to explain my emotions, and the therapist didn’t seem to have the way to help me find them. But returning to counselling in more recent times, with someone who really poked me with a verbal stick, allowed me to finally confront some tough truths. I discovered a new language, a new set of words to label how I was feeling. This is what instigated my writing about loneliness and connection in the early version of Alone Rangers nearly six years ago.

I’ve become very conscious of my body ageing. I stacked on a bunch of weight over the last couple of years, ascribing it to stress and uncertainty, which I salved with endless blocks of chocolate, bowls of pasta and many dozens of packs of Tim Tams. Today, after a concerted effort, I’m down more than 13kg and only 3kg off my goal. I’m swimming laps multiple days a week, and sticking with my now six years of Pilates practice.

But things are starting to not work as well as they did. Last year it was found I have osteoarthritis in my right shoulder. I’ve struggled with a knee issue and tendinitis in my arm. I’m at the end of a years-long journey to bring my cholesterol down to something approaching normal. The extra weight led to a diagnosis that I was approaching chronic kidney disease, so I’ve been on medication to reduce the blood pressure in my kidneys. Losing the weight, together with the medication, has brought the kidney results back into a healthier range.

It’s easy to self-flagellate. I know there are things to celebrate. I and my former partner raised three amazing humans who have grown into marvellous adults. I’ve been part of the creation of at least two businesses that I am immensely proud of, that have real purpose beyond just making money. Those businesses have employed many people, who have gone on to greater things in their careers.

How do I feel today? Honestly, I’m not sure. My life is still in a state of flux; I don’t have control over some elements that will shape my life in the coming years. I absolutely don’t want to come over all doom and gloom. I hope I have grown as a human and as a friend. I am not sure turning 60 offers a verdict. Perhaps it simply makes it harder to avoid the evidence. There is, though, much more joy in my life than this ledger suggests. I’ll endeavour to give you a sense of my life today in my second article, and my thoughts about the next decade.

Read Part Two:

I Have ‘Kindness Respect Love’ Tattooed on My Arm. I’m Working on the Joy (Part 2 of turning 60)

Read more like this

The Work of Being an Older Human

Why Did Everyone Disappear After Fifty?

Five Years Later: From Failing the Pub Test to Finding my Fellow Weirdos

I did actually go to a wedding a few weeks ago, the nephew of a close friend. But that’s the only nuptials I can recall attending for years. Nowadays there is a reality that hearing of someone I know passing away is more likely. It’s part of the cost of ageing; at nearly 60 I’m likely now older than more people than are older than me. The more likely invitation actually is to a divorce celebration; grey divorce is on the rise, couples splitting up in their 50s.

I’ve found my 50s a curious time in the sense of watching the dynamics of life changing around me. Death and divorce are more likely than weddings, but there’s no shortage of new beginnings - spending time with relatively new couplings as people emerge out of their long-term relationships, decide it’s time to move on, and recouple with someone new.

They don’t warn you of this transition. Some people I know are either fully or partially retired. One friend, fully retired, spends her days doing long-term house sitting, chasing the sun away from Melbourne’s winter. Another has moved from the suburbs to a large block of land on the green fringes.

For most of my compatriots, either our kids are fully launched, or even if living at home, they simply ship out at night as they grow into their adult independence. The school gate feels like eons ago, with its accidental daily contacts and manufactured friendships. Some make deliberate relocations to be closer to grandchildren or a quieter beachside or rural life. So many friendships don’t survive these transitions, unless considerable effort is expended on both sides; casual ‘let’s catch up for a wine’ conversations become a long-term diary exercise. Many people don’t bother, preferring to drift silently away from even previously strong connections.

I turned fifty a decade ago, and looking back I can see how much of my own social life at the time ran on infrastructure I never built and barely noticed, things like workplace proximity, my kids’ sport, a partnership that did a fair share of the social organising for both of us. Remove any one piece of that out, and you find out fast how little of the calendar you actually filled yourself.

I’ve written before about why adult friendship is hard at any age. Fifty just changes the arithmetic, because the natural replacements that used to arrive on schedule - another job, the start of a school year, a move to a new street - fade away.

Robert Waldinger, who directs the Harvard Study of Adult Development, puts the pattern plainly.

“It is no surprise to many adult Americans that social circles tend to shrink throughout our lives. We often find ourselves attending to fewer and fewer people as we commit to family and work while old friends move away or become busier in their own lives.”

Not all of that shrinking is a loss to mourn. Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen has spent decades studying why older adults often report more satisfaction with fewer, closer relationships, describing

“...a developmental tendency for people to prune social networks as they get older and get rid of those people not particularly emotionally close or meaningful.”

There’s a big difference between who does the pruning, cutting ties with friends yourself, or when others sever the connections when you weren’t really noticing, or perhaps really valuing the power of the connections. Loneliness as we grow older is well documented and increasing. AARP’s most recent survey found roughly four in ten adults over 45 feel lonely, men more than women, and almost half of that group say they simply have fewer friends now than they did five years ago. Men are lonelier than women, caused by multiple influences including simply a lack of tools, and a previous reliance on their partners to schedule the social occasions into the diary - too many of us men having outsourced our social lives have never built the habit ourselves. It’s atrophy, not deliberate choice.

I find it reassuring that none of this calls for radical action; for most of us, we don’t need a detailed five-year plan or to install a new personality. Marisa Franco, the psychologist behind Platonic, is clear that friendship doesn’t need to mean finding a soulmate.

It can bring us a once-a-month lunch friend or a soulmate.

Starting small is perfectly acceptable and often preferred, and one doesn’t need to turn into the other. Age shouldn’t be an impediment; meeting people with shared interests can connect us wth people whose age is a decade or two either way of us; it doesn’t rely on having the same birth year, and actually might be easier to navigate.

Rebuilding a social life after fifty tends to come down to one small move - perhaps putting ourselves in the same room with the same people more than once. I have a good friend whose friendship has built over a regular early morning walk with her dog. Or maybe calling a former colleague instead of just passively clicking the like button on their LinkedIn posts. I regularly volunteer with a couple of events around town, and have met all manner of diverse people and formed new connections.

None of this fixes a lack of friends overnight; this is a concerted campaign, full of small moments and decisions over time. But nobody but you can take those first tentative steps to create new friendships. There’s a bravery required; we are all scared of rejection, but maybe it’s time to pull on our big girl undies, make the phone call, send the message, join a group - because nobody else is going to do it for us.

Read more like this

The Work of Being an Older Human

Friendships Can Have A Shelf Life

Life Beyond the Facial Hair

I have run companies for the better part of three decades, which has mostly meant being the person in the room who needs to stay calm when the situation at hand has gone sideways. As a leader, your job is to quickly get on top of whatever is going on, have already processed it before your team, and already be running recovery scenarios. And whatever the outcome, you will be the ultimate owner. There’s no celebration, no feting of your leadership, other than maybe the occasional ‘hey nice work’ from a staff member. There’s no great post-mortem or check-in on you. You just drive home, feed the cat and make dinner.

I think about that pattern whenever I read about what the kink community calls ‘dom drop’, the low a dominant can feel once a scene ends. Most writing on drop is aimed at submissives - sub drop - and for good reason. The person who handed over control, or simply stopped having to make decisions for an hour, is the one whose comedown is easiest to see. Aftercare, the practice of tending to a partner once a scene is finished, has largely been built around that need: blankets, water, reassurance, quiet. All necessary. None of it designed for the other person in the room.

A 2009 study out of Northern Illinois University measured cortisol and testosterone in 58 practitioners before and after sadomasochistic activity, and found the physiological signature of the experience belonged almost entirely to the person receiving structure, not the one providing it.

Cortisol rose significantly for participants who were bound, receiving stimulation, and following orders, but not for participants who were providing stimulation, orders, or structure.

You can measure the sub drop chemically, but for the person delivering the experience, there is not the same reset; they stay switched on even though their partner gets to fall and be caught. There’s a loneliness bound up in that for the dominant person; they have to process what has transpired, whilst simultaneously taking care of their subservient. The structure of a BDSM scene, the control they exercise, does not protect the dominant from a feeling of disconnection and loneliness. As a leader, as a dominant, everyone assumes you are fine, because you are the one in charge. The truth is very different. Dominance and leadership are so often underpinned by isolation. Aftercare is focused on the sub, not the dominant.

There is a crossover to business leadership, where that dom/sub relationship operates in very similar terms. Indra Nooyi, former CEO of PepsiCo, described the position plainly once she had some distance from it.

You can’t really talk to your spouse all the time. You can’t talk to your friends because it’s confidential stuff about the company. You can’t talk to your board because they are your bosses. You can’t talk to people who work for you because they work for you.

The boardroom might as well be a BDSM dungeon, and you, the CEO, are the Mistress standing over your sub, cane in hand. Whilst as a business leader flagellating your employees is probably not a fab idea (!), both scenarios carry responsibility for the safety and welfare of others. The more of this responsibility you carry, the fewer places there are for you to seek your own aftercare and support.

A kink dominant chooses the position, and there’s an argument that this should include understanding the isolation it may bring. But so does any leadership role; there is a power exchange. In BDSM, it is a form of intimacy; in a business setting, it’s an employer/employee relationship.

Feeling capable and feeling connected are not the same thing. A dominant can walk away certain they did their job well and still feel entirely alone in having done it. I have written before about the cost of always taking charge in a relationship, and this is that cost in a different guise.

The obvious solution is that aftercare must run both ways, negotiated before a scene rather than assumed afterwards: a submissive checking in on the person who held the space, not only the other way round. Outside kink, I would call that the same conversation any leader needs with the people around them; it should be part of the deal, someone whose job it is to ask how you are doing and mean it.

Read more like this

Is Monogamy the Only Grown-Up Way to Love?

Is “Spice Things Up” Code for We’ve Lost Each Other?

Maybe One Person Was Never Going to Be Enough

I wrote about LAT relationships recently and argued that commitment and cohabitation are not the same thing. But there’s a question I dodged. How do you tell the apartness the partners chose from the apartness that’s a hangover from previous relationships? What sits behind that decision not to live in the same physical space?

When the shared Google calendar is set up, that really cements the LAT relationship. Each person on the calendar claims a weekend, a date night, or other social activities, with or without the other person. Visits are planned - because you don’t live together, time becomes all the more precious. On occasion, there’s a calendar conference, marking out territory, ensuring time in each home is distributed to each other’s comfort. For some, this might mean juggling other relationships, or times when the kids will be home. These are committed partnerships, in separate households - Living Apart Together.

The UK sociologist Simon Duncan surveyed LAT couples across Britain and interviewed fifty of them in depth, and what he found in the older “preference” group (my group, the ones supposedly choosing separate homes as a better way to live) was awkward. The choice often wasn’t really the point. As he writes:

“people can end up living apart because they feel anxious, vulnerable, even fearful about living with a partner.”

Sadly, the motivation can be fear; many of his interviewees had come out of long cohabiting relationships that ended badly, financially and otherwise, and some had survived violence or coercive control. One woman, Michelle, explained her thinking to the researchers:

“I don’t want to lose everything in my house, I don’t want to be possessed, I don’t, and I don’t want to be beaten up, by someone who’s meant to love me.”

For someone carrying that history, it’s completely understandable that having their own, separate front door is safety, plain and simple, and nobody should be embarrassed by needing it. It makes sense for those people, but that front door can serve multiple purposes - physical protection but also act as a breathing space, a symbol of a content individual who values their own space as well as the relationship with their partner. The LAT label happily covers both without ever asking which is which.

Couples who choose to live at a distance end up talking about everything, because nothing can be assumed. When will we see each other this month? Who does the driving? What is this relationship, actually? I half-joked in the last piece that a shared Google Calendar becomes essential, and I meant it; it’s where you can see each other’s choices.

For those who are non-monogamous and may have multiple partners, a shared calendar needs to be navigated even more sensitively when it’s used across the group. Transparency is key in true ENM relationships, but jealousy and resentment can surface when emotions are not carefully monitored and voiced.

The challenge is staying the course and not drifting, because it also allows the distance to quietly grow, perhaps by avoiding certain conversations. Checking in becomes super important, taking the time to sit together, be open and transparent, and work through the niggles. This has to be deliberate; standing together at the kitchen bench generally doesn’t provide the right venue or time to bring up the hard subjects. You have chosen a structure for life and living, and like all relationships, it must be worked on.

I’d like to think mine is the chosen kind. I can’t be completely sure. I live alone, and I like living alone, but plenty of Duncan’s interviewees liked their arrangements too, and they all believed they’d chosen them. I spent years under a shared roof, twice, so I’m not defending separate homes - I’ve seen both models. The test I come back to is this. When something hard needed saying, did having two houses make it easier to say or just easier to put off? I don’t think any couple can promise they’d pass that test every time.

So, is living apart together lonely? It can be. So can a marriage under one roof be lonely in exactly the same way. Everyone might be physically present, but that’s not the same as turning up authentically and honestly.

Read more like this

Living Apart Together

Maybe One Person Was Never Going to Be Enough

Is Monogamy the Only Grown-Up Way to Love?

There are men I stood beside for years at my kids’ Saturday sport who never heard from me again after my separation. I didn’t ring them. They didn’t ring me either, and a whole layer of my life dissolved without any of us ever saying a word about it, which is a strange thing to admit given how much of my week those men once filled. I have written before about that silence in The Silent Drift. This time I want to come at it from the other side. Because if one of those blokes ever wondered why I went quiet, the answer had almost nothing to do with him.

Let’s start with the fact that I never really learnt how to make friends. I don’t think I ever really had a role model for forming connections. And due to my peripatetic life - moving schools and countries - even if a childhood friendship was created, it wouldn’t have lasted; no WhatsApp or FaceTime when I was young, no Facebook or Instagram that could help at least maintain a low level of connection and communication.

I can now understand why many of the sports Dads might not have reached out; they likely felt uncomfortable injecting themselves into the breakup of a long-term relationship. The research on friend ghosting mostly points away from blame. Psychologist Susan Albers puts it plainly:

“The overarching reason many people ghost is to avoid conflict.”

In more recent times I have learnt to move on from people who don’t respond to messages, or prove flaky in their commitments, not turning up to pre-arranged meetings. Originally I was a little obsessive - what did I say? Was it the last message I sent? I’d scroll back through the chat history searching for signs or clues. Why someone has ghosted me is a pretty lonely question - and one that is impossible for the recipient to answer. The one person who knows is the one who stopped replying, and for some reason they are not saying.

Perhaps - and this has happened recently - they were in a car accident. But maybe actually the friendship wasn’t as strong as I thought; maybe they were just going through the motions, almost as an obligation. So I am left with a few cheery messages, then nothing.

There’s no handbook for ending a friendship. Many of us grew up in households where hard conversations didn’t happen, where conflict was discouraged. Add onto that the pressures of everyday life - house moves, divorce, mental health - and maybe ending a friendship turns into something they cannot find words for. I don’t think ghosting a friend is usually a verdict on the friend. I perhaps originally thought of this in terms of ‘courage’, not having the courage to end a friendship, but I’m not so sure now.

Courage is the word that I landed on from my side when pondering the silent sports Dads. I definitely lacked the courage and the tools to pick up the phone and send a message. Honestly, I had no idea what to say. Silence was easier. I now know that friendships can have a shelf life.

“Most friendships don’t end in a screaming match, stomping of feet, and the protagonist striding away. More likely the opposite, there’s no great climax, no cinematic denouement, just a slow, silent receding of the friendship tide.

Sociologists study this as friendship dissolution. In everyday terms, it feels more like friendship drift, the slow loss of the shared structures that once held the relationship in place. The connective tissue of a shared life gradually dissolves, the text messages, drinks after work and birthday wishes dissipate.”

A lot of friendships only exist because you keep turning up at the same oval or the same office, and when that stops, there’s no scaffolding to hold the thing up. Your friend’s silence might be the same. Maybe it’s grief, or overwhelm, or a new partner who takes up all the oxygen, or an avoidance habit far older than your friendship. None of it means you did anything wrong. As Albers says:

“Ghosting says more about the person doing it than it does about you.”

Psychologists call an ending like this an ambiguous loss: no explanation, no ritual, which is partly why a friend who faded can ache for longer than one who said goodbye. I explored the wider pattern in Ghosting, Fading, and the Unfinished Endings of Modern Friendship. You’re allowed to mourn a friend who is still alive. You can write the ending yourself, on paper if that helps. A poor substitute for a real answer, I know. But it beats staying stuck in the question.

I’d like to think that if one of those sports dads rang me tomorrow and asked why I disappeared, I’d tell him the truth - but even seven years later I don’t assume I’d find it easy. That truth is what I’d offer you about your own vanished friend too: they went quiet because vanishing felt easier than explaining, and they probably couldn’t put the reason into words, even to themselves.

Read more like this

Ghosting, Fading, and the Unfinished Endings of Modern Friendship

Good Person, Bad Friend: What’s the Difference?

Why Is It So Hard to Make Friends as an Adult?

“We’re just looking to spice things up.” It’s the sentence couples reach for on a club’s sign-up form, in a dating profile written for two, or across the kitchen bench when one of them finally works up the nerve to raise the idea. It sounds light and adventurous, and sometimes it’s exactly that. Often, though, couples use it to cover for something neither person wants to say out loud: we have lost each other somewhere, and I want us back.

I wrote last year, in Loneliness in Relationships: When Being With Someone Isn’t Enough, about loneliness in a relationship, the strange ache of feeling disconnected from a person you share a bed with.

“Surely this is one of life’s paradoxes: feeling lonely while being in a relationship? It’s the emotional equivalent of being hungry while standing in front of a full fridge. Everything appears to be in order from the outside, but something essential is missing.”

That kind of loneliness rarely arrives all at once. The deep intimacy fades a little at a time, conversation thins into logistics, and one day you realise you have become housemates who used to be lovers. A couple in that spot usually knows something is missing, but naming it feels dangerous, like an accusation one of you might not recover from. So they reach for a friendlier word instead. Spice.

Which brings me to the swingers scene, because that is where a surprising number of these conversations end up. Ask why couples start swinging, and you’ll hear plenty of answers, curiosity and confidence among them, but spicing things up leads the list. Swinging itself needs no defending from me.

I have argued before that there is no single correct way to structure a relationship, and the research on couples who swing is clearer than you might think. The largest survey of the lifestyle, a 2000 study by sociologists Curtis Bergstrand and Jennifer Blevins Williams covering more than a thousand swingers, reached a conclusion that startles people who assume the scene is full of broken marriages.

“Swinging appears to make the vast majority of swingers’ marriages happier, and swingers rate the happiness of their marriages and life satisfaction generally as higher than the non-swinging population.”

The couples in that survey were doing well before they ever walked through a club door. Jennifer Reeves, a marriage and family therapist who works with swinging couples, puts the caveat squarely.

“It should never be a tool utilized as a last ditch effort to ‘save’ a relationship. Most couples who start to swing are already in a happy relationship and are just wanting an enhancement.”

The pattern in the couples-therapy literature runs the same way. Swinging tends to deepen the satisfaction of couples who were already connected, communicative, and trusting, and tends to go badly for couples who use it to paper over a gap. That makes sense once you look at what the lifestyle actually demands: constant negotiation, complete honesty about desire and jealousy, the ability to say “I wasn’t okay with that” the morning after and be heard. Those are precisely the muscles a lonely couple stopped using years ago. If you cannot talk about what’s missing at your own kitchen table, a room full of strangers will not teach you.

So the couple hoping to use swinging to save a relationship is usually asking the night to do the talking for them. What they want is rarely novelty for its own sake. They want to reignite intimacy, to feel chosen again by the person beside them, and they are hoping the sight of each other in a new setting will shock the old feeling back to life. Occasionally it might. More often the two of them drive home feeling further apart than when they arrived.

The order matters here. Before anyone books a night out, try one question at home, phones down: “What are we hoping this gives us?” If the honest answer from either of you is some version of “I want to feel close to you again”, then that sentence is the work, and it costs nothing except courage to say. A couple who can say it to each other, and stay in the conversation that follows, might later walk into the scene connected and curious, which the evidence suggests is the only good way in. Or they might find the night out no longer feels necessary.

Say the quiet sentence first. Decide about the club afterwards.

Read more like this

Is Monogamy the Only Grown-Up Way to Love?

Loneliness in Relationships: When Being With Someone Isn’t Enough

Trying to Buy Oranges from a Hardware Store

When my partner and I separated, the people around me sorted themselves into two groups without anyone announcing it. The dads I had stood beside on freezing sports pitches for years never contacted me again. I have written about that silence before, including my own share of it, because I never contacted them either. None of those men did anything wrong. They were good people who were never quite my friends, and I had not noticed the difference until the moment I needed it.

A while back I put together Ten Qualities of a Good Human, and it still finds more new readers through search than anything else I have written. The qualities on that list- kindness, honesty, generosity and the rest - are the entry price for being worth knowing, but you can hold every one of them and still be nobody’s friend. A good person will wish you well from a distance, while a good friend knows how you are actually travelling this week, and the gap between those two is where a lot of men end up lonely.

Search for the traits of a good friend, and you will find lists of virtues: loyalty, trust, empathy, that could just as comfortably describe a reliable colleague or a well-trained kelpie. What makes a good friend is more specific than character, because mostly it is not character at all but behaviour, things a person does for you in particular, over time, without being asked.

Consistency comes first. The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, who has spent decades studying why some relationships endure, and others quietly dissolve, describes the handful of people at the centre of our lives like this.

“They are what I call the ‘shoulders to cry on’ friends, the people who will drop everything and come to your aid when your world falls apart.”

Nobody gets into that inner circle by accident, and his research puts the reason bluntly.

“People’s willingness to do that depends primarily on the time you invest in them.”

The friend who texts to see how the week went or suggests a walk or a beer without a reason attached is doing the slow work that every other quality depends on.

Listening comes next, and it is harder than it sounds. Most men I know, me included, are more comfortable doing than talking, so when a friend brings us something heavy, our reflex is to reach for solutions before he has finished describing the problem. A good friend can sit with the mess for a while, ask a question or two, and trust that being heard is most of what was wanted. The same patience shows up in smaller ways, in remembering the interview you mentioned or the scan you were waiting on, and asking how it went without needing a reminder.

Then there is staying close when things get hard. Anyone can be good company at a barbecue. The characteristics of a good friend only really show themselves in the stretches nobody would choose, the separation, the redundancy, the diagnosis, when turning up gets awkward, and most people politely disappear. The psychologist Marisa Franco, whose book Platonic gathers the research on adult friendship, points at what is at stake in those moments.

“Scientists have found that of 106 factors that influence depression, having someone to confide in is the strongest preventor.”

One person you can confide in does more for your health than a suburb full of pleasant acquaintances, which is worth remembering in a culture that still tells men to carry things alone.

The uncomfortable part of a list like this is that it reads in both directions. I stood next to those sports dads for years and never asked a single one of them how he was actually doing, so the silence after my separation should not have surprised me. I had offered them exactly what they offered me.

If you want somewhere to start, pick one person, remember one small thing they told you last time, and ask them about it this week. It costs a text message. That, repeated, is most of what makes a good friend.

Read more like this

Why Is It So Hard to Make Friends as an Adult?

Ghosting, Fading, and the Unfinished Endings of Modern Friendship

Why Did My Friend Ghost Me?

Tell someone who has spent a lifetime eating oranges that you also like bananas, apples, and the occasional fruit salad, and something close to panic can cross their face. It isn’t really about the fruit. It’s the question of what their own orange means if other fruit was possible all along, and whether their choice was ever really a choice at all.

If you have committed to only eating oranges for the rest of your life, and the other person stops liking oranges after a few years and wants to switch to mangos, where does that leave you?

The trade-off people are really defending is the security of one flavour against the freedom of a whole market, and the person holding the secure option often needs the other person to be missing something, rather than simply choosing differently. It’s a fair trade to make.

Plenty of people taste the whole market in their twenties and decide, deliberately, that one orange tended well is worth more than a bowl of things sampled once and forgotten. The mistake is treating that as the only correct answer, instead of one good answer among several.

David Rose, the character Dan Levy plays in Schitt’s Creek, drew a version of the same line with rather less fruit. Explaining his attraction to people of any gender to his friend Stevie, he works through the wines he’s tried: red, white, a rosé now and then, a merlot that used to be a chardonnay. Then he makes the point.

“I like the wine and not the label.”

The line carried the show’s pansexuality plotline for years, and as Newsweek noted when revisiting the scene, much of its power comes from how little it asks of the listener. Nobody has to defend a position. David just says what he likes, and the conversation moves on.

“Most of us are used to thinking of diversity in terms of what we consume: wine, food, Netflix, whatever, but we are not so versed yet in thinking about gender, sex and relationship diversity,” Silva Neves, psychotherapist and spokesperson for the UK Council for Psychotherapy, told Newsweek.

What I take from it goes wider than sexuality. Attraction, in whatever form it comes, is one question. How you choose to structure your life around it is a separate matter. Being drawn to more than one gender is fully compatible with a monogamous marriage. Equally, someone attracted to only one gender might grow into a marriage and, years later, realise that lifelong exclusivity isn’t the shape that suits them after all. The wine and the label were never the same argument, and neither are desire and structure.

Western culture treats monogamy as though it’s the only mature outcome, a kind of finish line everyone eventually crosses. There’s a word for that assumption: mononormativity, the idea that pairing off for life is healthier and more natural than any other arrangement, with everything else quietly filed under confused, greedy, or not ready to settle down.

I don’t buy it. Some people are built for one orange grove and tend it beautifully for decades. Others are wired for a fruit salad, and plenty manage both over a lifetime, moving through ethical non-monogamy, relationship anarchy, chosen family, or whatever arrangement suits the people involved, rather than the one they were handed at birth by family, culture or convention.

None of this is an argument against monogamy. If you’ve found your orange and you love it, good- keep it. My argument is with the idea that the orange is compulsory, that wanting variety is a character flaw rather than a preference, and that naming what you actually want requires an apology or an explanation from you to the rest of us, neither of which is required of you.

What you want doesn’t need anyone else’s approval, whether that turns out to be one orange for life, a rotating fruit bowl, or the realisation, well into adulthood, that you never much liked oranges to begin with.

Read more like this

Trying to Buy Oranges from a Hardware Store

Is “Spice Things Up” Code for We’ve Lost Each Other?

Living Apart Together

In January 2021, at 54 years old, I wrote the first Alone Rangers article and admitted something I’d never said out loud: I’d been lonely my whole life. Somewhere along the line, I didn’t make any friends. I had no ongoing friendships from school or university, and despite knowing hundreds of people through work, there was nobody I could call out of the blue and suggest we meet up for a beer.

Some of that has roots in an intercontinental childhood. On Christmas Eve 1975, aged nine, I boarded a Qantas jumbo at Heathrow with my mother and siblings, bound for Darwin. By the time my schooling finished, I’d been a pupil at seven schools across two countries, including boarding school in the English Midlands while my family lived in the tropics. Friendships made at one school dissolved the moment I changed schools. In England I was the Australian curiosity, in Darwin the pommy kid, and fifty years on people still ask where my accent is from.

Add a 23-year relationship that produced three wonderful children and then ended, and decades spent building businesses, and you get someone who became very good at figuring out life’s challenges independently - the alone ranger. My loneliness became a habit, so deeply entrenched I’d stopped noticing it was there.

Writing that first article changed things in ways I didn’t expect. Dozens of strangers left comments, and so many of them said some version of “this could be me” that the comments section started to feel like a confession booth. One person simply wrote, “I’ll be your friend!”

It turned out I wasn’t uniquely broken after all. There’s a whole invisible tribe of us who somehow missed the handbook on how to keep friendships going past childhood, and we’d all been carrying it, assuming we were the only ones.

In the five years since, I’ve measured my progress against what I call the pub test: could I pick up the phone today and call three friends out of the blue to suggest a beer? When I first asked myself that question, I failed it spectacularly.

The rebuild has been slow and sometimes awkward. I started volunteering with events that attract a broad and diverse range of people, connecting me to new tribes. I deliberately cultivated an inner circle of new friends, who I adore.

Today there are people I can call at short notice to suggest dinner, a movie, or a drink, which would have seemed impossible when I wrote that first piece. I haven’t solved loneliness, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who claims they have, but I guess I’ve learned to live alongside it differently.

So that’s what Alone Rangers is. I write about loneliness, connection, and the emotional complexities of modern life, particularly through the lens of men’s midlife experiences. However, this space is for anyone who has ever questioned what it means to belong. I write about friendship and why it’s so hard to make as an adult, about relationships in all their forms, about mental health and the quiet work of being a good human.

Please don’t think I am an expert - I’m not a psychologist or counsellor. But I do have lived experience, and have spent considerable time on self-reflection and reading, once I worked up the courage to look my loneliness in the eye. I tell stories from my life, not because I have the answers but because I know how powerful it is to see yourself in someone else’s experience.

New articles arrive twice a week, and subscribing is free, although becoming a paid subscriber is very, very welcome. A good place to start is the piece that began it all, I’m 54 Years Old and Been Lonely My Whole Life, or the Ten Qualities of a Good Human series.

Being an alone ranger doesn’t mean being isolated. It means being comfortable with solitude while remaining open to connection. If any of this sounds like your life, you’re in the right place.

Ask most men what would make them happy, and they will name a person, a job, or a bank account balance. I think it is the single biggest mix-up in the whole subject: treating that person, job or number as the actual cause of the feeling, rather than just the trigger for it. Once you make that mistake, happiness stops being something you build and turns into something you have to go out and collect, over and over, from someone or something else.

The Buddhist teacher Robina Courtin puts the mistake plainly.

“The first mistake is the primordial assumption that the person, the thing or the event is the main cause of the happiness.”

That single sentence from Robina explains a lot of what goes wrong in relationships, but it applies just as well to work, money, and the body you are trying to get back into shape. If a partner is treated as the cause of your happiness rather than its trigger, then losing that partner should mean losing the happiness itself, permanently. Most people who have lived through a break-up know it rarely works that way, however it felt at the time, and most people who have lived through a promotion or a windfall know the lift never lasts as long as they expected either.

Secular psychology supports the same point with data rather than doctrine. The Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, admitted as much about his own possessions in a recent podcast interview.

“When I think about the things I value in the world, if you take them away from me, I will be utterly devastated forever. The devastated part is right. The forever part is wrong.”

Gilbert has spent thirty years studying what he calls affective forecasting, the practice of predicting how an event will make us feel and for how long. We are usually right about the size of the initial hit. We are almost always wrong about its length, because we underrate how quickly the mind adapts to almost anything, good or bad. A new relationship, a new job title, a bigger house, all of it settles into the background faster than we expect.

I wrote recently about Waiting for Someone Else to Grow Up and reached much the same idea there: my happiness is my problem, not a debt someone else owes me.

When you assume a partner is the source of your happiness rather than one of its triggers, ordinary disagreements start to feel like a threat to your well-being, because you have handed someone else a job that was always yours. You start managing their moods to protect your own, which is exhausting for both of you. The same goes for work, for a body you are trying to get back, for a bank balance you have not reached yet.

Wanting these things is not the problem. The problem starts when you confuse wanting them with needing them to feel alright, because then every setback in that one area threatens the whole thing.

A useful habit is naming the difference out loud when it shows up: is this the cause of how you feel, or just the trigger for it? Most days, remembering that difference is the whole job, and it is one no one else can do for you.

Read more like this

The Cost of Being the Dependable One

We are not mind readers

The Oneliness Paradox

Workplaces are funny places, a coming together of all manner of different people, each, in theory, united in a common cause. Many companies invest considerable resources in team building and creating cohesion. But the fact remains you’ve thrown a group of otherwise disparate humans together who are forced to interact, converse, create and spend a considerable part of their week in close proximity, whether physically or virtually.

You’ll inevitably find yourself struggling with a particular coworker, especially if they are a manager or in a senior role. They can set the temperature for the whole group. Or maybe there’s a colleague who you just don’t think pulls their weight, leaving others to pick up the pieces.

I’ve found myself replaying conversations in the car on the way home, reassuring myself that I was in the right after a frustrating interaction, and sometimes castigating myself for not handling the situation better. But underneath that lies a belief that if only the other person could get their shit together, my life would be infinitely easier.

Kathleen Smith, a therapist and faculty member at the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, recently published a piece whose title pretty much sums up how I should actually behave: “No One Has to Grow Up for You to Calm Down”.

Her thinking draws on Bowen family systems theory, which treats anxiety as something that circulates through a group rather than sitting neatly within individuals, and, in an earlier essay, she was blunt about what our favourite coping habits actually achieve.

“From the top of the stadium, we see how our reactions to challenges are more about managing our own anxiety than helping others.”

We avoid confronting the actual source of our discomfort, instead, we write long emails that over-explain a decision. Worse, we vent to a friendly colleague, thereby transferring our resentment to them. Getting it off our chest might give a sense of relief, but in reality, nothing will change, which is why we rinse and repeat, and risk the unhappiness compounding,

What has taken me a long time to realise is that my happiness is my problem. If my calm depends on others behaving the way I think they should, then I have handed them control of my psychological welfare. This translates into your home life just as easily. Some men like to laugh “happy wife, happy life” - keep everyone in the house happy, and you will be happy. Maybe their way of ensuring that is to portray themselves - rightly or wrongly - as the ‘dependable one’. It’s the same reflex as if they were at work.

Bowen theory has a name for the alternative, differentiation of self. Stay connected to the anxious people around you; don’t soak up their anxiety; don’t wait for them to change - it’s not your place to force that change, and nothing good will come of you imposing yourself on another.

Smith poses two questions to ask yourself:

“How do I want to be responsible for myself right now?”

“How do I want to be responsible to others?”

Notice that neither question mentions anyone else; this is about you, and the behaviours that you can control - your own.

You regularly read about hostile and poisonous workplaces in the news, and occasionally, the most awful outcomes for victims. I am absolutely not suggesting that in a workplace you need to grin and bear it when you are suffering real harm. Removing yourself is the best option, but I also understand that it is not always achievable.

There is also nuance. A junior employee suffering at the hands of a poor-quality boss (think of all those horrible hazing practices in trades workplaces) is surviving a situation they didn’t design or sign up for. And may lack the maturity to properly respond.

I’m probably choosing to focus more narrowly on the two questions above. Your steadiness is yours to build, and waiting for another adult to mature first is often a long wait.

I’ve founded/co-founded/led and worked in businesses for pushing 30 years, so more often or not I’ve been the boss in these scenarios. I’d like to think I was steady to be around, but I know in my heart that absolutely is not true. I’ve let the emotion and stress build and allowed that to manifest in poor behaviour - which includes throwing a phone across the office. That was a very long time ago; I’d never in a month of Sundays allow that abrogation of emotional control to emerge today.

I’d urge those of you who have someone at work who really pisses you off to adopt the small practice of catching yourself when you think, “I’d be fine if they’d just…,” and noticing that you have outsourced your calm and happiness to someone you don’t like. It’s a contradiction that needs to be called out. Nothing about this prevents you from naming problems, setting boundaries or disagreeing out loud. It just means you do those things without waiting for anyone else to grow up first.

Read more like this

Stop Calling Them Difficult

The Cost of Being the Dependable One

Owing Our Mistakes

For most of my working life, I did not stop. My first business rolled into the next, then into consulting, then into whatever came after, and for years, I never really paused between them. At one stage, our youngest child faced serious health problems, and there were two other kids to raise on top of that.

It never once occurred to me to think strategically about my own well-being the way I would about any of my companies. Eventually, in May 2025, I stepped back from full-time work at the business I had co-founded, and only afterwards did I understand how close to empty I had been running.

I say that because there is a comfortable story about exhaustion, and it happens to be the wrong one. We treat burnout as a character flaw, evidence that a man could not handle what everyone else apparently manages, when the truth often runs the other way. The wall tends to get hit by pouring yourself into things that all matter, work, children, health and the people who lean on you, until there is nothing left in the tank.

Byung-Chul Han, the philosopher who described ours as an achievement society, one where we no longer need a boss to drive us because we have learned to drive ourselves, puts the point squarely.

“Burnout, which often precedes depression, does not point to a sovereign individual who has come to lack the power to be the ‘master of himself.’ Rather, burnout represents the pathological consequence of voluntary self-exploitation.”

The collapse is not a shortage of strength. Too often we have spent our strength on things we were right to care about at the time. But too many of us fail to recognise the cost, we’ve absorbed a culturally embedded truism that self-reliance is a prime quality for a man. We are engrained not to ask for help, that seeking assistance is an acknowledgment of weakness - I’m a man and a man carries his own load.

I have written before about the cost of being the dependable one, and it’s the same reflex that manifests in those approaching burnout.

The physician Gabor Maté, who spent years tracing illness back to hidden stress, names it plainly.

“The core belief in having to be strong enough... is a defence... One way not to feel rejected is never to ask for help, never to admit ‘weakness.’”

The habit that once helped a boy feel safe becomes the reason a grown man ignores every warning sign his body sends him. So the tiredness gets filed as a problem to push past rather than a message to heed, which is the opposite of what Maté recommends.

“Learn to read symptoms not only as problems to be overcome but as messages to be heeded.”

The tiredness is the message. The flat mood, the short fuse, the waking at 4 am, all of it is the body telling you the current arrangement cannot hold. What we must learn to do is treat these signs as needing attention, not as a symbol of weakness.

None of this means the answer is to care less, because much of what wears us down is worth the weight. It means noticing the signal early, before your body has to make the decision for you, and being willing to say out loud that you cannot carry it all this week. Stepping back, when I finally did it, was the right decision. Nothing is worth more than your physical and mental health.

Back when the kids were young, like many parents, I spent hours standing on cold, wet sports pitches watching them kick balls around. I stood shoulder to shoulder with a coterie of other Dads of all personality types. The ‘footy expert’ who screamed at the teenage umpires when he didn’t like their decision. The British expat soccer fan who couldn’t help but pass on endless advice to the team coach.

You would have thought we had formed a bond, forged over cold coffee and soggy shoes, each faithfully discharging our duties - umpire escort, half-time oranges, team shirt washing. As the kids got older, some parents seemed less keen and would text the day before asking if I could give little Johnny a lift to the game- weirdly, most often the away games where we had to drive for an hour to some remote suburb.

My partner and I separated seven years ago, which also coincided with our son gaining his driver’s licence and taking off to games each weekend without needing the Dad taxi. So ended my sports-watching career and, it turns out, my relationships with all those Dads and a few Mums. Not one contacted me ever again.

This is probably not a reflection on those individual men, but rather a statement about how many men form relationships in the first place.

The sociologist Geoffrey Greif has spent years interviewing hundreds of men about exactly this kind of bond, and he has a name for it.

“In the book we talk about, I talk about this being a shoulder-to-shoulder relationship.”

Greif’s research, gathered in his book Buddy System, found that women’s friendships tend to be face-to-face, built around long conversation and the deliberate sharing of what’s actually going on. Men’s friendships, he found, run side by side: doing something together, with the talking arriving as a by-product rather than the point of the exercise - we’ll exclude all that yelling men in lycra on bicycles seem fond of during group rides.

He’s careful to say one isn’t a worse version of the other, just a different way of relating.

“It’s rare you’ll hear men say, ‘Let’s get together and have a glass of wine at this great, new, intimate French restaurant that just opened up.’”

That’s the bind of a side-by-side friendship. The pitch gave us a reason to stand near each other for as long as we were both there. But it gave none of us a reason to ask actual questions, like how things were actually going. The sole focus was the reason for our presence: watching the kids play. And contributing copious amounts of inappropriate advice to players, officials and coaches!

Greif also found that these bonds don’t need constant contact to survive.

“You think of the men in war who share a foxhole with each other, and then 25 years later, one combatant will call the other former combatant and say, ‘Can you come and help me?’ Either friend would drop everything they’re doing, no questions asked, and go and help the other guy without necessarily needing to talk about it.”

It also explains the silence: untested bonds ask nothing of you most days.

But what happens when the common activity comes to an end, as it did for my need to go watch the kids play sports? A shoulder-to-shoulder friendship is built on a shared occasion, whether that’s weekend sport, a work project or a regular bicycle ride. When those end, it turns out that the connection was limited to the activity and being in close proximity.

Remove that, and the relationship likely struggles to survive, not because of any failing on the part of us Dads, but rather the simple essence of the original reason that brought us together was singular and lightweight.

I’m going to point out at this juncture that, having maybe sounded a little negative earlier about how the other Dads didn’t reach out after our shoulder-to-shoulder activities ended, there was another underlying, unrelated cause - I was no longer a couple and therefore no longer warranted to be invited to the almost exclusively couples-based social activities around the suburb. I’ll also confess I didn’t contact any of them - relationships flow both ways.

This isn’t some fixed limitation of being a man. The psychologist Niobe Way spent two decades interviewing teenage boys about their friendships and found a level of disclosure and tenderness that defied every assumption about what teenage boys are supposed to want from each other. Her argument was that boys don’t lose the capacity for that kind of closeness as they grow up. Crucially, and I am a reflection of this, they’re taught to put it away.

“We do not need to fix boys as much as we need to help boys remain confident in their knowledge of the social and emotional world.”

Many of us men suppress the very relationship skills we naturally learn in early life once we reach adulthood. A side-by-side relationship is valid for the duration of the shared interest, but we don’t explore how to deepen the relationship beyond the pitch. What if I had invested the smallest amount of time, picked one of the other Dads and sent a few messages, maybe suggested a beer at the pub? Not for any great heart-to-heart, but a chance to connect in a broader way. I regret not realising this was possible; it never occurred to me that those Dads could have become long-term friends.

Read more like this

Why Groups Feel Hard (Even When You Like the People)

The Friendship Pyramid Is a Map, Not a Mandate

Why Is It So Hard to Make Friends as an Adult?