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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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It seems inevitable that any long-term relationship will devolve into one between a manager and a managed. Old school convention dictates that the wife actually does the managing - organising the house, the kids and the doctor appointments. And there are many relationships today, I am sure, where this is still the case. Although not helped by the rise of tradwife influences looking for clicks whilst espousing some golden age of marriage and traditional gender roles. Of course, the husband goes to work and comes home to a clean house, clean children and dinner on the table.

But even in a relationship, when both parties are on the same page about the division of duties, someone will wind up checking that the bins are actually out and the power bill is paid. If this balance is equitable in the context of each other’s commitments and schedules, then great.

The problem is, there can come a point where care turns into control - and too often it’s the men who cross the line.

The clinical name for this is overfunctioning, a concept from the family systems work of psychiatrist Murray Bowen. It describes someone who manages a partner’s choices, moods, or tasks, not because the partner can’t handle them, but because watching them struggle, make slow decisions, or get it wrong feels worse than simply taking over.

Kathleen Smith, a therapist who writes on Bowen theory, puts it plainly.

“Overfunctioning is not a personality trait. It is one end of a reciprocal relationship process.”

Clearly, if one partner takes over, the other has to step back, and the household settles into roles that feel predetermined, despite neither person having tacitly agreed.

It’s a fine line in a way. Reminding your partner about organising an appointment is kind, but a second or third time? And worse, “Oh, I’ll just book it” is a vote of no confidence. It doesn’t fly with me; I’ve managed more projects, schedules and activities than hot breakfasts. I’m the demon of to-do lists; there are three written ones on my kitchen counter right now (housework, shopping, planning for a dinner party on Friday) plus my electronic work one, which surfaces on both my phone and my Mac.

You might think going ahead and booking the appointment is an act of love, but did your partner actually ask for help? Your partner needs to feel like a separate person, not a project to be managed and kept on schedule with a GAANT chart.

Zach Brittle, a Gottman Institute therapist, has spent years watching couples try to win control through pressure rather than trust.

“In a relationship fraught with conflict, wielding contempt and criticism can seem like a great way to seize a measure of control. But it’s an illusion.”

Most overfunctioning never gets that loud or that obvious. It’s way more subtle and grounded in misplaced good intentions, which is why it can carry on for years before the totality culminates in confrontation and a breaking point. I suspect many couples survive in silence, each deep in their roles, with a managed resignation, effectively gaslit into believing their relationship is ‘normal’.

Of course, none of this is about doing less for the people you love, whatever form of relationship - a marriage, long-term de facto, a friendship, an open relationship. But maybe next time you feel a pull to jump on something you feel your partner has neglected, try doing nothing and let them deal with it their way.

A lot of people are lonely inside relationships that are otherwise perfectly fine, and they don’t say so because admitting you need more than one person to carry the load can sound like an accusation against the partner who’s supposed to be enough. It isn’t one. Nobody was ever built to hold everything on their own, partner included.

Most of us inherited that equation without ever choosing it. Find the right person, and somehow one relationship is supposed to be your lover, your best mate, your confidant and your whole social life rolled into one. It rides on what the writer Amy Gahran calls the relationship escalator, the assumed sequence of dating, exclusivity, moving in and marriage that most people climb without ever treating it as a decision. I wrote about getting off that escalator before, in a piece on Living Apart Together. None of it gets said aloud, but the partner at the top is supposed to be enough on their own.

It’s the ending of every romantic film and the chorus of half the songs on the radio, so when the gap turns up anyway, it rarely gets read as ordinary maths. Most people read it as a verdict on themselves or on the relationship.

A piece in Psychologies on the rise of open relationships put language to that exact gap, in a way I think most people would recognise, whether or not non-monogamy has ever interested them. The clinical sexologist Ilka Kemp-Hall told the magazine:

“More people than ever before are beginning to question the idea that one person should meet every need and are placing more emphasis on communication, consent and emotional honesty. There’s a growing openness to exploring different relationship models, rather than defaulting to one ‘right’ way of doing things.”

Strip away the headline, and the real idea in that quote has nothing to do with who sleeps with whom; it’s an admission that 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.

None of that is unique to men, the gap itself is the same for anyone in a relationship, what’s different is mostly practice: men get less room to name a need before it curdles into distance or resentment, and fewer obvious places to put it once it shows up. Either way, the gap tends to get carried alone, which is where the loneliness from earlier really comes from, the feeling of needing something a partner cannot supply and having nowhere sanctioned to put that need, rather than anything to do with being single.

Most of us quietly expect a partner to absorb every need on their own, to be the one you vent to, your main source of comfort, and often the only person who still asks how you’re travelling. When that expectation doesn’t hold, because no one person was ever built to carry all of it, the shortfall rarely sends you looking for a mate, a hobby or your own family to fill the gap. It just gets carried alone and read as proof of the relationship, or you have failed, when it’s really just a flaw in the original equation.

The psychosexual therapist Lucy Frank, also speaking to Psychologies, made a point worth keeping even if you have zero interest in opening anything up:

“My clients are very dedicated to getting it ‘right’. Ultimately, they want it to enhance the dynamic, not erode it.”

You don’t need to renegotiate your relationship to use any of this. You just need to stop treating your partner’s limits as evidence that something’s wrong, and start treating your mates, your family and your own interests as legitimate places to put a need, instead of as a sign you’ve failed at the relationship. My article, The Friendship Pyramid Is a Map, Not a Mandate, covers similar ground: no one person was ever meant to carry an entire friendship network, and loneliness comes from the same source.

The relief in that Psychologies piece was never really about the bedroom. It was about giving up on an equation that quietly tells us a good partner should be enough on their own, the same equation built into the escalator most of us boarded without ever choosing to get on. You didn’t pick the wrong partner, and you didn’t get on the wrong escalator; you’re just human, and that gets a bit easier to carry once someone else takes a piece of it.

On Christmas Eve 1975, our mother walked three of us kids onto a Qantas jumbo at Heathrow, bound for Darwin. I was nine, and my eldest brother, already a year into Cambridge, stayed behind in England while the rest of the family started again on the other side of the planet.

By the time my schooling finished 12 years later, I’d been a pupil at seven schools across two countries: two in England before that flight, a school in Darwin, a boarding school in the English Midlands from age eleven (yup, commuting on Qantas each term from Darwin), a few more years at school in Darwin, then two final years boarding in Geelong (more commuting for the holidays).

At our English boarding school, we were the Australian curiosities - I do recall failing a test because I couldn’t name the capitals of all the Australian states - but in demand for the swimming team.

Because English school terms didn’t align with the Australian ones, I remember being accosted by an adult on the streets of Darwin, who demanded to know why we were not in school.

We even made the local newspaper, the NT News - Director of Education thinks so much of his schools that he sends his own children to school in England. It’s a News Ltd paper; you can get the drift.

In the tropics, we were the pommy kids. In the cold English Midlands, the antipodean curiosities.

Today, if I visit England, everyone thinks I’m from New Zealand. Despite 50 years in Australia, people still ask where my accent is from - not quite Australian, not quite English. However, they’ll tease me about my pronunciation of words like ‘vitamin’ and ‘plastic’.

There’s a price to pay for the peripatetic schooling. Friendships made at one school dissolved the moment I changed schools, in an era when staying in touch meant a weekly aerogram rather than a phone in your pocket. I’ve written before about the loneliness of an intercontinental childhood, and about realising at 54 that I’d been lonely my whole life.

What I hadn’t reckoned with back then is what that arithmetic does as you close in on 60. Friends who stayed in one town are forty or fifty years into the same friendships. I have friends today who are still in touch with their school friends.

My friendships kept resetting without my consent.

Mine Ruth Van Reken, who spent decades studying what she and the late David Pollock named the third culture kid experience, names the cost plainly.

“Identity becomes a real question. Where am I from? Who am I? Where do I belong?”

She’s talking about kids, but I’m fifty-nine and still don’t have a tidy answer, which gets a bit harder to admit at a barbecue full of people who’ve known each other since primary school.

I do wince when people ask me, ‘Where are you from?’ What they mean is, were you born in Melbourne, or Adelaide, or Sydney? It’s when I draw a deep breath and try to decide whether to inflict the entire saga (West Africa > England > Darwin > Alice Springs > Ballarat > Sydney > Bendigo > Melbourne) or just whether “oh, I moved here from England as a kid”!

Psychologist Pauline Boss calls it ambiguous loss, grief with no body, no divorce, no tombstone with a date carved into it:

“Ambiguous loss makes us feel incompetent. It erodes our sense of mastery and destroys our belief in the world as a fair, orderly, and manageable place.”

Nobody died, and nothing was officially lost, yet there’s no single town, accent, or group of mates from age ten who can vouch for who you were before you became whoever you are now. Perhaps some people might welcome this, the opportunity to create their own story and embellishments. But there’s so much influence early life has on your identity.

Turning 60 in a couple of months has made it harder to wave off. I’ve celebrated in articles previously how glad I am that our kids have enjoyed stability throughout their schooling - living in the same area, attending only a couple of schools each - and how they are still in touch with friends from primary school as they move into their late 20s.

To some degree, I’m now seeking that same grounded stability, evaluating where and how I’d like to live in the coming years and the people I’d like around me. Maybe I’m looking to recreate the same certainty our children have enjoyed. So what if it’s a few decades late? It doesn’t undo my history, but my past is just that, history. Like all of us, it’s my journey, and I’m grateful today I can choose what’s next.

In 2020, somewhere in the middle of the pandemic, I was dating someone who made her position clear early: she had no interest in ever sharing a home. She sent me an article to explain her thinking, and it introduced me to a term I’d never encountered before: LAT, or Living Apart Together.

My first reaction was unease. I was still operating from an assumption I’d absorbed without examining, that a serious relationship would eventually end up under one shared roof, and the term felt like a polite name for something that hadn’t committed to itself yet. I was wrong about that.

What LAT actually is

LAT describes couples who are committed and long-term and who, by choice, maintain completely separate households. Not casually dating, not waiting for circumstances to align, not in a transitional phase on the way to a shared lease. The separate homes are the arrangement, not the obstacle, and for many LAT couples, it’s intended to stay that way.

The sociologist Professor Sasha Roseneil, who has studied unconventional intimate relationships across Europe for two decades, describes what LAT couples push against:

“In the countries we studied, being coupled remains the very essence of ‘normal’, something fundamental to people’s experience of social recognition and belonging.”

LAT couples sit outside that definition, and they can feel on the outer when viewed on context of convention. Family members might not comprehend the choice, perhaps regard the relationship as ‘provisional’ or ‘temporary’ because the couple doesn’t cohabitate - the social ritual that marks a relationship as real and permanent.

Why the escalator doesn’t fit everyone

The writer Amy Gahran coined the term relationship escalator to describe the cultural script most of us absorb without realising it: a fixed sequence of steps toward cohabitation, shared finances and legal commitment. Most people step onto the escalator without noticing it’s moving - I know I did - twice! Familial expectations drove much of this; I simply didn’t know any better, and my partners didn’t either. In contrast. LAT couples step off the escalator, then spend considerable energy explaining they didn’t fall off, as Amy explains:

“When people say that a relationship is real or serious, they usually mean that the couple in question appears to be riding the Relationship Escalator. This can have the unfortunate side effect of marginalising people whose treasured intimate relationships somehow diverge from social norms.”

For people over fifty like me who’ve already ridden the escalator in full, sometimes multiple times, things look different. The merged life has its intimacies, but it also has its costs: the erosion of personal space built over time, maybe the creep of domestic inequality (although given I cook, clean and can iron, I’d really hope not in my case). Living alone creates its own rhythm, and breaking that can be difficult and confronting. I see my choice to live alone while maintaining strong relationships not as a retreat from intimacy but as a valid and strong way to build a bedrock of commitment. It takes work, without a doubt, but I’d argue that for people not suited to the escalator it leads to greater contentment for all.

What separate homes actually require

LAT doesn’t negate the friction of relationships; it just holds it in multiple places. For cohabiting couples, proximity can breed niggles and fractures that might be ignored; living apart together means you have to manage them consciously.

As Amy Gahran writes in Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator:

“Not living with lovers can help keep relationships fresh and vital, by encouraging partners to never take their shared time for granted.”

Everything becomes intentional: when you see each other, how you stay connected between visits, what the relationship actually is rather than what proximity implies. That’s not easier; it’s more demanding. A shared Google Calendar becomes essential! Reviewing the calendar becomes a ritual.

There’s a financial dimension worth naming. Two rents, two utility bills, two sets of everything the couple normally bundles into one; it’s the singles tax, except chosen rather than imposed. LAT is not an arrangement available to everyone, and that class critique is fair. But the cost also signals something: that the people who choose it are paying, actively, to keep their lives their own.

That relationship didn’t continue in 2020 for reasons unrelated to any of this. But the concept stayed. The idea that love doesn’t require merger, that commitment and cohabitation are not the same thing, rearranged something in me. I’d never heard of the relationship escalator back then, but it’s such an obvious, culturally baked-in concept that it becomes a template for life we conform to without even realising. I’m grateful to that 2020 relationship for opening my eyes.

Almost every close friend I have is divorced or separated and in their 50s. They date, they socialise, and some have adult kids drifting in and out. Outwardly, they often seem content, but this too often masks the precarious financial survival beneath the surface. Because, like me, they’re all paying more than they should be for the lives they’ve built.

It all comes down to money: rent or mortgage, utilities, insurance, rates, all of it lands at 100% rather than the 50% a shared household pays. The Aldi run costs one person nearly as much as it would feed two. Take a trip away, and a hotel room costs the same for one person as for two; the tax system prefers people who’ve coupled up. Individually, none of these is disastrous, but cumulatively, they add up to a levy that, by most other measures, is going fine.

“Grey divorce” is on the rise in Australia. ABS data show that in 1990, 13% of Australian divorces involved someone over 50; by 2020, it was 27%, and it now sits at close to a third. People living alone already make up 26% of all Australian households, and that share is projected to reach 35% by 2046. Yet the housing market, the tax system, and the pricing of just about everything conspire to penalise us single 50-somethings.

The rental market is where it really hurts. I’ve had several single friends who need to find a place to live and struggle terribly. Rents across Australian capital cities peaked at 8.5% annual growth in late 2023, and at the worst of it, 94% of new tenancies saw increases. I’ve driven past home opens for rental units with queues of dozens of people waiting to look around. Oh, and don’t tell the agent you have a dog; that instantly puts you at the bottom of the queue.

It feels unjust and unfair. You’ve carved out a life, moved on from a long-term relationship, and are starting to think about what the next stages of your life might look like, perhaps as work scales down, using the time freed up by the kids leaving home, but now you can’t afford a home.

I noted my new obsession with tiny homes in an article a few weeks ago, and the idea of them as a practical response to a problem nobody seems interested in solving. I’m fully over the big house dream; I’d like my life to be simpler, cleaner, less cluttered and tiny houses offer a model for living that delivers this.

Combined that with looking around my friendship circle, and the idea that keeps bubbling away at the back of my mind is a bunch of us roughly in the same situation coming together to buy a block of land not too far from civilisation, and setting up a group of tiny homes. A community that doesn’t require anyone to give up having their own space, and at a price that is affordable.

There’s a formal name for something like this - cohousing - and versions of it have been running successfully in Scandinavia for decades, with a few projects starting to appear in Australia. Most skew toward families or retirees. There’s almost nothing designed for the people in the middle: past raising kids, not yet thinking about aged care, stretched thin by solo overheads, and wanting some company without having to negotiate whose turn it is to clean the loo.

It feels to me like this is the missing piece for us 50-somethings who have not repartnered, or who have decided that, irrespective of whether a new relationship eventuates, we’d prefer to live independently. It’s an option that sits between competing with 100 others for a one-bedroom rental flat and moving in with someone.

Like my friends, I am not looking for rescue. I like my life; it’s just that my friends and I are paying too much in a world that doesn’t provide an easy spot to slot into.

I can’t remember a time when I haven’t loved words. I was a voracious reader as a child. I think the first book I can remember being gifted was The Hobbit from my big brother. I then graduated to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the cover fell off; I’d read it so many times. I can remember a contestant on Mastermind whose specialist subject was LOTR, and I was watching, thinking I could give him a run for his money with the answers.

Other early influences were Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, helped by Dad being a fan. He once wrote a treatise on the frequency distribution of the first letters of characters’ surnames in books and matched it against the frequency in the London telephone directory!

Douglas Adams was a particular hero. I adored how much effort went into constructing the perfect sentence, finding the humour, playing with the sounds of words to create a rhythm. I’ve read all four books in the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy many times.

As a teenager, I tried my hand at writing some short stories - I still recall Murder at the Dolphin, and feeling clever, I’d constructed a plot whereby the killer could be found because of his height - a witness saw a figure in their dressing room mirror but couldn’t see their face as the killer’s head was above the top of the mirror.

I even turned my hand to an airport thriller, in the vein of Clive Cussler (I was a huge Dirk Pitt fan) and Tom Clancy. Although I later cooled on Clancy after discovering he was a pretty far-right Republican.

My thriller was set in London; the fact I lived in Darwin was a minor hindrance. I pored over photocopies of pages from the London A-Z to describe spy-thriller action on the real streets of London. Totally capitalising on Dad’s big boss role at the education department, I would sit in an office corner, bashing out pages on a spare IBM Selectric golf ball typewriter. I hung onto the ring binder of that book, with all its notes, research, and typed pages, for years, although it seems to have gone astray in more recent decades.

Sometimes I feel chagrin at not understanding that being a writer was a career I could have pursued - I’m not sure career counselling in the early 1980s was as detailed as today. My big brother was a career journalist before retiring and has turned his hand to a couple of books. There’s no question this has been an underlying inspiration to me over the years - even his emails are grammatically correct, something in short supply in today’s online social media world.

The root of my love of words is Mum and Dad. Both lifelong readers and fascinated with language and words. As kids, we were always surrounded by books - when Mum and Dad retired from Darwin down to the colder climes of Ballarat (Dad liked the golf course there), Mum’s big consideration was the endless running metres of bookcases that would need to be transported. The large shed in their garden was like a library; you literally could walk up and down the bookcase aisles because they didn’t all fit in the new house. Mum still always has a book on the go, always curious and interested in something new.

The first computer in our house, an Apple 2E, was so Dad could draft his speeches and, most importantly, maintain his list of quotations he’d found while reading that could be worked into those speeches.

After my one year at Monash Uni, I needed to find something to do, and I applied for a cadet role in the news team at Darwin’s commercial TV station. I still have all that correspondence, but the overriding memory is Dad sitting with me, working through multiple drafts of the application letter’s half-dozen paragraphs, because it was important to get it right. Such a contrast to the literally hundreds of form letters we receive online at our company when we advertise a role.

Many moons ago, I once wrote some marketing copy and was lambasted by the client for starting a couple of sentences with ‘And’. I was positive I was correct and enlisted Dad’s help, who emailed me a mini essay on how this was perfectly acceptable- indeed, the King James bible does! As with any writing, the context, style and form of writing can dictate what is acceptable. Plus, it’s difficult to argue with the word of God.

My friends know I do climb on my high horse over especially punctuation and most particularly apostrophes, say after me….apostrophes do not make words plural!! Well, except when pluralising a single lowercase letter, for example: mind your p’s and q’s.

A huge joy in the last few years has been rediscovering writing for enjoyment rather than work. I’ve churned out probably millions of words in business plans, strategies and reports over the years. Today that’s receded significantly. My Substack and other writing platforms, like LinkedIn, have allowed me to reconnect with a regular writing rhythm, and I could not be more grateful. It’s not an income earner by any stretch, but perhaps that spy thriller novel is still buried deep down inside.

A while back, I wrote about what I called the pub test: how many of us have sat in a cafe on a Saturday afternoon scrolling through our phones, wishing we had something to do that evening, but without anyone we could actually call? The question hit harder than I expected. So did the silence after I asked it.

I’ve been thinking about it again since listening to Andrew McCarthy on the Death, Sex & Money podcast. McCarthy was a film star in the 1980s, one of the so-called Brat Pack whose faces were everywhere at once, whose social lives seemed to define a generation. Others included Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez (used to love CHIPS), Rob Lowe (Eternal West Wing fan), Molly Ringwald, and Judd Nelson.

Somewhere in his fifties, McCarthy looked around and realised he had almost no friends. Not “busy” friends or “we should catch up” friends. No one he could actually call. This is the premise of his book, Who Needs Friends, and the cross-country road trip he took to find out whether it was too late to do something about it.

The answer, it turns out, is no. But the journey there is more honest than that.

If you are a guy, I suspect you’d be the same as me, much more comfortable doing than talking - at least that was my default mode until a few years ago. But that means my connections were only as durable as the duration of the activity I shared with other men - almost always something to do with the kids, and almost certainly sport-related- like managing my son’s soccer team. When the activity ends, the ‘friendship’ ends, so it wasn’t really a real connection, just a happenstance few moments with a few others.

I have wondered what those other men thought when the activities ended. Did they miss me? Was I actually not that interesting to them? Did they not feel a connection? Did I put in the effort to build a connection? Probably not because I really did not have the toolkit at my disposal.

The idea that some men have no close friends has been a common theme for me, right back to my earliest writings for Alone Rangers. And the statistics exist - the Survey Center on American Life found in 2021 that 15 per cent of American men reported having no close friends at all, up from 3 per cent in 1990. I wrote about my own work friendships last year, how connections built over decades dissolved almost as soon as I left my company. Nobody fell out. The connective tissue just wasn’t there without the shared context.

McCarthy told the Boston Globe why that pattern is so hard to break:

“Men won’t admit they’re lonely, because that makes them sound weak.”

What tends to fill the gap is a romantic partner, which works until it doesn’t. When a spouse becomes the sole container for all emotional needs, the weight is enormous for both people. What researchers describe as secondary loneliness (the isolation of someone who is never technically alone but still has no one outside their relationship to confide in) is more common in men than most people assume, and harder to name precisely because it doesn’t look like loneliness from the outside.

McCarthy drove thousands of miles partly because the car creates a captive audience, instead of a dinner table that is easily left. Sitting with someone for a long car trip takes the pressure off the conversation. You can legitimately slip into silence for periods. Perhaps it might feel a bit awkward, but awkwardness is the price of admission for that kind of reconnection, not evidence that something has gone wrong.

Robert Waldinger, who directs the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running study of adult life ever conducted, has stated:

“The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80.”

What protects us then is not complexity but closeness.

McCarthy also noticed something about the friends who’d known him longest: they didn’t require the ‘PR’ version of him. These were people who knew him before his Hollywood career, before the Brat Pack reputation. He didn’t need to manage how he appeared to them.

None of this requires enduring 10,000 miles in a passenger seat. As McCarthy put it:

“I do think about that old cliche that 90 percent of life is showing up. If I did one thing right in this book, I showed up. I got in the car, and I went to see my friends, and in response to my act of going to see them, they were like, ‘Dude, you just drove from New York to Texas to see me.’ Like, yeah, you’re important in my life, man. And you needed to know that.”

The end goal is friendship, and the research on longevity makes this clear. The message is just show up - make the call, go for the drive - do something that doesn’t directly benefit you - be a good human to others, and they’ll do the same.

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The Quiet Epidemic: How Loneliness Became a Public Health Crisis

The loneliness of the clock

Why don’t we ask for help when we’re lonely?

Anna Goldfarb, who writes the newsletter Friendship Explained, has a framework for why this happens, and it has nothing to do with being unlikeable. It has to do with tiers.

Goldfarb maps our social lives across five distinct layers, each named after a body of water. At the innermost ring is the Bathtub (one or two people with full, unfiltered access to you: a partner, a lifelong best friend, someone who has seen you cry in an airport). Then the Jacuzzi (three to five people), your core emotional support crew. Then a Swimming Pool, a High Tide, and finally the Water Park, which caps out near Robin Dunbar’s famous 150-person limit for meaningful social recognition.

The framework is elegant, and its central diagnosis is hard to argue with. Most of the modern loneliness epidemic isn’t happening at the Water Park. We’ve gotten very good at accumulating weak ties, mistaking the noise for nourishment. What’s actually suffering is the Jacuzzi. Anna Goldfarb writes:

“The loneliness epidemic isn’t really a water park problem. Most lonely people have an overflowing cornucopia of acquaintances. What they’re missing are those valuable Jacuzzi people.”

Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running happiness study on record, found the same pattern from a different angle:

“The surprising finding is that our relationships and how happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health.”

Wealth and career success barely feature. The three to five people who know you well enough to tell you the truth: that’s the tier that keeps you healthy and sane. As we’ve explored before, making those connections as an adult is harder than most people expect, and the deficit is real.

“Making friends as an adult isn’t impossible. It’s just different. It requires more intention, more effort, and more courage than it did when we were seven.”

So the framework earns its keep. Where it gets shakier is in the assumptions quietly baked into its architecture.

Yes, it’s true that quite likely the Bathtub accurately describes those in traditional monogamous relationships, but even then, you must be careful not to audit your life - do I have three to five people in my Jacuzzi - is eight too many? How come I only have two?

The pyramid works cleanly if your social life follows a fairly conventional shape. But the assumptions it rests on aren’t always visible until you step outside them. Someone who is polyamorous or ethically non-monogamous might have two or three Bathtub-level relationships simultaneously, partners who each carry genuine depth and know the unguarded version, and the tier model doesn’t quite know what to do with that.

Some people have intense long-term relationships with others online, without ever meeting in person. Some are finding comfort and connection with AI chats. An extrovert might find a 150-person Water Park a source of energy, but for an introvert, that’s a definition of hell. That’s the risk with any framework: it is by nature prescriptive. And that’s fine, provided you don’t get too bound up in the literalness.

The pyramid is a useful tool to notice where your connections might be thin on the ground. You might have an intense, close relationship with your partner, but perhaps your wider constellation is lacking. But it’s important to remember that building an authentic connection has to start with your own life, not by trying to fit it to someone else’s map.

“It’s not just about finding someone who ‘gets me’. You need to be equipped and develop emotional intelligence to understand yourself and the people you associate with, ensuring you can navigate the differing experiences and perspectives.”

The world is a broad and colourful canvas. Some people will find their version of the Jacuzzi in a partner and two lifelong friends. Others will find it in a rotating constellation of people, each holding a different facet of who they are. Some will have a Water Park that matters enormously to them; others will have let that tier go and feel no loss. None of these configurations is a failure of the framework. They’re just lives.

Use the map, but don’t let it use you.

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Friendships Can Have A Shelf Life

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

Shoulder to Shoulder Friendships, Not Face to Face

Back in the 90s, when working for the local government in Bendigo, the CEO had us all take a Myers-Briggs test. Mine came in as ENTP:

• E (Extrovert): Extroverts draw energy from being around other people rather than from time alone.

• N (Intuitive): Intuitive types focus on patterns and possibilities rather than concrete facts and details.

• T (Thinking): Thinking types make decisions based on logic and objective analysis rather than feelings or personal values.

• P (Perception): Perceiving types prefer to stay open and flexible rather than making firm plans and sticking to them.

My E and P were borderline (the opposites are Introvert and Judgement).

Those who know me will often have seen me in group settings, both personal and professional, as pretty social, interested in talking to people, and happy to march up to someone I don’t know and introduce myself. What people don’t see is the drive home and my need to decompress. It’s not because there was any conflict or concern, but because my battery ran out and I need some quiet time to recharge. There’s my introvert kicking in. If I need to be ‘on’ for a few days in a row, for example, working a tradeshow and interacting with many people, it takes a couple of days to recoup my energy. It’s not that I feel there is something wrong, rather a kind of unexplained sense that I’m struggling.

Writing as a guest on Dr Marisa G. Franco’s Substack, clinical psychologist Ellen Hendriksen, author of How to Be Yourself, offers a useful comparison: a meeting with one colleague versus the Monday team meeting goes “from playing catch to nine innings of baseball.” In a group, you are simultaneously tracking multiple voices, reading emotional undercurrents, monitoring who is being left out, and negotiating conversational turns. Hendriksen says:

“In groups, we have to follow and respond to multiple people’s words, emotions, and interpersonal dynamics, not to mention interruptions and side convos. There’s a greater load on our cognitive capacity, social battery, and emotional bandwidth.”

Group dynamics are much harder to navigate than one-on-one interactions. It’s not that you don’t have the tools or that you’re awkward; groups are just awkward. It’s not you; it’s the nature of how much work you’ve done.

There is an extra layer of complexity when the gathering involves people who know you well. You are not simply navigating a room of strangers. You are trying to show up consistently across several overlapping versions of yourself: the funny one, the capable one, the one who more or less has things together (the latter is an impression I’m very good at projecting whilst it is not necessarily true).

As I explored in The Quiet Exhaustion of Keeping Parts of Yourself Hidden, the exhaustion doesn’t come from hiding the flawed pieces; it comes from the ongoing vigilance required to decide, moment by moment, what stays visible.

“All of us hide something of ourselves. It’s why we very rarely (I’d hope) tell people to fuck off when we don’t agree with them in work meetings. The most exhausting thing is not hiding who you are, but carrying the constant awareness that you are doing it.”

It’s even harder when different circles of friends are in the same room, some knowing something about you that others don’t. The burden increases because you are straddling two pathways simultaneously.

Hendriksen draws a distinction between social performance and social connection. Social performance focuses on external actions: saying the right things, avoiding mistakes, meeting whatever unspoken standard you imagine is operating. Social connection focuses on the relationships themselves,

“knowing, trusting, accepting, and supporting each other through experiences shared both directly and verbally.”

The two can look the same from the outside, but they feel completely different from the inside. I’ve written before about performative socialising and how you might be liked without feeling seen - this is that dynamic, operating at the level of a single evening.

Her practical advice follows the same logic. When someone asks what’s going on with you, you don’t have to file a tidy report on work, family, and other. You can tell a story. You can ask for advice on something you’ve been chewing over. You can riff on what someone else just said. The goal, as she puts it, is simple:

“Talk about what you’re jazzed to share.”

And when all eyes in the room turn toward you at once, the job isn’t to perform adequately. It’s just to show up as you actually are, which is enough even when it doesn’t feel like it.

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The Friendship Pyramid Is a Map, Not a Mandate

Shoulder to Shoulder Friendships, Not Face to Face

Friendships Can Have A Shelf Life

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how we stall on our own decisions, not because the choice is hard, but because we can’t stand the uncertainty of what comes next.

“None of us can see the future. We might make a decision, but there may be hidden information, an element of luck or external forces that, even if our decision seems sound, may still all fall apart. Alternatively, a shitty, reckless decision may pay off through sheer luck.”

But this plays the other way round as well, because most of us don’t just freeze on our own decisions. We also jump too quickly on other people’s. Not to take over, exactly, but to prevent something uncomfortable from happening to them. We smooth the path, absorb the friction, say the thing before the silence becomes too awkward. We tell ourselves it’s love.

The Anxious Overachiever put it plainly: we tend to mistake distress-prevention for love. And once you see it, you see it everywhere.

As parents, our natural instinct is to protect our child, but maybe we are jumping in before they have a chance to work it out on their own. Or, and I am so guilty of this, taking on a task from a team member because waiting for them to work through the task feels worse than just doing it myself. Or maybe we soften a hard truth for a partner or close friend because we love them and can’t bear to see them sitting with difficult news.=

Jonathan Haidt, in The Coddling of the American Mind, argues that this instinct, played out across a generation of parenting, has produced adults less equipped to handle ordinary adversity. His guiding principle is simple and well known:

“Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”

It applies equally to anyone you’re leading or loving. When we over-function for others, fixing problems before they can attempt them, managing feelings before they can process them, we’re not being kind. We’re managing our own discomfort at their expense.

The harder truth is that emotional courage rarely looks dramatic. It usually looks like not doing something. Not jumping in, not explaining, not rescuing. Staying present while someone else sits with difficulty and finds their own way through it. Putting it plainly, sometimes we need to suck it up.

Brené Brown, in Daring Greatly, frames what that actually costs us:

“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.”

It is only natural to want to share the load with someone we love. It’s tough watching them struggle with something difficult and unsettling. We can’t know how that struggle will resolve, yet intervening early is likely more for us than them.

We must learn to notice the moments that we feel we must jump in and save our friend, resist the impulse to dive into the swirling waters - because it’s entirely possible we’ll both drown. It’s not up to us to fix something that isn’t ours to fix.

We must trust that our friend is capable of fighting their own battle and give them the space to resolve their conflicts. Usually, they are way more capable than we give them credit for.

I’ve never been to a fortune teller, although I’ve seen plenty on television, gypsy characters in a headscarf huddled over a crystal ball, riffing on themes until they find one that lands with the customer. The reality is nobody can predict our futures nor read our minds. Mentalism is an art form, verbal gymnastics wrapped in mystical smoke and mirrors for entertainment.

Given that we all know this, why do we think our friends, family, and people in our world are also mind readers? Yet internally, we can experience flare-ups because someone misses a cue, maybe doesn’t recognise that we are overwhelmed or troubled? Maybe they ask the wrong question at the wrong time, but carry on not understanding that they have triggered something inside us? “How dare they not know?” is our reaction - yet that’s completely unreasonable and irrational.

Kathleen Smith, writing in The Anxious Overachiever, calls this a “How Dare You” moment: the specific frustration we feel when someone fails to read our minds. It’s a pattern that’s more common than most of us would like to admit. The frustration isn’t really about what the other person did. It’s about what they failed to read.

Some people genuinely are very empathetic and great at reading faces and vibes. I remember doing an executive EQ review once, where I was shown a series of faces, and asked to name the emotion each was experiencing. It’s an interesting exercise, some are obvious - sad, happy - but so many facial expressions are subtle and difficult to discern. I know I found it challenging, although interestingly, I scored reasonably well.

Psychologists call this the Illusion of Transparency. In a 1998 study, Thomas Gilovich, Kenneth Savitsky, and Victoria Husted Medvec found that people consistently overestimate how visible their internal states are to others. We feel our distress or frustration so acutely that it seems impossible those around us wouldn’t notice, and yet they usually don’t, because they aren’t inside our heads - they don’t have a crystal ball, and not everyone scores perfectly on an EQ test.

A vicious circle forms, and we can develop a martyr complex: we don’t ask for what we need, our friends can’t read our emotions, we absorb the disappointment silently, our emotions rise further, yet nobody notices, leading to resentment. How the heck haven’t they noticed!

There’s a kind of righteous suffering born of resentment. I’m carrying all this load, and nobody notices or cares. Which is true insofar as that goes, but the real problem is we didn’t tell them. How can we expect someone to meet a need we have without asking them? Without sinking into vulnerability.

I’ve written previously in Building Authentic Connections about how we create a mask:

“We curate our lives like museum exhibitions, showing only the polished pieces whilst hiding anything that might be considered flawed or messy.”

“To connect, we need to feel safe enough to be seen.”

We expect someone to meet a need we never articulate, and we want to be known without the vulnerability of being known. That tension sits at the heart of so much adult loneliness. As I’ve written in both Building Authentic Connections and Why Is It So Hard to Make Friends as an Adult?, vulnerability is the entry price for being genuinely seen, and most of us would rather wait to be found than risk paying it.

Explicit communication might feel unromantic - and let’s be blunt, downright scary - but the alternative is the slow accumulation of resentment toward people who, in most cases, simply didn’t know.

Next time you feel indignation rising, try reframing your thoughts. Instead of ‘how dare they not know?’, ask ‘what do I need here, and have I actually said it?’

Monika Jiang wrote recently on her The Oneliness Project substack about returning to Berlin after an extended stay in Vietnam, and how life felt different there:

“Time feels different there. Not because people are less busy or work less hard, but because there seems to be spaciousness alongside the work. Perhaps because time doesn’t operate primarily through linear, Western logic, but moves through the cycles of the moon, the rise and set of each day, the rhythms of collective life, rather than the isolated individual one.”

I think I can relate. I have been going down a rabbit hole lately, the tiny house kind. Over the past year or so, I have been steadily clearing out the accumulated remnants of decades of living, and the more I clear, the more I find myself returning to something I think I have always believed: that I care more about people than things. I have never been particularly motivated by money; I am only motivated by what interests me and what I can become passionate about. I suspect that has cost me dearly financially over the years.

But it does clarify what the tiny house project is actually about. It is not austerity. It is stepping away from the idea that accumulation (of things, of trophies, of visible markers of success) says anything meaningful about a life.

That logic runs deeper than we think, though. It does not just govern our stuff; it governs our time.

As Edward T. Hall wrote in The Silent Language:

“Time with us handled much like a material; we earn it, spend it, save it, waste it.”

This linear, productivity-driven model creates a phantom pressure that follows us from the moment we wake up. You might find yourself checking your watch at 7:00 AM and feeling an odd sense of panic: it is early, but you already feel late.

The term for this is chrono-colonialism: the gradual imposition of Western clock time on cultures with their own, more communal rhythms. Monika’s experience of Vietnam is the counterpoint: time there still bends around people rather than schedules. Community needs, rather than a spreadsheet, govern the day. A coffee stall is not just a caffeine fix; it is a “third place” where time is shared.

In The Dance of Life, Hall returned to this:

“Polychronic cultures are by their very nature oriented to people. If you value people, you must hear them out and cannot cut them off simply because of a schedule.”

When we live exclusively in a monochronic world, a spontaneous chat with a neighbour becomes an interruption to our “real” work. We schedule our friends weeks in advance, and the organic spontaneity that genuine connection requires quietly dies.

Byung-Chul Han, in The Scent of Time, put it plainly:

“Whoever tries to live faster, will ultimately also die faster. It is not the total number of events but the experience of duration which makes life more fulfilling.”

When time has no narrative or ritual, it becomes a series of disjointed points. We rush from one to the next but never feel we have arrived.

Living well might require something similar to what draws me toward the tiny house dream: less accumulation, more intention. The people in our lives are not a cost to our time. They are the reason for it.

Nobody ever felt less lonely because they were on time. Presence is a different kind of punctuality.

Read more like this

No One to Call

Wanting the Waiting to End

The Quiet Epidemic: How Loneliness Became a Public Health Crisis

R U OK? is a genuinely good idea, not just as a charity or a day on the calendar, but as an actual practice: noticing someone in your life who seems to be doing it hard and asking them, with real care, how they’re going. That question, asked sincerely and outwardly, can change things.

I’m interested in a different question, one that looks almost identical but works very differently.

In the aftermath of a disagreement with a friend or partner, you may think the air has cleared, but as the minutes pass, that familiar prickly heat (the kind I wrote about in Prickly Heat Sucks. Just Like Loneliness) begins to rise in your chest, and you find yourself re-reading their last message or statement, trying to detect something in the punctuation or tone. Then the natural urge surfaces: Are we really okay?

Could this be you outsourcing your own discomfort?

Thomas Joiner, a psychologist at Florida State University who has spent decades studying distress in close relationships, defined ‘Excessive Reassurance Seeking’ in a landmark 2001 study as

“the relatively stable tendency to excessively and persistently seek assurances from others that one is lovable and worthy, regardless of whether such assurance has already been provided.”

The temporary relief it offers is real, but the longer-term effect is corrosive: the more we seek reassurance, the less capacity we build to sit with uncertainty, and the person on the other end gradually finds it exhausting. What starts as a bid for closeness can quietly create the very distance we were trying to close.

As I explored in Loneliness in Relationships: When Being With Someone Isn’t Enough, conflict doesn’t just create friction; it breeds its own particular loneliness, particularly for those whose anxious attachment style makes a partner’s post-conflict silence feel unbearable rather than temporary.

“All too often, communication lies at the heart of the disconnection. If you are clashing and disagreeing, the connection is weakened at each outburst.”

There’s also a timing issue. After conflict, the logical brain often resolves things well before the nervous system does, so even when we know the disagreement is finished, our body hasn’t quite caught up yet. Reaching for reassurance in that window is less about genuinely checking in on the relationship and more about forcing an emotional resolution our nervous system craves before it’s ready to arrive on its own.

We must ask ourselves: are we reacting to what is actually happening, or to a pattern we’ve carried from somewhere else? Can we trust the history of this relationship more than we trust your current anxiety? What actually happens if things stay a little quiet for the next hour?

Not every silence after a conflict is a warning. Some of it is just two people coming back to themselves at different speeds, and building the capacity to believe the relationship is solid enough to survive that gap, without needing a status update to confirm it, is one of the quieter and more useful things you can develop in any close relationship. Michel de Montaigne put it plainly:

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”

The most durable sense of safety isn’t the one you ask for. It’s the one you build in yourself when the room goes quiet.

Are you okay with not being okay for a moment?