No One to Call
What a road trip, a Brat Pack star, and thirty years of data have to say about the friendships we let fade.
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.