At 54, I failed what’s often called the pub test. Did I have three friends I could ring on a Saturday and ask if they’d like to go for a beer? I’d built businesses, raised children and collected hundreds of professional connections, and I couldn’t come up with a single name.
Last week I finished my piece on Jimmy Carr, putting people on the list of basic maintenance right alongside sleep and exercise. That leaves the obvious question: how do so many men in midlife end up with nobody to put there?
I don’t think most of us decide to drop our friends. It happens more quietly than that, and from the inside it looks like a full life, with work taking up the weekdays, the kids claiming the weekends, and a partner filling the evenings and, in a lot of households, the social calendar as well. Each of those does a job friendship used to do. So the friendships stop being asked for anything, and after a few years the calls just stop.
The Survey Center on American Life has tracked what it calls a friendship recession. In 1990,
“Only 3 percent said they did not have any close friends.”
By 2021, that figure had risen to 12 per cent. One of the causes the researchers named will be familiar to anyone who spent their forties driving kids to weekend sports.
“American parents are spending twice as much time with their children compared to previous generations, crowding out other types of relationships, including friendships.”
Anna Goldfarb, author of Modern Friendship, puts the married version of this more bluntly.
“For most husbands, their wives are an all-in-one product.”
The Survey Center’s numbers back her up.
“Eighty-five percent of married men, compared to 72 percent of married women, say they turn to their spouse when they have a personal problem.”
That works well enough while the relationship holds, but it leaves one person carrying everything, and plenty of relationships don’t hold.
Closer to home, Ferdi Botha and Marlee Bower, working from Australia’s HILDA Survey, found that men living in couples with children tended to be lonelier than men in couples without them in most of the midlife age groups, and concluded that
“...middle-aged men are at particular risk of feeling lonely.”
I recognise myself in all of it. I’ve written before about how much of my social life ran on infrastructure I never built: workplace proximity, my kids’ sport, and a partnership that did a fair share of the social organising for both of us. When my partner and I separated, the dads I’d stood beside on the sports sidelines for years never called, and to be fair I never called them either. Once those pieces moved, I found out quickly how little of my calendar I had ever filled myself.
Rebuilding took about six years, a separation, a pandemic, a great deal of therapy and roughly a hundred essays, and almost none of it came in big leaps. I have a good friend I got to know through regular early-morning walks with her dog. Volunteering at a couple of events around town put me alongside all manner of people I’d never have met through work. Slowly I became someone who could ring a friend at short notice to see if they were up for dinner or a movie, which at 54 I couldn’t have done.
When I turned 60 in August, a couple of close friends took over organising my party and told me to leave it to them, and I did, which was a very new experience for me. More than 60 people were on the invitation list. At 54, I failed the pub test completely, and these days I pass it.
Men lose their friends in midlife, I think, because work, marriage and kids take over the jobs our friends used to do, and we let them. The way back is smaller than it sounds. Pick one person, get yourself into the same room (or beach) as them more than once, and be the one who books the next time.