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2 hours ago
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I have a friend named Gerry. I didn’t have much choice about being Gerry’s friend. If Gerry decides you’re going to be his friend, you don’t have much choice about it. He calls. He invites. He emails. If you don’t answer, if you can’t make it, if you make plans and then cancel, he doesn’t care. He keeps calling. He keeps inviting. He keeps emailing. The man is relentless in his mission to connect.
And guess what? Gerry has a lot of friends.
In a world where men suffer from unprecedented loneliness, Gerry is an extreme rarity: a man who works on his friendships. I can’t help wondering why he is so unique.
Gerry is 85, which is 36 years older than me. One weekend, he invited me to his cottage with several other friends, most of whom were around his age.
At one point after dinner, as a bit of a parlor game, they went around the room giving me advice as the younger, if not exactly young, man at the table. Much of their counsel boiled down to the fact that I will need to have more money in the future than I currently have, which I already knew.
Gerry’s contribution at first seemed less hard-headed but was far more practical and has remained with me ever since: “Never lose a friend.”
When I later asked Gerry what he meant, he told me a story about a man we knew, a man who, when all is said and done, was an asshole. They were having some random fight about politics, and as it grew more and more heated, the asshole said: “I don’t think we can talk any more, we’re too far apart.”
Gerry refused to allow him to end the friendship.
“I’m going to call this week, and I’m going to call next week, and I’m going to call the week after,” he said. “You can answer or not but I’m going to call.”
That’s what I mean when I say you don’t have much of a choice about being Gerry’s friend. And his wisdom was truly life-changing to me. What if you took total responsibility for your own social life? What if, instead of treating social life as something you inhabit, you treated it like something you made?
At this point, writing about the dangers of loneliness feels like writing about the dangers of smoking. Everyone already knows. The evidence is overwhelming; the debate is long over.
Still, there is a small industry devoted to describing masculine loneliness, and how damaging its effects are. By one estimate, being lonely has as much effect on your mortality as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Social isolation increases the risk of premature death by 29%. One 2024 survey found that only 27% of men had six or more close friends; in 1990, another survey put the number at 55%. Today, about 17% of men say they have no close friends at all.
Researchers have been trying to figure out the source of the accelerating loneliness since Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone in 2000. The answers are mostly vague and culture-based: there is a stigma against male intimacy, supposedly, and men, in the exhausting world of late capitalism, do not have the time and energy for friendships.
That’s the idea, anyway.
The directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, in place since 1938 and among the most methodologically sound sociological investigations ever undertaken, examined the lives of a huge array of men from a wide range of backgrounds, and came to a single overwhelming insight. “It’s the longest in-depth longitudinal study on human life ever done, and it’s brought us to a simple and profound conclusion,” they wrote in 2023. “Good relationships lead to health and happiness.”
It’s kind of as simple as that. If there’s a secret to life, it’s bonding with others.
The reason loneliness produces such harmful effects is that human beings are social animals. The need for society, for a group of friends, is essential to human nature. Today, people are reaching out to chatbots for therapy and companionship. That is like drinking salt water to slake your thirst. Imitation society will not suffice. Face-to-face contact is not a negotiable aspect of your humanity. If you deny it, you will suffer.
Of course, you already know this. Men know it. They feel it in their bones. So why are there not more Gerrys in the world? Why don’t men work at their friendships?
One reason male friendship falters is the lingering belief that it should just happen on its own. To work at it seems to betray the very idea of friendship. We are told connection should be effortless, so intentional socializing feels faintly embarrassing, even pathetic. Men go around pretending that they are not the kind of men who need other people, because expressing that need makes them vulnerable.
But everything human beings need makes them look ridiculous. In the 1960s and 1970s, exercise also seemed absurd and humiliating and artificial – why would you consciously work at tiring yourself out? In 1968, a Connecticut runner was stopped by the police for “illegal use of a highway by a pedestrian”. That same year, the New York Times gently mocked the emerging trend: “Today the majority of runners – or ‘joggers,’ thank you – seem to be securely middle-aged, that great awkward crowd of us too old for LSD and too young for Medicare.”
The reason jogging took off in the 60s is that society required it. During the 50s, farm labour declined by 37%, and during the 1960s by a further 38%. If you’re baling hay or herding cattle, you don’t need to go to the gym. But suddenly, far fewer men were baling hay and herding cattle. Physical activity was no longer something that just happened. People figured out that their bodies needed movement.
If you don’t move your body, you will be miserable. Physical activity is about 1.5 times more effective in treating mild-to-moderate depression, stress and anxiety than any treatment. Most people accept this reality.
Socialization, like physical activity, also used to be something that happened to you: big families, school, maybe camp, then college or a factory, then church or synagogue or the mosque, plus community leagues, neighbourhood associations, hobbies where you used to have to gather. Once upon a time, it was a struggle to find solitude, to find a way out of the crowd.
The format of contemporary existence has changed those accidental interactions – the internet, social media, working from home, etc. It should be no surprise that loneliness is accelerating. Why would it not be?
Just like exercise, the process of conscious socialization is not as complicated as finding the will to do it, at least in my experience. If I meet a guy I like, I go out for drinks with him. I organize get-togethers. I never take a cancellation personally. I have a friend – and I think everyone has a friend like this – who cancels plans at the last minute more times than not. I don’t care. I just keep rescheduling.
I’m trying to be like Gerry. If I like somebody, they will have very little choice about the matter.
So how did Gerry get so good at his friendships? “I’m not going to tell you I think I’m so good,” he told me. “I’ve always been a bit of a keep-in-toucher but I was never the kind of guy who wanted to be the class secretary.”
For him, the process that seems so foreign to young men today came naturally, as an outgrowth of his curiosity. “There’s nothing more interesting than people, and even people who you think might not be superficially interesting. If you go out for lunch or dinner, you find out everybody’s got a story. The least obvious people have the greatest stories. It’s a really important form of intimacy when you share stories. And it’s not even confidential stories. It’s just they’re your stories. There’s a whole spectrum of confidences in life.”
To be clear, I am not talking about networking. The use-value of a social life is not to advance your career down various paths of connection. That is why LinkedIn exists. The use-value is contact in itself. Simply being in the presence of somebody whose presence you enjoy is enough, but there can be big gains from it.
If Gerry needs to know something about Canadian literature or the gossip about some journalist, he just calls me up and I tell him. And he has a guy like me for everything. If there’s some controversy around a point of law, he calls up a former supreme court justice who’s a buddy. He probably has a guy who knows the Asian bond market. It’s not like Gerry and I share many political opinions, but he is invulnerable to disinformation. His effort at connection has plugged him into the facts.
Younger friends and older friends are particularly valuable, I think. You can learn things from men of other generations that you just cannot learn any other way. I learned from the older men that no one should be in power over the age of 75, and that, after you reach a certain age, there is no such thing as an unhappy widow. My younger friends keep trying to find me a therapist, which is kind of them.
I should also point out that I do not consider myself “good” at socialization. I am no Gerry. It’s a bit like when I started running. I ran for a bit, then walked for a bit, then ran for a bit. My lungs hurt and it felt unnatural. It’s the same with conscious socialization. At first it’s annoying and can be humiliating – you’re asking people for their time and you get rejected. Then it feels good and you notice that it feels good, then it becomes a cherished part of the day, and then it becomes a requirement for basic sanity.
There are regular embarrassments of course, just like with exercise. Sometimes, when I manage to pull my fat ass out for a run, I get passed by some elfin 20-year-old sprinting past me. I don’t judge myself and I don’t judge others. I’m operating at my level. Everybody has their own limits, their own preferences. Like almost everything that matters, 90% is just showing up.
Embarrassment goes away pretty fast, I have found. The advantages outweigh the stigma so overwhelmingly. “At first you think everyone is staring at you – and they are,” a jogger told the New York Times back in 1968. “After a while you enjoy jogging so much that you don’t give a damn.” The mockery of jogging eventually stopped of its own accord. The people who made fun of it all died.
“Not everyone I want to have lunch with wants to have lunch. They don’t like me. They find me annoying. Whatever,” Gerry says. Rejection does not dissuade him: “I do make the effort. Get out there. Be open. Join a club. Go to a book launch. Say hello to somebody you don’t know, ask them who they are. People are always interested in people who are interested in them.”
That last remark, in particular, seems to me to be the key to Gerry’s success. It’s hard not to enjoy the company of people who enjoy your company.
In 2016, the UK government ran a year-long Commission on Loneliness. Its final report was at least honest: government can’t do much. Loneliness seems like some kind of vague background force nobody can do much about, a nefarious social breakdown beyond anyone’s control.
The only substantial plan is for men to take responsibility for their own socialization the way they take responsibility for their fitness. The gyms are full of men who work out because they know that, if they don’t, they will be less healthy and therefore less attractive and therefore less happy. The only solution to the crisis of loneliness is a similarly conscious effort in social life, what Gerry does. Loneliness is not insoluble. It just takes some solving.
If you’re lonely, do you try? Do you work at it? Bro, do you even friend?
