Why men are just worse at friendship

Male loneliness is a bigger public health issue than obesity, writes Donal Lynch, so we really should make more of an effort

‘A coffee is too business. The cinema is too like a date’

ARE men worse at friendship than women? I’d always assumed that the answer was ‘yes’, but only because I am a man, bad at friendship, and sort of entering that period of life where a lot of the comrades of youth are increasingly Facebook phantoms, if that, and actual socialising frequently feels like a major expending of effort, requiring weeks of notice. Not that it’s not pleasurable when it happens, but I find you need less and less of it.

I’m past the age of needing a wingman, and can’t handle hangovers any more but what does that leave? There’s a whole generation of men in Ireland who are valiantly trying to drink less but seriously can’t figure out what the hell to do with each other sober. A coffee sort of feels like a business meeting. The cinema is too much like a date. Perhaps this was why there has never been a male Sex and the City. They’d never actually make it to brunch.

Selfishness is a part of it. Men are notably bad at putting up with the bulls*** of other men. We cannot fake it like women and we do not relish discussing personal problems, like a lot of women do. There is a self-serving pragmatism at play too. According to the Male Deficit Model, the result of a 30-year US study, friendships between men function and falter within strict pragmatic categories: “convenience friends,” for example, exchange helpful favours but don’t interact much otherwise; “mentor friends,” who connect primarily through one man’s tutelage of the other; or “activity friends”. The study holds that the closer men adhere to traditional male gender roles, like self-reliance and a reluctance to spill their guts, the worse their friendships fare.

“Since most men don’t let themselves think or feel about friendship, this immense collective and personal disappointment is usually concealed, sloughed over, shrugged away,” writes the psychologist Stuart Miller in his book, Men and Friendship. “The older we get, the more we accept our essential friendlessness.”

This, maybe, wouldn’t be as big a deal if we were settling down. But Irish men are staying single later into life — almost a quarter are still single when they turn 40. Nobody mentions these men because, as a society, we are still too obsessed with women’s romantic and fertility situations.

We presume the trope of the Irish bachelor was mainly limited to elderly farmers, who will one day die out, but the way we are going there will be more and more of these men. Even for men who do marry, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that they become so absorbed in their marriages and being more giving fathers than their own fathers were, that something has to give. And that something is often male friendship.

The writer Mark Green says that “many men accept being scheduled out of our friendships because it’s really not that big of a loss for us anyway. I mean, let’s face it, our friendships are only half way there anyway, feint shadows of the joyous, ecstatic friendships of our youth, so we let them go”.

There are older Irish men who retire and turn around to find they haven’t a single real friend except their wives.

What you don’t get told as you blunder through adulthood is that, despite the illusion of total freedom, your well-being really hangs primarily on how well connected you are with other people. That’s because nearly all research into healthy ageing has found that the key to a long, happy life is not diet or exercise but strong social connections — that is, friendships. Loneliness, which was this week reported to be at “epidemic” levels amongst British men, accelerates age-related declines in cognition and motor function, while a single good friend has been shown to make as much as a decade of difference in overall life expectancy.

A huge meta-study, which reviewed over 100 studies, found that loneliness is just as harmful to health as not exercising, smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and alcoholism, and twice as bad as being obese.

All of which means that ‘bromance’ is really a public health issue, even if its causes and solutions are quite complex. Loneliness is an especially tricky problem because accepting and declaring our loneliness carries profound stigma. Admitting that we’re lonely can feel as if we’re admitting we’ve failed in a fairly basic way. It attacks our basic instincts to save face.

Perhaps, then, that is the selfish, avoidant, introverted person’s key to friendship: don’t worry about saving face. Other tips might be: stay off social media, which will trick you into being satisfied with some ersatz facsimile of actual company. And keep trying to figure out novel, middle-aged ways to hang out with the dwindling number of people you can actually bear. I’ve found recently that lunch is a good solution for male friends. An hour is just the right amount of time for two men to catch up. There’s no whiff of it being a business meeting or date.

And the well-researched benefits of male bonding surely cancels out the bottles of wine.