[Lifestyle] ‘An uphill battle’: why are midlife men struggling to make – and keep – friends?

[ThunderStorm.]

 

Some call it a friendship recession: a time when close male friendships sink to their lowest. Here’s how friendships for straight men fall to the wayside – and what could bring them together.

As a therapist, Jeremy Mohler spends his days guiding middle-aged men through feelings of loneliness. He encourages them to seek connections, yet the 39-year-old is the first to admit it: when you’re a guy, making real friends in midlife is difficult. “It feels like an uphill battle,” says Mohler, who lives in Baltimore.

Some call it a friendship recession: a time in midlife when close male friendships sink to their lowest. According to data from the Survey Center on American Life, 15% of US men said they do not have close friends in 2021, compared with 3% in 1990. Those reporting 10 or more close friends decreased from 33% to 13% during the same period.

Authentic or close friendship may mean different things to different people. One straightforward description is finding “someone who sees you as you see yourself, and you see them as they see themselves”, says Niobe Way, a developmental psychology professor at New York University. Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas who studies friendships and has previously found it can take 200 hours to make a close friend, says: “A true friend will support and stand by you no matter what, will stand up for you, and tells you the truth.”

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The reasons for the friendship recession are complex, says Hall. Straight men Mohler’s age often depend on their partners for socializing. Some dive deep into parenthood. College buddies disperse. Work priorities take over. And moving to a new city or country can dissolve formerly strong bonds. Ultimately, it can feel too hard to invest time in new and deeper friendships.

Despite loneliness due to estrangement from relatives or different family structures, “many gay men find and build community around an embrace of shared spaces,” says Matt Lundquist, a therapist in New York, which he finds is less common for heterosexual men. “This sort of intentional taking on a project of searching for new, deeper friendships is more a heterosexual project. It is a demographic that is very isolated.”

“My clients are looking for more connections,” Mohler says. “I have ideas and skills and solutions, but I’m still personally searching for practical ways to do that.”

He is not the only one feeling the itch to turn a workout buddy into someone he can call on a Saturday afternoon. US men aged 15 to 35 are among the loneliest in wealthy countries, with 25% reporting feeling lonely for a lot of the previous day, according to a 2025 Gallup poll. Marketing professor and po[CENSORED]r podcast host Scott Galloway recently touted the benefits of authentic connections for men amid what he called a “perfect storm of loneliness”.

“Men have it drilled into us from an early age that vulnerability and emotional connections are signs of weakness,” Galloway wrote. “They aren’t, and men with influence have an obligation to cleanse this bullshit version of masculinity from the zeitgeist.”

The men I interviewed say they don’t want to be just a stat in the much-touted loneliness epidemic, which is also increasingly being tied to poorer physical and mental health outcomes. Still, it’s difficult to avoid in practice.

“There’s a certain cultural understanding that men don’t know how to enact intimacy or that it’s simply not practiced very much,” says Hall. “And even men’s po[CENSORED]r culture doesn’t show you how to go about the process.”

Some are figuring it out. Jedidiah Jenkins, 42, an author living in Los Angeles, says he’s had to relearn about the importance of maintaining close bonds with other men. As a teenager, he had plenty of friends; making them seemed effortless. “You didn’t have to work for it,” Jenkins says. “We have to learn in the same way that we actively download dating apps and pursue a relationship that we have to pursue friendships.”

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For the last few years, Jenkins has organized a weekly hangout at his house. Anywhere from three to 20 friends show up for what he calls “riff raff Thursdays”, including a handful of regulars. He starts a bonfire and serves hot tea, mezcal and peanut butter pretzels. The consistency means that his friends know what they are doing that week, and takes away the pressure of scheduling one-on-one meetups.

“It doesn’t require the full energy of finding time for a weekly coffee date,” he says.

How male friendships fall by the wayside

Before the second world war, same-sex male friendships were a large part of public life, and women’s friendships were seen as frivolous and less important, Hall explains. But these roles have since reversed. Today, most heterosexual men feel they are marrying someone who becomes the default events planner, and their genuine close friendships fall away, Hall says. “They rely on their wives to develop the social calendar – they think: ‘She’ll do it and I don’t have to do it’,” he says. “There’s atrophy in their skillset.”

Way, the developmental psychology professor, says girls and boys start out on the same trajectory of prioritizing friendships. But boys feel pressure to give up their same-sex friendships because it feels “girly or gay”. Rates of male suicide also tick up around adolescence. “It’s not that they naturally don’t want these friendships. They had them when they were younger,” she says. “It’s not some weird biological thing.”

Way, who receives emails from hundreds of men each year about her research, says more of them feel like it’s possible to secure closer friendships after the pandemic because the topic is receiving more attention. “They are now recognizing what the problems are,” she says. “They’ve hit the bottom of the barrel.”

At the same time, her research points to a culture that doesn’t value friendships. Since the 1980s, she says, the United States’ focus on self-fulfillment has reduced the importance of friendships for everyone. Digital life distracts us too much or provides a simulacrum of closeness; even listening to podcasts can bring a faux feeling of intimacy. “We focus more on the self, and the tech just exacerbates it,” she says.

Bringing men together

In Hebden Bridge, England, former professional rugby player Craig White has started hosting nature retreats for men to encourage deeper connections. White, now a mentor and coach, runs a “mid-life intensive” program that offers online meetings along with a three-day in-person meet-up. White’s retreats involve hiking, spending nights around a fire, discussing feelings openly and bonding outside of day-to-day pressures.

When it came to his father, “healthy male friendship wasn’t modeled and the friendship groups involved alcohol,” he says. “A lot of my clients are brilliant men, but a lot of their old friends are still doing the same thing and there’s a reluctance to go back to that.”

Draymond Washington, an entrepreneur and former financial adviser, founded a private club in Chicago called Three Cities Social earlier this year, and says connecting midlife professionals is the goal. But after months of hosting events, he realized that while the club’s membership is roughly 40% male, event attendance was typically 80% women, he says.

Men aren’t always willing to come to the club to socialize. So he has started hosting events aimed specifically at men in their 30s and 40s: boxing classes, pickleball and boat rides. “Guys like to do stuff,” Washington says. “Someone needs to curate and then they do want to show up.” He’s been able to engage more men this way, but it’s been more difficult than he expected.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/ng-interactive/2025/jul/10/male-friendships-midlife