Most male friendships aren't shallow because the men are shallow—they're shallow because no one's ever risked going first
I had a friend in New York—I'll call him Mark, because that wasn't his name—who knew everyone.
I mean everyone. He had a guy for everything. A guy for tickets. A guy for cars. A guy for restaurants where you couldn't get a table. He was on the group text for three different fantasy football leagues. He had a standing Sunday round of golf with five other men, a Wednesday poker game with four different ones, and a summer house share with a third group entirely. By any measure most people use, Mark had a thriving social life. He was, in the demographic sense, the opposite of lonely.
I had dinner with Mark, just the two of us, maybe three times in the four years I knew him. The dinners were always loud, fast, and structured around stories. He'd tell me about his deals. He'd tell me about a trip. He'd ask, in passing, how my place was going, and I'd give him the headline version, and he'd nod and order another drink and move on to the next story.
I liked Mark. I want to say that. I liked him enormously. He was funny and generous and he knew how to make a Tuesday night feel like an event.
I also could not have told you, at any point in those four years, what Mark was actually afraid of. I couldn't have told you whether he and his wife were happy. I couldn't have told you what he regretted. I couldn't have told you whether he was, on a given Wednesday, doing well or quietly drowning. We were, by any reasonable definition, friends. I knew his order at three different bars. I'd been to his daughter's birthday. I had no idea who he was.
I think about Mark a lot now, because I think there are an enormous number of men living some version of his life, and almost none of them are talking about it.
The shape of this kind of friendship
I want to describe what this looks like from the inside, because the diagnostics are particular and most of us have been trained not to recognize them.
The friendships are real. That's the first thing. They're not fake. The men in question have known each other for years, sometimes decades. They've been to each other's weddings. They've stood at each other's parents' funerals. They show up. They lend each other things. If one of them needed help moving a couch on a Saturday morning, six other men would be in the truck.
And yet. The actual content of the friendship, when you examine it closely, turns out to be remarkably narrow.
The activities are shared. The opinions about sports are shared. The jokes—often the same jokes, recycled with minor variations—are shared. Most of the conversations would be perfectly understandable to a stranger sitting at the next table, because they don't really require knowing the men in question. They could be any men. The dialogue is a kind of standardized friendship dialect that doesn't depend on the specific human beings producing it.
What isn't shared is the inside of any of those men. The fears. The regrets. The hard year. The thing that keeps them up at 3 a.m. The marriage that's quietly not okay. The career that, deep down, they're not sure they ever wanted. The grief about a parent. The complicated feeling about their own kid. None of this gets said out loud at the grill, on the tee box, around the poker table.
It doesn't get said because it would, in some unspoken way, violate the contract.
The contract
I want to think out loud about this, because I think the contract is the most important thing to understand if you're a man trying to figure out why you have lots of friends and feel, somehow, alone among them.
The contract goes something like this. Men in groups, especially groups that formed around an activity, agree—almost wordlessly, from the first time they meet—that the friendship will be sustained on a particular kind of currency. The currency is humor, banter, shared experience, and tactical exchange of useful information. It is not vulnerability. It is not, generally, sincerity. It is not the inside of any specific person.
Once the contract is set, breaking it is hard. The man who tries to bring something real into the group conversation runs the risk of changing the temperature of the room in a way that nobody asked for. The other men don't know what to do with the disclosure. They might offer a quick word of support, or a joke to defuse, or a sudden interest in the menu. Then the conversation will move on. And the man who tried will, almost certainly, feel a small flush of embarrassment afterward, and file the experience away as: do not do that again here.
Repeated over years, this teaches every man in the group that this particular friendship is not the place for the inside of his life. That has to live somewhere else. Somewhere else, in many men's cases, ends up being nowhere at all.
This is how you get a man with dozens of friends and zero intimacy. Each individual friendship is doing exactly what it was set up to do. None of them are set up to do the thing he most needs.
Why this is so hard for men in particular
I want to be careful not to make this sound like a lament about masculinity, because I don't think it is one. The men in question aren't doing anything wrong. They're operating inside a script that was handed to them, mostly without their consent, very early.
The script, briefly: men bond through doing. Women bond through talking. Men's friendships are sustained by activity and proximity. Women's friendships are sustained by emotional disclosure. This is, of course, a generalization, and there are exceptions in every direction. But it's a generalization that holds up enough to shape the lives of millions of men, including most of the men I know.
The trouble with this script is that it produces friendships that are durable but shallow. Two men can do the same activity together for thirty years and emerge knowing roughly the same amount about each other as they knew at the start. The activity doesn't, by itself, build intimacy. It builds familiarity, which is a related thing but not the same thing.
Familiarity is knowing how he takes his coffee, what his swing looks like, which jokes he's likely to make. Intimacy is knowing what he was thinking about on the long drive over. Familiarity grows automatically with time. Intimacy doesn't. Intimacy requires something that men of my father's generation, and a fair number of men my own age, were never really shown how to do, which is to say something true about themselves, in a normal voice, without it being a moment.
The cost
I want to be honest about what this costs, because it's not free, even if it looks free from outside.
The cost shows up in the kinds of life events that the casual friendships can't carry. The bad year. The depression. The divorce nobody saw coming. The diagnosis. The loss of a parent. These are the moments where a man with dozens of friends and no intimacy with any of them suddenly discovers that none of his current relationships are built for the load he needs them to carry.
Some men, in this moment, panic. Some men go quiet. Some men reach, late and clumsily, for one or two of the friendships and try to retrofit them into something deeper. This sometimes works—I've seen it work—but it's a hard ask. You're trying to renegotiate a thirty-year contract under crisis conditions. The other man may not have the equipment. He may want to help and not know how. He may, in his own panic, default to the only register he knows, which is the joke or the practical fix or the awkward shoulder-pat.
Many men, in my observation, don't even try. They just absorb the bad year alone. They keep showing up to the grill, they keep playing in the Sunday round, they keep telling the same jokes, while privately drowning. The friendships continue, undisturbed, because the friendships were never built to register a man's interior weather. Their job is to be there for the activity. They do that job well. They do not, structurally, do any other job.
I knew Mark for four years. I found out, from a mutual acquaintance, two years after we'd drifted, that he'd been quietly dealing with something significant during most of the time I'd known him. Nothing he ever said would have indicated this. Not at the dinners. Not on the group texts. Not at his daughter's birthday. He'd been carrying the whole thing, alone, in plain sight, with thirty friends nearby.
I think about that more than I'd like to.
What can actually be done
I'm not going to give you a list of tips, because I don't think there's a tidy fix here. But there are a couple of things I've watched work, and one I've tried in my own life.
The thing I've watched work, in other men, is the deliberate cultivation of one or two friendships that operate outside the contract. Not the whole golf group. One man from the golf group. Pulled aside, gradually, into a different kind of friendship. A walk that isn't an activity. A coffee with no agenda. A standing call. The container has to be different from the group container, or the group rules will silently apply.
The thing I've tried, with mixed but real success, is being the one who breaks the contract first. Saying the true thing in a voice that doesn't make it a moment. Mentioning, in passing, that I had a hard week, in the same tone I'd use to mention I'd had a hard tee shot. Some men I've done this with have stiffened, predictably, and the friendship has stayed where it was. Others—and this has been one of the surprises of my late thirties—have, after a small pause, said something true back. The contract didn't actually require both signatures. It just required that nobody had ever tested whether it could be torn up.
Most male friendships, I've come to believe, are not as shallow as they appear. They're shallow because nobody has ever risked depth. The depth is often available. It's just waiting for someone to go first.
If you're the man with dozens of friends and no intimacy, you might be the one who has to go first. The risk is real. The friendships that don't survive the going-first weren't, probably, the ones that were going to carry you through the bad year anyway. The ones that do survive will be the most important relationships of your second half of life.
It's worth the awkward Tuesday. It's worth the small flush of embarrassment. It's worth, in the end, anything that means you don't end up like Mark—surrounded by people who liked you, none of whom knew you, none of whom got the chance to.
