Sex & Relationships

Where have all our guy friends disappeared to?

American men have shed nearly half of their male friendships over the past two decades. Where have all our guy friends disappeared to - and how can we get them back?

Something feels awry.

You work 50- to 60-hour weeks. On weekends, you shuttle the kids to their sports practices and playdates. On Saturday nights, if you’re lucky, you get a sitter so that you and your significant other can engage in that ritual meant to keep things zesty—“date night”—but at times you long for another type of date. Perhaps, during those rare moments you have for reflection, when your fingers are not working your BlackBerry as you sit in commuter traffic, you think about how your social life has changed (or ­evaporated) since you were a swinging ­postcollegiate, sharing a loft, say, with three close friends.

If so, you’re like millions of other men with enough mileage behind them to look with nostalgia upon The Life, the single life in which you were surrounded by men and dedicated, it seemed, almost entirely to a sworn allegiance to the pursuit of adventure and debauchery.

Perhaps you’re like Rich Price, a reader from Chicago, who wrote Best Life last year about the phenomenon of men and their vanishing friendships. He mentioned bygone days when a group of his male friends seemed to have a ­“consistent investment in one another’s lives,” and about the numerous times he has wanted to reach for the phone to call one of his old roommates to say hi or “Hey, want to get tickets to the game next month?” But friends seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth. “Guys have moved, married—one of us is going through a messy divorce,” wrote Price. “It seems like we are all engrossed in our own individual futures.”

Like many guys soldiering through their lives, fulfilling the obligations of adulthood, Rich has awakened to the loneliness of the American male in his midthirties to early fifties.

Us? Lonely? With the wife and the kids and the parents and the jokesters at the office and the never having a moment to think? Well, yes. That’s what experts who study these matters say. In June 2006, sociologists at Duke University and the University of Arizona, for instance, provided the most recent statistical analysis of the problem. Their report, “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks Over Two Decades,” announced, among other things, that the number of friends with whom Americans discuss important matters has shrunk as much as 33 percent over a span of nearly 20 years. This problem is particularly acute for young, educated men, who have lost an above-average number of “discussion partners”—down from 3.5 in 1985 to 2.0 in 2004—according to the study. Friendship, the report suggests, has taken a serious dive across the culture, and guys like us in particular are shedding companionship faster than anyone else.

Men who have been managing their careers for years but who find themselves, midstream, feeling bereft of the kind of friendships they once had seem to have made four critical life mistakes, according to experts. The first and biggest problem involves time constraints, according to sociologist Theodore F. Cohen, professor of sociology at Ohio Wesleyan University, who has studied men’s friendship networks. “Friendship ties,” Cohen writes in the discussion of one study, “seemed always to rank behind both marriage and parenthood in terms of the salience and legitimacy of their claims on one’s time.” Add to the mix the time pressures of one’s career and you can see how male friendships can slowly start to vanish. One study, “The Overworked American Family,” conducted by Michael Hout, Ph.D., a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, and Caroline Hanley, Ph.D., a visiting professor of sociology at the College of William and Mary, looked at data from 1968 to 2001. They estimated that “families have added 10 to 29 hours a week to their hours working outside the home.” This increase, writes Miller ­McPherson, a ­University of Arizona sociologist and coauthor of the study “Social ­Isolation in America,” has been “the most dramatic among middle-aged, better-­educated, higher-income families.” Time constraints loom large, according to University of Pennsylvania sociologist Jerry A. Jacobs, author of The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality. “Professional and managerial men very likely put in longer hours than their fathers did,” says Jacobs. “If you take the proportion of men working more than 50 to 60 hours a week, and add commuting time to that, those numbers are substantially higher for this generation than for the previous generation.” As a result, successful men with families have less time to spend on themselves or their friends—a minuscule 1.3 hours a day, according to the Families and Work Institute’s latest “National Study of the Changing Workforce.”