I made a list one night of every close friend I've ever had. There were nine names. Then I wrote down, next to each one, who made the first move.
School put me next to two of them. A team gave me three. One was my college roommate, assigned by a housing office. Two were husbands of my wife's friends. The last one invited himself to my backyard because his dog kept getting through our fence.
Nine for nine, somebody or something else did the work. I had never once, in forty-four years, looked at another man and decided to become his friend.
The system that quit
For most of my life I didn't have to. There was always a structure doing it for me: class schedules, practice, dorms, early jobs where everybody was twenty-six and went to the same bar on Friday. Then the structures ended one by one, and nothing replaced them. I didn't lose my friends in a fight. I lost them to calendars.
I kept waiting for a new structure to show up. That's what I mean by waiting to be invited. I figured if I was likable enough, the invitations would come the way they used to.
They don't. The other men my age are waiting too.
What initiating actually looks like
It turned out to be almost embarrassingly small. I texted a guy from my kid's soccer sideline: Want to grab a beer after Saturday's game? I rewrote that text four times. He said yes in under a minute.
Then I did the part I'd never done before: I asked again. Two weeks later, then a month later. By the third time he was the one texting me. I'd always assumed friendship was a feeling that happens. It's more like a habit somebody has to start.
I won't pretend it's easy. Some invitations go nowhere. One guy said yes three times and canceled three times, and I had to decide not to take it personally. But I've learned that being the one who asks isn't needy. Somebody has to do it, and for most of my life it was somebody else.
My wife has a theory that men don't make friends after forty. I used to agree. Now I think we just stopped asking.