TYPICAL I saw Wes at the coffee shop near my apartment on a Saturday last spring. For two years we had eaten lunch together almost every day at my last job. We talked about his divorce while it was happening, my father's knee surgery, whether the cafeteria's Thursday curry should be reported to someone. Then I took a job across town, and the lunches ended the way a radio station fades when you drive out of range.
He saw me in line and we did the nod. Then we had the conversation you could write without being there.
Hey, man, I said. Hey. How's it going? Good, good. You? Good. Still over there? Nope, left last year. Nice. Yeah. Cool. Cool.
Then we stood there holding our cups, both knowing the conversation was over, and I am fairly sure both wishing it weren't. What I wanted to say was: I've had a strange year. I don't really see anyone outside of work anymore. Do you want to get dinner sometime, not to talk about jobs, just because I miss our lunches? It's a short paragraph. I had about four seconds to say it. I said, "Good to see you, man," and he said, "You too," and we walked out in opposite directions.
I've thought about those four seconds more than most of last year.
The argument I keep hearing
You've probably heard the case that male loneliness is mostly self-inflicted. Men don't call. Men let the lunches end and then complain about the silence. The phone is right there, the argument goes, so pick it up. The essay paired with this one, The Phone Works in Both Directions, makes the fair version of that case, and it deserves a real answer.
There's truth in it, and I'll get to my share. But the shape of the argument repeats the thing that got me here. When I'm told my loneliness is my own fault and I should fix it myself, I'm hearing the same instruction I've heard since I was seven: handle it. Handling it alone is how a lot of us ended up alone.
What I practiced instead
My sister is three years older than me. When she came home upset in middle school, my mom sat on the end of her bed, asked what happened and how it felt, and then asked a follow-up question. My sister had sleepovers that ran until two in the morning, which as far as I can tell are seminars in telling someone the truth.
When I split my chin open on the driveway at nine, my dad held a dish towel on it and said, "You're fine. Shake it off." He was being kind in the language he had, and I don't blame him for it. But by the time we were adults, my sister had years of practice saying what was going on inside her, and I had the same years practicing the opposite. I got good at it. I write software for a living, and I've been promoted twice partly for being the calm one on the call when production goes down at three in the morning.
So when someone tells me, at thirty, to just call my friends and open up, it lands like being told to just speak Portuguese. I could learn. I'm trying to. But I wasn't refusing out of laziness. Nobody in my house ever spoke it to me.
The numbers suggest this is bigger than one house. In a 2021 survey from the Survey Center on American Life, 15% of men said they had no close friends, up from 3% in 1990, and the share of men with at least six close friends fell from 55% to 27%. The researchers note that the 1990 numbers came from a Gallup phone poll and theirs was taken online, so the comparison isn't perfect. Still, a shift that size is hard to explain as a personal failing that millions of men all developed at once.
Where would I even go?
Every piece of advice I've gotten about this has been addressed to me alone. Call someone. Join something. Get a hobby. Download the app. Try harder. Some of it is good advice. All of it treats the problem as a personal project.
Meanwhile, almost every other kind of connection in my life comes with a door. If I want a date, there are apps built for that. My sister found her closest friends in a new-parents group the hospital ran. What I couldn't find was a place where a thirty-year-old man could walk in alone, on purpose, and make a friend without a cover story like fantasy football or a work happy hour.
When I told a coworker I was thinking about trying a men's group that meets in a church basement on Wednesdays, he laughed and asked if it was a cult. He was mostly joking. I didn't go for another four months.
That's the part of the blame argument that goes unexamined. The same culture that tells men to build a support network raises an eyebrow at the few places built for it, and then points at the empty network as proof of what men are like.
My share
None of this gets me off the hook. I could have said the paragraph to Wes. He had listened to me for two years. I chose the nod because the nod was safe, and that choice was mine. Some of what keeps me lonely is shame dressed up as good manners: not wanting to be the needy one, not wanting to be the guy who makes it weird.
I also don't think the fix is for the women in men's lives to do more of the work. My sister has kept our family group chat alive for a decade, and she's tired. In October I read The Group Chat Is Not a Friend, a composite essay about a man who types my dad had a stroke to his friends and deletes it. Nobody in that chat was a villain. The structure just wasn't built to carry anything heavy.
Men carry part of this, and I carry my part. But blame is a bad tool for the job. People who feel blamed get defensive or they hide, and hiding is the one skill most of us already have in surplus. So who owes the first call? In that coffee shop the answer was nobody, and I'd trade the question of whose fault that was for a more useful one: what makes the first sentence easier to say?
What helped
Structure helped first. This magazine's October editorial argued that men don't need more hobbies, they need a standing time, and it was right: a standing time is a door somebody already opened. I finally went to the Wednesday group. I said almost nothing the first three weeks, and nobody made me. The fourth week I said I'd been lonelier since changing jobs than I had admitted to anyone. A retired electrician across the circle nodded like I'd told him the time. That was all that happened, and it was enormous.
Then I went back for the paragraph. I tried it in our conversation rehearsal tool first, to see the cold response before I got one for real, and sent Wes this: This might be a slightly weird text. I've missed our lunches more than I expected to. Want to get dinner next week, no agenda?
He wrote back in eleven minutes: Not weird. I almost said the same thing at the coffee shop and chickened out.
If you're a man reading this from inside a quiet year, borrow that text. Change the details and send it to one person before you talk yourself out of it. If the feeling has a weight you can't name, our page on loneliness has words for it.
If you love a man like this and you're tempted to tell him it's his own fault, I understand why, and you may be partly right. Try a different question first. Instead of Why don't you ever call anyone?, ask Who did you used to eat lunch with? If he's been pulling away for a while, our guide for when he's been withdrawn for months covers when to push and when to wait. But start with the lunch question. Most of us have an answer, and a name is somewhere to start.