The loss of all-male spaces has made male friendship enormously difficult to create and sustain because it destroyed the milieux of that friendship. If you want to be friends with other men, it’s now something you have to do outside of everything else in life. No wonder so few men have the time or energy for that.

The lack of male friendships was the subject of a great article in the NYT Magazine (that link should bypass the paywall). The piece, by Sam Graham-Felsen, doesn’t just have great content. It’s also well-written, something that in itself helps explain the enduring dominance of the Times in America.

He explains the problem:

The notion that men in this country suck at friendship is so widespread that it has become a truism, a punchline. “Your dad has no friends,” John Mulaney said during an opening monologue on “Saturday Night Live.” “If you think your dad has friends, you’re wrong. Your mom has friends, and they have husbands. Those are not your dad’s friends.”

What I didn’t know is that American men are getting significantly worse at friendship. A study in 2024 by the Survey Center on American Life found that only 26 percent of men reported having six or more close friends. Polling a similar question in 1990, Gallup had put this figure at 55 percent. The same Survey Center study found that 17 percent of men have zero close friends, more than a fivefold increase since 1990.

This not only describes the problem, but it conveys an important truth that I keep hammering. Too many men only have the illusion of friendship. They think they have friends, but those people are actually just the husbands of their wives’ friends.

By the way, the Survey Center on American Life is part of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Yet here it is being cited as an authoritative source of information in the New York Times without any qualifiers or disclaimers.

This is another example of what I’ve highlighted before, namely that AEI made a series of strategic moves that successfully repositioned it as “legitimate” in the eyes of center-left dominated elite institutions.

He also talks about why men don’t hang out together:

Most men I know say they’d like to hang out more but don’t have time. They have little kids or demanding jobs or both, and if they have a second to breathe, they’re going to spend it with their partners. One friend says, only somewhat jokingly: “I have a family now. Why would I want to hang out with friends? What would I get out of it? What are we even going to talk about? It just feels kind of contrived.” Another friend recently transitioned out of a high-stress career. With more free time, he has been trying to see friends more, but, he says: “There’s a stigma around asking another man to hang out. It feels higher stakes for me than it does for my wife.”

While he prefers other explanations this paragraph is interesting in that it implicitly sees male friendships in terms of purely social “hanging out,” and specifically contrasts that activity with career.

In the past, work would have been one key venue where male friendships were forged and sustained. The work world used to be largely sex segregated. Men worked primarily or even exclusively with other men. As women entered these occupations, their dynamics changed considerably.

The loss of all-male spaces has made male friendship enormously difficult to create and sustain because it destroyed the milieux of that friendship. If you want to be friends with other men, it’s now something you have to do outside of everything else in life. No wonder so few men have the time or energy for that.

There also remains deep hostility in some quarters to all male spaces in our society, something that needs to be confronted.

Greater male involvement with family has also played a role.

When I asked my friends at what point their friendships began to fall off, almost all of them said the same thing: marriage, kids. Other things happened, too—they moved, they got busier and more ambitious with their work, they got distracted by the internet—and face-to-face hangs and phone calls and long, emotional emails gradually eroded into WhatsApp replies on the fly. But really, one thing happened: Little by little, almost all of them began to prioritize their romantic lives and families over their friendships. It’s certainly what happened to me.

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