Where Did Your Mates Go?

Male Friendship at 40

A reader sent me something recently that’s stuck with me for weeks.

“Since reaching my 40s, the thing that affects my mental health most is loneliness due to relationships with friends. This is due to a shrinking friend group as I’ve got older and a lack of commitment or interaction from those still on the scene. This is despite a happy family life and great marriage. I’ve often found myself as a ‘peripheral friend’ to most people, although I’ve been let down and excluded by so-called close friends too.”

If that landed somewhere uncomfortable, you’re not alone. And I don’t mean that as a platitude.

The question worth asking

Not “how many friends do you have.” That number doesn’t tell you much.

The real question is: do you have one or two people you could call right now, who’d actually understand what’s going on with you, and who you see regularly?

If you paused before answering, this post is for you.

A happy marriage isn’t the whole answer

You’re told that a good marriage, a stable job, and a settled family life should be enough. That if you’ve got those things, loneliness doesn’t make sense, so something must be wrong with you for feeling it.

It isn’t, and there isn’t. A partner is not the same as a friend. Family closeness and friendship closeness meet different needs, and a marriage can be genuinely happy while a man is still quietly starved of the kind of connection only a friend can give him.

That’s not a failing in the marriage. It’s just not what marriage is built to do.

There’s also something specific about connection with other men, a kind of camaraderie that comes from being understood by someone who simply gets your situation, man to man, without needing it explained. Research backs this up: men involved in friendship groups built on openness and solidarity report better mental and physical health as a direct result, not as a side effect.

Where my own friends went

I’ve lost more friends than I’d like to admit. Some of it was the obvious kind, people who drifted as life got busy. But the one that still catches me is the workplace kind.

Ten years or so as an NHS GP, including training, I had colleagues I was genuinely close to. People I trusted, laughed with, leaned on during hard days. And then the role ended, I moved on, they moved on, and so did the friendship. Not because anything went wrong. There was just nothing underneath the role to hold it together once the role was gone.

That’s a strange kind of grief. Nobody falls out. Nothing dramatic happens. The friendship just quietly runs out of fuel, because it turns out it was running on proximity, not on anything deeper.

This isn’t just me

In the US, the number of men reporting they have no close friends rose from 3% in 1990 to 15% in 2021. In the UK, 11% of men now report having no close friends at all, and men aged 55 to 64 are the most likely group to say this.

And loneliness in men doesn’t move in a straight line the way it tends to for women. A large Norwegian study tracking men over time found loneliness follows a U-shape specifically in men, climbing through your 30s, peaking around 40, easing off through your 50s and 60s, then rising again in your 80s.

If you’re in your 40s and feeling this more than you used to, you’re sitting right at the peak of a well-documented curve. That’s not a character flaw. That’s data.

Why it fades without anyone noticing

Men are often taught that friendship should look after itself, that as long as you’re a good husband, a good father, a good employee, the rest falls into place. But friendship is the one relationship in a man’s life with no formal structure protecting it. No wedding, no job title, no school register. It only survives if it’s actively maintained, and most men are never taught that maintaining it is a skill, let alone given permission to spend time on it.

So it fades quietly. And because there’s no event marking the end, most men don’t even register it as a loss. They just notice, one day, that the phone doesn’t ring much anymore.

Friendship has rules. No one teaches you them.

Friendship isn’t one thing, it’s several different skill sets, and we’re rarely taught any of them.

Take badminton. Every other week I play with the same group. The rules are simple: turn up, play, take the piss out of each other, laugh at your own mistakes. That’s a real friendship, with real value, built entirely on showing up and shared rhythm. I don’t go for a drink afterwards. Not because I don’t like the lads, I’m just not that interested in the banter, or the alcohol anymore. And that’s fine. It doesn’t need to be more than what it is.

Then there’s a different register entirely, the kind I’ve built with one or two people over coffee, in the day, away from noise. That one runs on different rules: speaking honestly in turns, naming a feeling even when the only word you’ve got is “crap,” sitting with someone’s uncertainty instead of fixing it, acknowledging what’s hard without changing the subject.

Nobody hands you a manual for either one. I picked up the second set almost by accident: communication skills training as a GP, which I now know plenty of doctors never properly get. Years of practising listening as a husband. And, honestly, a period of being properly depressed, where I learned that saying “I feel bad” out loud, with no better words than that, was still worth saying.

The point isn’t that one kind of friendship is realer than the other. It’s that both are skills. And if nobody’s taught you the second kind, that’s not a personality flaw. It’s a training gap.

Reply to me

I think a lot of you reading this are in a similar place. Thoughtful. Kind. Compassionate. The kind of man other people lean on. And underneath that, quietly lacking the closeness and the space to actually explore where you are in your life.

If that’s you, get in touch and tell me. I read and respond to every message personally.

I’m also exploring something for men in exactly this position, a small, structured group built around this kind of work. I don’t know yet what it’ll look like. If you’re curious, email me and I’ll keep you posted as it takes shape.

Change one thing

This week, take stock of what you’ve already got. Think about the friendship skills you’ve built, maybe without noticing, through work, marriage, fatherhood, or just living long enough to get knocked around a bit. Naming a feeling. Listening without trying to fix it. Showing up consistently. Sitting with someone in silence.

Write down one skill you already have that you could bring to a group of men trying to do this properly. You don’t need to do anything with it yet. Just notice it’s there.

Until next week

References

Survey Center on American Life, friendship recession data, 1990–2021.
UK polling on men reporting no close friends, men aged 55–64 most affected.
von Soest, T. et al. (2020), Development of loneliness in midlife and old age, Norwegian NorLAG study.
Pulido, C. et al., Alternative Friendships to Improve Men’s Health Status, on solidarity-based male friendship and health outcomes.