Dude, Where Are My Friends?

The Art of Friendship

This is a question that has been on my mind over the past couple of years. As has now been made very clear, we’re living through a loneliness epidemic. This concept strikes me as abstract. After all, loneliness is a feature of what it means to be human. But…

One of the ways it has manifested for me is specifically when I think about my friendships. Ever shifting throughout our lives, this is felt more acutely as we transition into various stages of our adult years. There’s the post-college period, trying to figure out which relationships have lasting power. There’s the move-to-new-city period where some older friendships remain while integrating with more proximal relationships. Then, there’s the parenthood stage. There’s too much to say for the purpose of this piece but these articles are worthwhile for a deep dive. Are kids adorable little detonators? I’ll let you come to your own conclusions!

But what about male friendship? I’ve felt this intensely over the last few years. Which friendships fall by the wayside as a natural part of life? Which friendships do we fight to maintain? How much effort are we willing to put in at a stage when we all feel stretched so thin?

This recent piece resonated strongly with me. It helped me feel less alone in my loneliness as the author notes:

…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.

The piece delves into the myriad cultural shifts that have caused this loss of male friendship. There’s family demand, social media, work demands, and plenty of other black holes of life that require our energy. But I wondered, given all those various stressors, shouldn’t friendship serve as a shield against them? Shouldn’t we have stronger, more robust, and more quantifiable friendships?

I implicate myself in this struggle. I just as easily cast blame towards male friendships that have faltered while also recognizing (and trying harder to do this) that I could be doing more to stoke the embers of these relationships. One of the interventions Graham-Felsen offers in the article comes at the advice from the Man of the Year podcasters:

Guys forget that friendship is a relationship — it requires watering.” Among the watering techniques they suggest: ‘TCS,’ which stands for ‘text weekly, call monthly, see quarterly.’ ‘The great hack about having a regular event,’ Karo says, ‘is you don’t have to worry about calling — it happens automatically.’

So much of the worry I have is about the maintenance of the communications. Because my closest male friend lives a good hour and a half from me and the rest are spread out across the country, there’s an immense amount of effort that goes into simply keeping in touch, but this notion of a system that can help alleviate that particular burden feels useful.

Then, there’s the content of the friendships. What makes a male friendship substantive. It’s here that I think the Jewish wisdom tradition has important insights. Whenever friendships come up, my mind always goes to the teaching from Pirke Avot, the collection of mishnaic texts that offers useful wisdom for the every day. In 1:6, we learn:

Yehoshua ben Perachiah and Nitai of Arbel received from them. Yehoshua ben Perachia says, "Make for yourself a mentor, acquire for yourself a friend and judge every person as meritorious."

The middle clause requires our attention. What does friendship mean here and why is it framed as an acquisition? A later text that can be, at least in part, described as a commentary on Pirke Avot called Avot d’Rabbi Natan offers its own take on this mishnah.

And acquire for yourself a friend. How so? This teaches that a person should acquire a friend for himself who will eat with him, and drink with him, and study Scripture and Mishnah with him, and go to sleep with him, and reveal to him all his secrets, both secrets of the Torah and secrets of the ways of the world.

The acquisition language here is largely seen by commentators as highlighting the great efforts one should take in making friends. Even when it’s hard, work harder at it; it’s pithy but sound. But this interpretation fills in the gaps on what friendship used to be and perhaps what it could be.

A friend should be a part of the regular parts of life. Break bread with your friend; spend time learning with a friend; take a nap with a friend (that one could be a case study for the rabbinic notion of homosociality, or what the Times piece described as an older model of male friendship, or, you know, something else). But it’s really that last part that strikes me as deeply important.

Male friendship, at least speaking personally, has lost that aspect of delving deeply into what’s happening in our lives. Do I love the game I have with an older group of St. Louis friends where we try to best each other by naming obscure St. Louis Cardinals’ relief pitchers of the 90s and early aughts? You’re damn right. Do I wish I had more friends to talk to about the challenges of fatherhood, how to be a better partner, and how to live in a financially unstable world? You’re even more right.

The commentary goes on to say that this delving into the secrets of the world creates accountability between the friends. They can hold each other up and build each other up when one is struggling. I’m not offering this up in a blameless way. know I need to hear this just as much as I want others to hear it.

Maybe the language of revelation of secrets feels too aspirational. But there’s wisdom there. When Graham-Felsen wraps his piece by describing his meet up with a long-time friend, he says:

Nothing in particular stood out. We didn’t have some kind of transcendent conversation, but we had no problem talking honestly.

That’s what I think the commentary is getting at. Friendship, at its most successful, is about being as real as we can be with one another. In doing so, we open up doors and pathways that we thought were closed for good but perhaps had been slammed shut by more temporary forces.

Maybe it’ll be the ‘text, call, see’ methodology or maybe it’ll be some other system I will come up with, but I write this piece to create more accountability in my life. Wherever you are out there, I miss you. If you miss me too, let’s work on it.

Shabbat Shalom and Happy Weekend