Why Millions of Men Lose Friends in Their Twenties (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Why Millions of Men Lose Friends in Their Twenties (2015)

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This is so bizarre to me.

I'm 30 years old (also from Britain) and see my closest four or five friends on most weekends. These are friends I have had since the age of 12/13 years old.

I have a lot of 'mates' too that I don't consider as close as 'true friends', but frequently spend time with as well as a result of spending time with my close friends. Social circles overlapping with other circles.

I couldn't imagine not doing this. My life would be far less worth living without those few people I consider more or less my family.

Even if I'm not doing anything particularly special with them. It could just be a few hours in the afternoon of some old school co-op games on an emulator or something. Could be a few hours in the pub on Friday evening.

I am in a relationship but have no kids (never wanted any), so maybe that's the reason. Perhaps I just have the free time to maintain these relationships.

I'm 30 in the US. I haven't had any real friends, outside of my wife and family, since I was about 20. Even in high school I had friends but I never really saw them outside of school because I worked full time. I don't know how people have time for friends. I get up at 6am and go workout. Work until 6-7pm. If I'm traveling I go to my hotel and usually do some more work. Sometimes sit at the bar by myself so I have a reason to feel numb. If I'm home I take care of whatever house work I can, spend a few hours with my son, etc. Weekends are usually spent going grocery shopping, doing car maintenance, cutting grass, or other house repairs that I can't get to during the week. I had my own business on the side for awhile but I let that go.

I usually end up using my vacation from work to work done around the house because there just isn't enough freaking time.

I would say that men are less prone to small talk and after leaving college, most of the shared topics that create bonds between us disappear, leaving us with just a few things to talk about (in my opinion one of the reasons why when we meet together we mostly talk about the old days).

So, why? Seems like this article only proves that they do, not why they do.

What I've seen is that women typically make the social calendar. Once people are in a stable relationship, the woman's friends take priority because men abbrogate their responsibility to make plans because it's easier to let their wife or girlfriend make them. If this happens, mens friends drift away.

Yes, although fortunately for me my wife has become friendly with a lot of my mates' wives / girlfriends, so we still catch up when they organize things.

It's weirdly the opposite for me.

Girlfriend doesn't speak to her friends much, and relies on me a lot of the time to organise events/gigs/trips.

Kids. If you have kids and your friends don't (or vice versa) it's hard to keep doing stuff together.

Even if you do both have kids those kids end up eating all of your free time so you don't have much chance to do stuff with the boys.

Considering the birth rate and average parenthood age in the UK that can't be the reason frankly.

It also doesn't say if women suffer the same fate and if not why.

Agreed. My current theory is college changed everything. In my father's generation, most people formed friendships, marriages and strong bonds to their communities in their teenage years. Those bonds held throughout adulthood. Now, just when we start making strong ties to those people and communities we grew up in, we're being shipped off to college for four years, then off to whatever job in whatever major city will kickstart our career. We're in our early 20's at that point, in a mid to large city with no ties to anyone or anything.

Some manage to build a life from scratch at that point, but it's hard to do that, especially in a big city. I suspect most just focus on their work and before they know it, they're in their 30s with well paying jobs but no personal connections to speak of.

I think what you said is very true, and I see it reflected in my own life. Though I think it also has to do with male nature. Historically, it has made sense for men to be less likely to form attachments in healthy circumstances, and I think evolutionary biology probably hs a role here. Men can form intense bonds with each other when they are comrades or fellow soldiers, but to irrationally attach oneself to other men is not an advantage to a man when the going gets tough and he has to find a new position in life that doesn't involve his old platoon; from a reproductive perspective, hanging out with the same men indefinitely isn't as likely to get him to fertilize some eggs as forming an emotional bond with a woman or women. For women, it seems more beneficial to form lasting bonds with other women as they can provide a support structure that can help raise children and consolidate effort doing menial tasks while men are off doing other things. A man, in times of yore, could make his own way even if he lacked a support structure. For women, vulnerability and lack of strength, made it much more difficult for them to simply go off at will on their own and form their own families and slay their own dragons. Nowadays, that's not so much the case in the west, but I think these innate behaviors we developed as a result of our physiology usually remain, aside from some conditioning (i.e. nurture). The lack of a physical community can amplify those behaviors.

On the other side of the coin, I think many men are forming friendships and communities, not in the real world, but online where people can form bonds with those who have common interests as opposed to those jerks on happen to live on your street who don't drink your brand of beer or root for the same football team. Our Burger King culture of "have it your way" makes forming communities with people who only share very general traits with one, like the kind of genitals you have, make little or no sense. Lack of common experience also makes it hard for people to really care about spending a moment with one another. Meanwhile, the Web has a segment for every belief, activity, or way of life, and people who one can relate to on an asynchronous basis with little social risk. I had online buddies for years, but it was easy because they never saw my face and I was never obligated to take time out of my day to go to lunch with them or attend a boring get together with their family.

+1. I read an anthropology article years ago that helped explain this from an evolutionary point of view. Men tended to make strong bonds with a few men for life, while women tended to have more mobility in their bonding. Men needed intense trusting relationships that their lives depended on: if you're going to organize and go hunt big animals, you needed to trust those you went with. Women needed different things during different periods of their lives. Vulnerability really is the need for community to help raise children. So you made friends maybe before you had children, then different friends who were also raising children, then you made different friends and had different relationships when you were finally a grandparent and not having children yourself.

I think you nailed it. I made friends in college, but everyone got married in their late twenties, and friendships just sort of died.

That's one side of it but the UK isn't the US. The US is huge if you go to college out of state or even within the same state you can be separated from your community.

The UK overall is smaller than many US states (Texas is 3 times the size of the UK, California is twice it's size). In the UK it's also pretty common to go to college/uni in the city or town you live in or nearby, same goes for work, and even if you work pretty far away 1.5-2 hours commutes are not that rare in the UK and it gets you pretty far on a train.

So while I could see how going from state A to college in state B and ending up working in state C in the US causes this rift I don't see this being much applicable to the UK. The 2nd part was also about men vs women, as the article specifically was about men in the UK does this mean that Women preserve relationships better? If so why? How do "nontraditional" gender identities and affinities affect this?

I don't see how this doesn't apply to the UK? The UK may not be as ridiculously huge as the US, but it's still unlikely that I'm going to take a 3/4 hour train or car ride to see friends in my hometown on a regular basis. The people I met at university have ended up in jobs in opposite ends of the country. I definitely feel like the GP's comment applies to me.

I'm assuming that 3/4 is 3-4 hours, rather than 45 min, that could be in your case but the question is how "common" is your case compared to the rest of the population.

Many people I work with in the UK live still around why they grew up and commute to London.

Quite a few of them are N generation Londoners so they haven't really moved anywhere.

I've also done quite a bit of work in Manchester and Newcastle and the %age of locals there is even greater. Newcastle has Sage and quite a few other tech companies and the majority of the people I met there was from around still pretty much living where they grew up and they as sure don't have 4 hour commutes to meet their friends.

So while I can see how some one from the North coming down south to study and work or vice versa, or even moving to Scotland/N. Ireland might create a pretty big social rift due to distance I just don't know if that's the only, the main, or even a major reason for it. Might be something in our lifestyle, how we consume information and experiences and many other things that affect this. I've lost touch with most of my childhood/early adulthood friends because I've relocated to the UK. But even in my mid 20's I could remember more than one occasion on which I could not be arsed to drive for 30 min (on a company leased car so even gas money wasn't an issue) for a meetup. What It seems to me is that all of us moving from the early 20's to the mid 20's onwards just became more "lazy" as far as the effort we were willing to put into our social interaction. That too me is the more interesting part, I can remember orchestrating social events during highschool and late teens early 20's back when we had considerably less agency and free resources to do it. But a soon as all of us got high paying jobs and company cars it seemed like we stopped giving a damn.

Yeah 3-4 hours is what I meant.

I definitely fall into the category of coming down from the North to work, so maybe my experience is different to those from London or the South. I see myself being able to keep in contact with my universities friends and see each-other occasionally since we're all in the same industry, but the common denominator for all of us is that none of us are working in the places we grew up in due to the scarcity of tech jobs in our respective areas.

I've observed strong bonds are formed during hardship, so enduring the teenage years/military service/some other hardship with others will result in a deeper friendship, but people are moving around so much that even if you have such bonds the other person will likely move to another city.

​Why Millions of Men Lose Friends in Their Twenties (2015)

Why Millions of Men Lose Friends in Their Twenties (2015)