Why Is It So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends?

As a male, that's never factored into having male friends, are you sure you're not projecting your own insecurities onto others?

I have never seen this happen. In fact, I only see the opposite, it can be difficult to have a friend of the opposite sex without people thinking you are intimate.

This was the original, nuanced meaning of "homophobia", before it was simplified in the popular mind (where nuance cannot live) to merely mean "hatred of gay people". I think there was an implicit "see, there's something for straight people in this too!" aspect to the argument -- something like, "by eliminating the taboo on homosexuality, we will also eliminate the negative consequences to straight men of heterosexual signaling ". I'm not sure that's panned out though, since if anything it has probably increased the need for that signaling in many circles.

I agree with this 100%. When I lived in the city with my family, I'd a) run into random friends frequently and b) getting together was trivial since a large number of people lived within walking distance.

I find the opposite problem that living in a larger city makes connecting with people outside of work harder. Everyone lives far away and getting together can take an hour of driving.

A small or mid sized city on the other hand has a large enough group of people but they are more accessible to each other on evenings and weekends.

> Time from getting out of bed to meeting someone is like 30-45minutes, and I have to spend money. In the city,it is more like 15 minutes, meaning you can do it twice as often, hang out longer.

How tightly packed is your calendar that this makes such an enormous difference?

I'm asking because I always met my friends in the city centre, to which the commute alone from my place was 45min.

Or just do what everyone else does and watch TV instead.

I'm only kind of joking.

I've made tons of good friends in online places over the years. Forums, AOL, MMOs, Discord.

Heck I even met my wife through World of Warcraft. All these things are 'repeated' and 'casual' and online. They're not "social media" though (which seems inhumanly anonymous and transactional to me) more like communities built around specific things.

Go to a board game meetup.

Take a woodworking class.

Art exhibitions and gallery openings, the gym, a sports tournament, every kind of society, concerts, bands, club or voluntary activity, ...

If you don't put yourself into the places where you get to know new people and don't spend some fraction of your time there you might not find friends.

Getting to know people is not luck, it happens when you want to do it. Getting to know people is the first step of finding friends (or relationships for that matter).

There is enough places to go, just pick one you like and put yourself out there.

There is more than that. Local sport clubs. Gardening societies etc. etc.

There are churches that will accept you for who you are, and let you search for what you need. If you showed up at my church and introduced yourself as "not a Christian, but I think regular involvement with this group would be healthy for me" I would welcome you and find ways to involve you.

Organized religion is not for everyone, but it might be that what you want can be served by organized religion, a la carte.

Drop me a message if you want to know more.

> I wish I had some. I heard once, the best or only places to make friends as an adult are where encounters are repeated and casual, so like university and church. But I don’t attend either.

Can I offer some advice?

I suggest you find what people find interesting about you and make yourself available to all who you come across if you feel this isolated, go to events where those traits are part of an equally shared value system, volunteer or tutor at a HS and share your skill set to those who are intrested in pursuing a career in tech and see what comes from it and you might just found some teacher friends as a result. Ex: I still hung out at an arcade as an adult because it was just a part of being a 90s kid, I met so many other people who worked in tech as a result and had lots of interesting conversations about Life and work that I otherwise never would have.

I have also traveled extensively and met people from all kinds of walks of like, such that despite having been in tech in various periods of my Life I still make an effort to speak or hang out with my farmer and chef friends or the friends I met while clubbing or doing activism and introduce myself to new friends with the explicit intent of noting that being solely confined to one aspect of Life is easiest way for me to get bored and lose interest.

As I got older I saw how easy it was to drift away from those things we all had in common as many grow out or have families and the only ones that remained were the ones who I felt were people who I had more in common than the hobbies that brought us together.

Modernity has offered us many comforts in Life, and as a result the things that bonded males strongest together were often trauma related (War, hard dangerous manual labour, immense and high projects); as tech workers are disproportionately on the higher end of the earning scale they should in theory have more opportunity and resources to experience and explore more, but the reality is far harsher: they are often kept far and completely detached from those visceral struggles that have defined male Life for most of Human existence. And thus suffer from this loneliness.

I'm not saying Life is easy, tech has in my experience an immense amount of normalized mental health issues that is only second to my time in Kitchens in frequency and even then only by so much, but it is my observation that working 10+ hours at one's desk and then going to an empty apartment and playing video games or watching netflix and ordering doordash for another 5 hours before going to sleep seems to be the routine so many fall into. I've met so many who have and have relegated this routine for years and solely focus on a higher TC for more stuff and leisure time only to later wonder why they never have friends.

I'm on an odd situation, I'm an introvert by nature but I make friends easily when I'm motivated and which often requires some level of intoxication for me to be agreeable enough to keep a conversation light enough to now scare people off--as a child I was the odd kid in the group who thought too much about everything and pointed out the absurdity of it all, so I came off as pretentiously precocious and could feel isolated but I realized my oratory/story telling skills when used correctly opened many doors so I worked on it diligently and it served me well with my social skills later on in Life.

Personally speaking, I can and have gone weeks/months without talking to anyone because I'm so immersed in a project or what ever subject; but my mental health suffers so much that I always make an effort to make even small talk with a stranger I know I'll never see again or have a call with a friend while I eat or have a drink when I go somewhere or at home even if I'm on the other side of the World from them and on a 9+ hour time difference.

or work place, i made many friends in adult life from work.

This doesn't ring true. Friendship is defined by a willingness to engage in violence without reason?

Loyalty means supporting and accepting someone for who they are. Not just doing whatever they ask regardless of consequence.

I have a friend I've known since I was 16 and I'd do absolutely anything for that man.

But you damned well better believe I would ask questions and make decisions based upon the answers. I'd probably also talk him down from doing something stupid.

I like your point about male friendships being forged (it's very true), but your example is a non-sequitur.

The title is misleading, don't read only it.

The article talk about how men makes close friends almost automatically before (highly related to job) and why it's not the case now.

So yes, the article only focus on men because the reason why men makes close friends almost automatically before doesn't work in how men behave now.

> I invited a woman to church one evening and the event had a reception with delicious food afterward. It finished up around 9pm and we were right in the middle of downtown in a major metropolis. I flitted off to the train station chatting to a different woman. I hadn't given a second thought that my companion was stuck downtown wearing dark clothing and she would also need to find a bus stop, alone and female. Honestly none of that occurred to me because I didn't even consider it a "date" or a "companion" for the night.

You inviting someone somewhere would make you a decent human being if attend to them even if you had no sexual or emotional incentive to, it’s because you are the one who invited them.

> Many of us are victims of feminism to some degree.

A male doesn't have male friends and this is femenism's fault?

> But after high school, I preferred to hang around straight people, and a straight guy won't get too close--because it might be gay?

Sounds like you have some serious insecurities... One of my best friends is gay, I don't think anyone ever thought I'm gay because I hang out with him, but if they did I just don't care. My mate is more important to me than some random prick's opinion.

Also plenty of activities considered manly and not gay are done in groups. Team sports are often perceived as manly not gay activities, things like hunting or fishing are also done in groups commonly and society percieves them as totally not gay, even after Broke Back Mountain. Men hanging out with other men are usually not perceived as gay.

I'm not saying that you are, but this sounds like a repressed gay man would be insecure of. And there's nothing wrong with being openly gay, but being repressed fucks people's mental health.

> I was subjected to decades of gender-based emotional abuse and so my relationships with women are also poor. This is a direct result of feminists and feminism.

Honestly pretty much everyone is influenced by the society, feminists and feminism are everywhere. If it was something provoked by a social movement as large as feminism it would hapen affect everyone. It would affect me, your coworkers, your cousin, the butcher, etc. Now I agree that social interactions in general have changed, but most people still manage to have functional relationships.

Sounds to me that you have some internal issues to deal with... Perhaps professional wouldn't hurt.

If you invite someone out, you shouldn't just ditch them. It doesn't matter who you invited out or what your plans, or lack thereof, are.

What?!

So because you preferes to hit on someone else you didn't co sider asking your other friend to ask if you should go with them to a train station?

That's not an issue of feminism this is just you being weird.

You had gay friends and again you mention feminism?

Wtf do you have a ethical problem with friendship?

Are you perhaps actually gay and that's you issue?!?

You do need friends. Spouse and kid don’t share your hobbies…

I always saw men in my father's generation (he was born in the 1940s) have many close friends that would get together regularly. These close and decades old friendships are especially critical now that he's retired. Without them, he'd be completely isolated.

A significant percentage of men not having any close friends feels like a recent development in the last 1-2 generations.

Why? What makes it "natural"?

I don’t think that I agree. The two folks that I consider to be my BFF’s recently helped me (and my wife) through a difficult time. Each had a specific set of skills and were able to offer support and help in ways that my family wasn’t.

Cancer and cancer treatment was a bitch. The importance of friends (and family) became evident to me during that time. YMMV I guess.

It sounds sad

If that was said by married man then I'd joke that he needs a little longer leash

Ah the good old natural argument, that does ignore that reality (or as some call it: nature) looks different.

What you call natural is societal behaviour that is specific to western society of this day and age. Even in our own society looking three generations back that "nature" looked different and if you cared to look elsewhere than where you live you'd find that what you call "natural" does not exist in certain other cultures as well right now.

Be careful to mistake something feeling natural to you (because you know no different) to something actually being natural in an evolutionary biological sense. Those two are very different bars to clear in terms of proof.

If it were natural we wouldn't be facing such a situation and having this debate right now.

I enjoy the company of my male friends.

It's not natural what we do in our modern society at all btw.

Tribes were very normal and tribes never just focused on family.

Animal kingdom also shows plenty of group and tribe behavior

men need friends, women need friends, everyone needs friends.

This is an excellent point, and it's telling that the article espouses feminization as the solution. Men in general are competition to each other, and it is difficult to feminize oneself sufficiently to become a non-threat to other men. Take the natural standoffishness of men and add that to the increasing number of women that think they can do better than any man who's interested in her, and you get a loneliness epidemic. Add the constant degradation of the male role in society, and you get diseases of despair.