When I am not with my always-receptive and long-suffering girlfriend, I spend hours and hours on my own. I have lunch alone, I coffee solo, read a book, do a crossword; a walking Edward Hopper painting with a plaintive, whistling soundtrack. Where are the real friendships in my life, I wonder as I walk? Where are loyal and empathetic crime partners, the through-thick-and-thin soulmates that everyone else seems to have? The solid, stalwart, good-guy buddies that would help me navigate the heartache of divorce, money worries, myriad vocational traumas and the untimely death of a parent?
Our beloved capital is officially one of the loneliest cities in the world. A recent survey found just seven per cent of Londoners strongly agree it’s a good place to make new friends and one was 14 per cent less likely than in the average city to have made a new friend recently. This put us seventeenth out of the 18 cities surveyed for sociability, all before lockdowns kicked in and made us lonelier.
I can freely relate to this sense of urban alienation. Like many Londoners I am “connected” but virtually friendless, a phone full of names but no one calling it. An urbane and give-good-party type, I can work a room but I can never work out why I’ll always end up sitting down solo, wondering where to go next. (In a cab, on my own, usually). “Loneliness,” sang Bryan Ferry, “is a crowded room.”
And here’s the crazy, 21st-century irony, I am really quite popular! On Facebook I have more than 600 contacts. Instagram? Over 1,000 followers. People post nice things on my birthday, add friendly captions and affectionate comments to my photos. But actual friends? I’m even worse than the British average male who is said to meet 396 people during his lifetime, manages to alienate 27 of the guys he actually likes, makes 33 friends, but retains only six of them. I’ve retained just two or three. Tops. And even some of them will regularly reject my calls or fail to ring back.
Does this disparate triumvirate ever meet up? IRL? Not often. Maybe twice a year. And always, it seems, at my instigation and tireless, tenaciously scheduling encouragement. If it wasn’t this way, I have no doubt that at least one of these friends — two, even — would happily fade away and never bother calling again.
Oh, it can be a Rabelaisian riot of top bantz and Wildean wisecracks when we do get together, though. I don’t open up to them. They don’t open up to me. It’s the trusted and time-honoured male way. Our occasional unions are wrought by a kind of tacit agreement to life’s trivia and shallows (Iris Murdoch believed male friendships to be “a complicity in crime, in chauvinism, in getting away with things, in just gluttonously enjoying the present even if hell is all around”) so we never, ever talk about our wives, girlfriends, our kids, our feelings or failings. Nothing that, you know, actually matters.
If I have a personal problem to deal with, I share it not with a male compadre but with my dog. How did the rot set in? When and where did I go from friend wealth to near social bankruptcy?
I believe it all started 20-odd years ago, when I was surrounded by smart, glamorous, hyper-connected people with interesting careers and lots of clever things to say to one another… but also utterly friendless, alienated and lonely. I was invited to everything, had a long-running gossip column in this newspaper and was listed as “social editor” in another glossy. Doors opened, ropes lifted. Champagne every night, if I wanted it, but also sham friends. I was well known… but was I well liked? Apparently not.
This lonely cycle only worsened as I grew older. Now, in later life, divorced but happy and in a relationship, with grown-up children, an interesting career and a nice place to live, my friendship circle has constricted even further.
At least I am not alone with my loneliness. According to a recent YouGov poll, almost 18 per cent of men owned up to not having a single close friend while 32 per cent stated that they didn’t have a best friend. Predictably, for women, these figures were lower — 12 per cent and 24 per cent respectively — suggesting that, on average, men in the UK are leading more solitary lives. But the survey didn’t allow for a critical characteristic of lonely men: 10 per cent say that they would never admit to feeling lonely.
Determined not to become another statistic and craving conversation and male companionship, I called David Waters, a psychotherapist specialising in male issues. “From an early age, males are encouraged to be self-reliant,” he tells me. “Through a variety of learned and accumulated issues, it is harder for us to say ‘I need company. I am feeling lonely’.”
Women are encouraged to maintain lasting and reliable friendships through adulthood, explains the wise therapist. Men, on the other hand, are culturally conditioned to glamorise and champion loneliness — everyone from James Bond to John Wick is a stone-cold loner. Male friendships tend to be awkward and surface, conversations based around occasion, careerist achievement, material acquisition, sporting heroism.
Men fear being perceived as needy. “So, if they do open up,” Waters says, “they can become self-conscious very quickly.” So who do men talk to? “More than women, men will turn to their significant others, for intimate conversations and confessionals,” says Waters, acknowledging that this can, in turn, put a huge pressure on marital relations. But while men are careful to choose the right partner, they might not choose their friends as wisely.
Case in point, me. Persistently blighted by FOMO, I’ll choose star quality over empathy, the reflected glory of a cool and popular individual. I find myself genuflecting to free-wheeling raconteur/bon viveur types. The kind of man, I suppose, I would quite like to be myself. But flaky and self-serving, these show ponies are rarely good friend material.
I don’t belong in their world, they don’t fit into mine. So why do I persist in chasing them? At my age? “Welcome to the human race,” says Waters, wryly. “As they get older, men can grow passive when it comes to their social lives.”
So, step up and show up, he suggests. “Make the phone call. Arrange the date. Be there for your old friends. Listen to them and actually, really, honestly care about what they are saying.” What? Both of them?
