How do you make friends? It’s a simple question with a terrifying edge to it, the unspoken assumption being that if you start to tease your technique apart, you might realise that you don’t actually have one. What if every friend you’ve ever made was just luck, happenstance, right-place-right-time, engineered by other, more naturally sociable people into whose orbits you somehow blundered? What if overthinking it ruins your ability to actually do it, like public speaking or tightrope walking? What if friends – or your friends, anyway – are a non-renewable resource?
These are questions that have elbowed their way into my brain every so often for the past couple of decades because, like many men, I’m not a natural at making friends. In my teens, I mostly stuck with the chums I’d bonded with while painting tiny figurines at school; at university, the new ones came from juggling and jiujitsu clubs. In my 20s, additions to my social circle came mostly from external pressure: one of my existing pals would squeeze me together with other acquaintances over a long enough timeline for awkward conversations to fossilise into friendships. And so it went.
But at some point, I realised that I had to get better at it. This happened long before any lockdowns kicked in: working freelance and from home a lot means there’s no self-replenishing pool of pub pals to draw on. So I tried, and if you’re one of the sizeable chunk of men who report having no close friends, I’ve got some advice. Sorry if you hate advice: we’ll get to that, too.
First, cast aside any shame you have about the whole business. When you’re a small child, making friends seems outrageously simple. You sit next to someone at school – or you’re hauled around to their house by your parents – and you talk to them about a rock you’ve found or hit them with a foam bat, and that’s it: pals. You can still do this as a grownup, but it takes a touch more bravery, or at least a willingness to say yes to things more often. Ask other men to the cinema! See if your favourite workmate fancies a non-work coffee! One of my friends traces a decade’s worth of bi-monthly pub catchups to a neighbour who popped a note through his door saying he was organising a meet up for the men of the street.
If that’s too daunting, ease yourself in via social media. After a couple of false starts, these days I think nothing of saying: “Well, I’m in London today, and I know we’ve never actually seen each other in life, but … pint?” to people who’ve made me laugh on the internet. There are always going to be rejections, but that’s all part of the process: it’s like being a pickup artist, but 1,000% less creepy.
Also – and please don’t take this the wrong way – it’s worth considering that you might not be the best at talking to people. For instance, if you’re already composing the comment you’re going to write under this article, telling me I’m wrong about everything, please stick with me long enough for me to admit that – about every five or six years – I realise that something I’ve been blithely wandering through life doing was completely misguided. Only half-listening while you wait for your own turn to speak? Turns out people hate that! Steamrolling every conversation with your own precis of the topic? Not popular! Luckily, there are entire books about how to be better at talking to people, and some of them are written by FBI negotiators or prison guards so you get to feel like Jack Reacher when you’re reading them. Think of befriending people as a skill, like regrouting a shower – there’s no shame in working on it.
Finally, and maybe counterintuitively, don’t be afraid to lose bad friends if you have to. Almost as serious as having no friends is not having any who you feel you can confide in. And if your regular meet-ups are full of people you would never consult about a parenting problem or a vague feeling of existential dread, it’s probably time for a cull. Plenty of men will tell you that the male default for conversation is cutting jibes and endless persiflage: the way you can tell those men are dicks is that they’ve deliberately chosen an obscure word to excuse their terrible behaviour. Prune them out and get on with making some new ones. Or drop a WhatsApp to an old one, because the very best thing about male friends is that, in my experience, most of them are delighted to be contacted out of the blue after half a decade. In fact, if any of mine are reading this … pint?
• Joel Snape is a writer and fitness expert
