RARELY IS THERE A DAY when the news doesn’t reveal a new study that finds men in their advanced years are increasingly socially isolated. Isolation, we are told, has serious health consequences; loneliness is a plague that causes or contributes to depression, addiction, dementia and suicide.
And while the antidote — more friends — would seem to be obvious, we are also confronted by the trope that men can’t make friends when they are older. Friends come from youth and the middle years when parents are jumbled together by their children. As the years advance, the goal is to hang onto the friends you have, because new ones are few and far between. You can’t make new old friends.
But like so many tropes about aging, the truth is more generous. There are many strategies to make friends later in life. Here is one that has worked for me.
The idea sprang from a cocktail party in 2002 when someone pronounced, “Men can’t talk to each other.”
Of course, men chat and banter and joke, but the contention was that men cannot have deep, intimate, emotional, vulnerable — pick your favorite cringy description — conversations with other men.
One of us — for reasons that follow I won’t name names — challenged that hypothesis. He believed that men could speak to each other, they just needed to figure out how to do so.
We subsequently formed a group with the bland but satisfying name “Six Guys Talking” to see if — under laboratory conditions — we could disprove the trope.
So… what do we want to talk about?
We began with a set of ground rules. We’d meet in the evening at someone’s house or in a restaurant. Spouses — we all had them — were not invited. Our group agreed that all discussions would be confidential.
Three topics were off limits: Business, politics and sports. Not that there was anything wrong with these subjects — they were, after all, the lifeblood of our cocktail party chitchat — but their easy familiarity muted other topics.
We decided to jumpstart each session with a theme. One person would facilitate the conversation. No pre-reading or research expected. A book club without books. That appealed because we could avoid the usual book club challenge of people not doing the reading.
We were then in our 40s and early 50s and lived in the same neighborhood. We all had jobs, spouses, kids and engagement with our various communities. We were in the thick of child-rearing and career-building.
Beyond those commonalities, there were important differences. We worked in different areas — business, law, medicine, journalism, the arts — and were of different economic status. We were friendly socially, but none of us went way back. We were comfortable enough with each other at cocktails or dinner, but we didn’t know each other’s back stories.
Our first discussion was on the easily accessible topic of balancing what we saw as the three forces that shaped our day-to-day lives: work, kids and community. In retrospect, it was a great place to begin because we were all headlong into our careers, committed to being engaged fathers and good partners, and wanting to be part of our community.
When we started to talk, it quickly became apparent that we each had the same problem: there was never enough time to do all three, or at least do them at the level that we wanted. We shared the bond of falling short. And right from there we achieved what would seem the obvious first step towards finding deeper connections — we weren’t parading our resumes or accolades — we were admitting that we were failing.
We talked for several hours. We drank beer and wine, but lightly; the idea was not to see what alcohol would unleash. We learned things about our colleagues that we hadn’t known before, and we appreciated how in our different lives, we had similar challenges.
Communication gets easier
Over the next couple of years, we kept the same format. We had sessions on fathering that carried us into discussions of our own fathers, a topic that was good for endless engagement. For several of us, our core fathering strategy was to do it differently than our fathers did. For others, there was the pressure of trying to be as good for our children as what we experienced.
As we got more used to being with each other, we were surprised how casually and seemingly effortlessly we talked about subjects that never would have animated our regular social conversations. We talked about faith — two of us identifying as atheist, two agnostic and two believers. We talked about death; we really got into those discussions. Seems like death was something none of us had ever truly talked about. We discussed our families of origin. We talked about our ambitions and our fears.
We kept the group going for years. We disproved the idea that men can’t talk to each other. We not only did that, but in the process, we became deep friends, and we remain so today.
In 2011, I moved to San Francisco, and sadly our meetings became more like reunions than our regular get-togethers.
We kept the group going for years. We disproved the idea that men can’t talk to each other. We not only did that, but in the process, we became deep friends, and we remain so today.
By this time, I was in my 60s and living in a new city where I had no history. I had switched from law to writing and while I was busy learning the craft, I often felt lonely and isolated. I was meeting people socially, but nothing replaced the shared intimacy I had with my old friends from Philly.
Talk is cheap, but friendships matter
One day I took a bike ride with a new acquaintance. In passing I told him about the Six Guys Talking group. He thought it sounded interesting and proposed that we form a new one on the West Coast. We invited four others and, at least at first, we followed the same ground rules. We met roughly monthly, in person until COVID forced us onto Zoom.
While we were older and our personalities were different than the Philly group, the results were pretty much the same.
We bonded over opening up to each other. We shared intimacies that we hadn’t shared with many people. It wasn’t always easy; but there was a payoff. Through the process, we became close friends.
At this point, we have been talking together for seven years. We are into our 70s — some of us midway. We have had medical challenges — some serious — and have shared many deep dives into what our adult children are contending with in the toxic world of social media, polarization and generative AI.
I have concluded that the idea that men can’t make friends when they get older is as bogus as the trope we challenged back in Philly. We are social people; we crave connection. That does not fade as we get older. What we lose is not the craving, but the strategy for fulfilling it.
What I have described here is only one of many strategies, but I can report that, at least in my experience, it works. You don’t form a group to make friends, but to talk deeply. It just turns out that when you do, friendship happens.
What does a longer lifespan mean to you? Talented local columnists tag-team every Friday to tackle the challenges that inform your choices — whether you’re pushing 17 or 70. Recent Stanford Center on Longevity Visiting Scholar Susan Nash looks at life experiences through an acerbic personal lens, while other longtime writers take the macro view to examine how society will change as the aging population grows ever larger. Check in every Friday to expand your vision of living the long game and send us your feedback, column suggestions and ideas for future coverage to newsroom@baycitynews.com.