Back to the Poker Table

Men don't make friends as easily as women do, and the pandemic didn't exactly help. I'm glad to return to my dates with mates.

- Don Gillmor

Years ago, I lived beside a pessimistic 70-year-old Irish man named Steve who told me he hadn't had any friends since quitting his factory job 20 years earlier. The bowling league, tavern visits and poker games had all withered. Steve sat on his porch all day.

Across the street was 70-year-old Werner. Weather permitting, Werner sat on a battered La-Z-Boy recliner he'd set up on his lawn. The two men stared at one another but rarely talked. When Steve collapsed on his porch, Werner watched as the ambulance crew tried to revive him. I went to Steve's funeral, a subdued event (there were just four of us, including a priest who hadn't met him), and thought about the nature of male relationships.

Steve and Werner are a handy metaphor for the kind of isolation that Covid19 has visited upon many of us, an isolation that still lingers. Though we men were heading in that direction anyway: the percentage of males with at least six close friends fell by half between 1990 and 2021, according to the Survey Center on American Life.

Simply put, men are in a friend recession. We are gifted in the art of isolation, the result of social conditioning and 10,000 years of evolutionary forces, where cooperation among men has been offset by competition. The invention of the big-screen television hasn't helped.

We can find ourselves stranded by middle age. It's easy for our friendships to drift; people move, we're occupied with children and work. We're tired, we're distracted, we change. Then there's our preference for socializing in groups rather than one-on-one, as noted in a 2020 Oxford University study. Groups are looser, less intimate. And our group activities often revolve around something a sport, a bar, a poker game. But when the activity goes, the group can go with it.