Daniel Goodwin

In my teenage years I came across a joke that attempted to summarize the difference between men’s and women’s friendships. I don’t remember the details but at least part of it went something like this: A woman will share more about herself in an hour with another woman she has just met at a dinner party than a man will share with his best friend over the course of their entire lifetimes. The joke was on the men of course. We don’t generally excel at friendship and at least two of its prerequisites: showing vulnerability and communicating well.

The explanation for this friendship disparity between men and women usually falls back on gender stereotypes: Traditional ideas of masculinity don’t involve sharing feelings beyond elation or dismay at the trials and tribulations of favourite sports teams. Men are supposed to be stoic and laconic rather than touchy-feely and generous with their feelings. Men apparently skew toward the rational rather than the emotional. We are geared to action not conversation. We famously prefer non-fiction to fiction.

Happily, we’ve moved far beyond these stereotypes in recent years. I don’t watch sports. I am as emotional as I am rational. I make my living based on half-decent communications skills. But old habits die hard and men’s friendships are still in a deficit situation compared to those of women.

Since the pandemic and its period of enforced isolation, we’ve been paying more attention to our friendships. The media have referred to a “friendship recession” in which many people wish they had more close friends. Apparently on the rise before COVID-19, the situation was made worse by the pandemic. But men appear to be hurting more than women.

In a 2021 survey by the Survey Centre on American Life, less than fifty per cent of the men said they were happy with the number of friends they had while 15 per cent said they had no close friends at all. This latter number had increased five-fold since 1990. Men were also far less likely to depend on their friends for emotional support and be open with their feelings. Forty-eight per cent of women said they had shared their personal feelings with a friend in the previous week while only 30 per cent of men had done so.

As society increasingly grapples with isolation and loneliness, some companies are paying attention. A couple years ago, Budweiser Canada launched a marketing campaign to celebrate male friendship. Their hook was their “Inaugural Friendship Survey” which showed that “almost 70 per cent of men see their friends less in-person as they get older.” To ostensibly help their male customers while selling them more beer, Budweiser Canada gave away restaurant coupons for “buds” to use to take each other out for dinner.

But the male friendship gap goes beyond marketing. In their Suicide Prevention Toolkit “Men and Suicide”, the Canadian Centre for Suicide Prevention addresses the higher suicide statistics for males. Men are three times as likely as women to take their own lives. The Centre attributes some of the reasons for this to traditional masculine characteristics: men are generally more reluctant to seek help and show or express emotion, and more likely to be socially isolated.

I have a handful of close male friends outside my family. A couple are like me, in their early fifties. Some are a decade or two older, and a couple are a decade younger. Some are fellow writers. Almost all are avid readers. I met most of them at work. Two are former bosses. I speak with most of them regularly but not all the time. We email or text each other more often. These are all individual friendships. We are not a group of friends.

When we speak, it is never about traditional male topics like sports or the weather. Politics figures as a subject but rarely. We do speak about the deaths of our parents. The dementia of once vibrant mothers and fathers. Our sometimes-complex relationships with those parents when they were alive or aware. The highs and lows of work. Modern dads to the core, we often speak about our children. About their academic accomplishments and career plans. Their amusing observations and adventures.

We also speak regularly about books and writing. We recommend books to each other and share articles. When it comes to our own writing, we share ideas, drafts, rejections and acceptances. We value each other’s feedback. We encourage each other to keep going. But writing, as personal as it is, is much easier to share than other aspects of our lives.

Any marital complexities are only ever very lightly hinted at unless they erupt in divorce. And then we tread gingerly around the topic. Not wanting to pry but wanting to offer empathy and as much support as needed. Despite all the social progress in gender norms, we have not yet completely shed our traditionally masculine tendencies. But I like to think we provide support to the best of our abilities.

A New York Times article written in 2022 and titled “Why Is It So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends” offers four recommendations for men to improve the quality of their friendships: “Practice vulnerability even if it makes you uncomfortable… Don’t assume friendship happens organically… Use activities to your advantage… Harness the power of casual check-ins.”

I compare my real-life friendships to the four-pronged advice offered in the article by various mental health experts. Casual check-ins are about the only one of the four recommendations that we deliberately follow. We will email or text each other, checking in when we know someone is going through a tough time at work or with their parents. We also let each other know how we are doing.

My friends and I practice vulnerability in our slow, plodding, tentative masculine ways. But I like to think we do it naturally, not deliberately because we desire self-improvement or to become better friends. We share our problems as they arise and help each other think through them. One of my friends is a certified business coach. We find our laconic ways of communicating how much we appreciate each other’s listening, advice, support, and time, often in quick follow-up emails after we have had one of our calls. We are not afraid to mention how much we value our conversations and the support we give each other but we don’t go overboard.

Friendship for all of us has happened organically. In many cases, we interacted through work and found we had an affinity. A shared love of words and stories. Shared values related to family and work, and an ironic sense of humour. A shared sensibility, a way of looking at the world, of living a life.

I have moved a bit for work over the years so most of my close friends live in different cities. We don’t do traditional masculine activities together like watch or play sports. We are content to talk by phone or communicate by email, to send each other poems or stories we come across or those we have written ourselves. When we happen to be in the same city, we have supper together or go for a walk.

Men’s communications and relational styles are often described as being “side by side” – playing team sports is the usual lazy example – whereas women’s are often viewed as “face to face.” If there is any activity my friends and I are regularly engaged in side by side, albeit most often virtually, it is the journey of life. Marriage, children, parents. Aging. Reading and writing. Careers. Through talking, we help each other better understand the world, others, and ourselves. In the process, we share our feelings to a certain extent. We help each other navigate them. Continuing with the journey metaphor, we put ourselves in each other’s shoes.

When I think about what is important to me, I rank being a good friend very highly, just below being a good father, husband, and son, and above achieving career success. I consider each of my good friends to be a companion to me on that journey of life. Although separated by thousands of miles, they are always there beside me.

Male friendships were very much on my mind when I was writing my third novel, The Great Goldbergs. Like the two others before it, this novel has male friendship as one of its core themes. In the late seventies, two boys meet on the first day of junior high school and become close friends and then colleagues. One is from a working-class family, the other is the son of a billionaire.

As they grow into middle age, they confide in each other about important aspects of their lives: professional disappointments; challenges with parents; family secrets. But they also never quite share everything with each other, including fundamentally important things about themselves. Nor are they ever quite fully aware of their own selves. Each of them tries their best to help the other, with varying results. Sometimes, words – and actions – fail them. They are thoughtful and sensitive twenty-first century males but they still carry the burden of their male heritage.

Someone recently asked me why I like to write about male friendships. Why a novelist feels the need to write about any subject is often a mystery: an alchemical function of upbringing, identity, and circumstance. Male friendship is obviously important in my life as well as fiction. The more interesting question for me is why my third novel was about men when according to one of the truisms of the English publishing world, 80 percent of fiction is purchased by women. Men tend to prefer non-fiction as they believe it is more useful.

This gender gap in reading habits could point to another subtle recommendation for men interested in beefing up their capacity for friendship. If one of the qualities of good friendship is empathizing with the other person, and if reading fiction builds empathy as psychological studies suggest, reading novels might serve as a bit of an antidote to a million years of male evolution. And anything that boosts readership, amongst any gender, is a good thing!