Male friendship: I can get my podcast friend fix whenever — getting a real friend fix is trickier

Another best friend, also from college, is in Australia now. We go for a walk whenever he makes it home, and there are the odd few Zoom calls where we joke about getting old. He makes me feel young and foolish again, which is never a bad thing.

A third best friend came from nowhere to be my best man. I knew him as a friend-of-a-friend for ages and it was just one of those things that I always ended up chatting with him on our nights out. He’s hilariously positive, a good option when you need a boost.

Another friend is into big awkward ideas and pints, often at the same time. He’s big into soccer as well, so once he’s done explaining Jordan Peterson to me, we can have a laugh about Arsenal.

Another is a recent addition, our thing is talking about our kids and sourdough bread. (One is a form of escape from the other.)

My latest best friends are Dominic Sandbrook, Tom Holland, and Blindboy. The first two present a history podcast, Blindboy is Blindboy and has a podcast of his own. I hear more from them than I do from my friends. That might be a problem.

Podcasts are great — you get to live in your head and you don’t have to say anything. Better still, I can get my podcast friend fix whenever I find a spare moment.

Getting a real-life friend-fix is trickier.

My real-life friends are all in different places — East Cork, Cork City, Dublin, and Melbourne. We tried a few Zoom calls at the start of lockdown, but they fizzled out.

They just made us miss meeting up in person.

Anything but group chats

Whenever we meet up in real life, there is general chit-chat for a few minutes where we all try and entertain each other. After that, we split up and talk one-on-one with each other about Brexit, Arsenal or mushroom kimchi, whatever interests we share.

That’s why three or four of us like to go mountain hiking a few times a year. You can pair off with one friend in the group, talk the talk there, and then sidle up to someone else. We’re not great at group chats.

We haven’t had one of those hikes since 2019. I’ve met my friends individually since then, and for all the talk of getting the band back together in the Comeragh Mountains, it hasn’t happened.

It’s a shame. Male friendships, like any friendships, hold us up through life.

They’re making a bit of a splash now in popular culture. The Banshees of Inisherin, with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, was a side-ways look at an Irish bromance with a dollop of bleakness because that’s Ireland for you. The stunning Channel 4 drama series, Somewhere Boy, was rooted in an awkward male friendship between two young men, lost without their fathers.

Scottish writer Michael Pedersen was on RTÉ’s Arena earlier in the year, talking about his new book on male friendships Boy Friend. Written after his musician friend, Scott Hutchinson, took his own life, Pedersen said that friendships are the great love affairs of our lives. He might be on to something there.

He isn’t the only guy with a book out about male friendship.

Max Dickins realised he didn’t have a best friend to act as best man when he was getting ready to propose to his girlfriend. So he wrote a book called Billy No-Mates: How I Realised Men Have a Friendship Problem.

It’s light-hearted with plenty of sharp observations, as you’d expect from a stand-up comedian.

He has done his research too, citing a 2019 YouGov survey in Britain which found that one in five men have no close friends. A 2018 report by the Movember Foundation reckons that it’s one in three, with participants asked if they had a male friend to discuss serious issues around health and finance.

The other issue he mentions is what sociologists call network shrinkage. In short, men have bigger social networks than women in their 20s, but by the time they hit their 40s, this has been reversed. He concludes that a lot of men are lonely. And loneliness is deadly, apparently worse for your health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day, with a correlation to illnesses like heart disease, stroke, and dementia.

Lonely among crowds

So, am I lonely? Not really. The one time I was noticeably lonely in my life was when I was surrounded by millions of people. I worked in Germany for a year, near Frankfurt, in one of the most densely populated parts of Europe.

There were people all around and plenty of them spoke English. The place was full of ex-pats, English and Irish people working on contract for the EU technical agencies spread around the city.

I ended up sharing an apartment and making friends with two Italian guys — they were incredibly entertaining, particularly when they both started dating a beautiful woman from Wiesbaden. (She didn’t have any time for me.)

But I felt like I was just visiting. I didn’t speak German so, two Italians and one other Irish guy aside, I was hanging around with a gang of ex-pats from the Irish bar. I wouldn’t have hung around with them at home, which was Dublin at the time.

I missed my long-time friends and headed back to Ireland before my contract was up.

I haven’t felt that level of loneliness since. That said, I have kids now. So I don’t get to see my friends as often as I’d like to.

Trying to organise a get-together for a gang of friends with kids is like being a project manager on Noah’s Ark.

But being busy with kids’ stuff has an upside — I’ve made a raft of new friends in the last few years at the school gate.

I’ve probably never had more friends-slash-acquaintances in my life. I think this is where male and female friendships are different.

From what I can see, women tend to their close friendships better than men. They stay busy on Whatsapp groups with their gang. My wife has a Golden Girls plan with her friends, where they will go and live together in Florida once their husbands have died off. I hope it always stays fine for them, as my mother would say. But male bitterness aside, they’ll be there for each other until the end.

Men are into looser associations. We don’t have best friends, or if we do, we have four or five of them. It’s like having a panel of people to go to if you need something sorted out in your mind.

I’m lucky to have them, dead lucky.

Max Dickins’s book shows that some men aren’t great at making and keeping friendships, particularly if you don’t like sports and dodgy banter.

I could do more to stay in touch with my friends — they’ve been the ones making the phone calls recently. It’s time to organise a hike in the Comeraghs.

Hopefully, we’ll get up there in the next few months, plodding along through the boggy bits of the Nire Valley, having the same conversations about Brexit and Manchester United, pretending time has stood still.