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People who make time to hang out with friends have all the luck

- Don Gillmor

YEARS AGO, I lived next door to a pessimistic older man named Steve, who told me he hadn't had any friends since quitting his factory job 20 years earlier. The bowling league, happy hours and poker games had all withered. Steve sat on his porch all day.

Across the street was another neighbor, Werner. Weather permitting, Werner sat on a battered La-Z-Boy recliner he'd set up on his lawn. The two men, both around the same age, stared at each other 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).

Steve and Werner are a handy metaphor for the kind of isolation that COVID-19 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. Guys are gifted in the art of isolation, the result of social conditioning and 10,000 years of evolutionary forces, where cooperation has been offset by competition. The invention of the big-screen TV hasn't helped.

And so, by middle age, we can find ourselves stranded. People move, we're occupied with children and work. We're tired, we're distracted, we change. Then there's our team mindset. A 2020 Oxford University study confirms what many guys will readily admit: Males prefer to socialize in groups rather than one-on-one. Groups are looser, less intimate. And shared activities often revolve around something-a sport, a bar, a fantasy football draft. But when the activity goes away, the group often goes with it.