How I Learned to Make Friends Again

It used to be so easy. Then life got in the way.

- By Billy Baker

Let’s start with the moment I realized I was already a loser.

I had been summoned to an editor’s office at the Boston Globe. “We want you to write about how middle-aged men have no friends,” he said. There was a crisis in modern friendship, he went on to say, and it was having a catastrophic effect on mental and physical health.

I have plenty of friends, buddy. Are you calling me a loser? You are.

Also, did you just call me middle-aged?

As I slunk back to my desk, I ran a quick mental roll call just to confirm that I was not, in fact, perfect for this loneliness story. First off, there was my buddy Mark. We went to high school together and we still talked all the time and we hung out all the ...

Wait, how often did we actually hang out? Maybe four or five times a year? Maybe less?

Then there was my other best friend from high school, Rory ... I genuinely could not remember the last time I’d seen Rory. Had it been a year? Entirely possible.

I had a wife and two young boys, and we had recently purchased a home in a small coastal town about an hour north of the city. Aside from work, most everything revolved around my children. When you added it all up, there was no real “friend time” left.

My story was very typical. And very dangerous. That’s what I heard from Richard Schwartz, a psychiatrist and local Boston guy who, with his wife, Jacqueline Olds, MD, had written a book called The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twentyfirst Century.