The boys breakfast club
A chance meeting and a quarter of a century of friendship
By the time I was in my mid-40s I had lost every one of my close male friends. And I had done it without noticing.
I was coupled up, kidded in and careered out. I had no time for the other boys and they had no time for me.
My best friend from school had married a German woman, gone to live in Italy and had three daughters.
Of my three great mates from student days, two had (separately) decided to wake up every morning with a view of Dartmoor and the third was managing two families and a role in local politics.
New associations were difficult to make. At work, where most new friendships are created, an hour for lunch became lunch in the canteen taking 45 minutes, became lunch at your desk taking as long as it takes to consume an M&S hoisin duck wrap and a mango smoothie.
I could bore you with lots of stats, but a rich, sad literature concerning men and their lost buddies and how it’s all got worse in recent times attests to a male ‘friendship recession’.
One British stat stood out for me: 27 per cent of men in 2018 in the UK telling a survey that they had no close friends at all.
But women somehow keep their friends, which has prompted the many people writing about this into a kind of ‘men are from Mars and women are from Venus’ take.
The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar puts it down to men being ‘inherently socially lazy’. And whereas, he says, women strike up deep friendships in which emotions and problems are eminently discussable, men only seem to be able to get together when their proximity to each other is mediated by an object such as a golf club or a racing bike.
Others posit that the effort to create social contact (which, as we will discover, is essential to friendship) is seen as somehow unmanly.
When my eldest daughter was about to start primary school, one of the parents of the new class invited the others to meet up over drinks at their flat.
I will never forget one of the other parents – a dad – taking me aside and telling me how suspicious he was of the host’s motives. ‘What do they want?’ he demanded.
Have you heard the one about?
It sounds like the beginning of a joke:
‘A psychoanalyst, a theatre critic and a newspaper columnist walk into a bar.’
But the story starts 25 years ago this autumn. My youngest was 16 months. I had almost never worked harder. One thing I made time for was the school run.