I’m a 54-year-old man without any male friends

Writer on relationships, heartbreak and midlife at @dadhugsforyoursoul and dadhugsforyoursoul.com All of my close friends are women. I’m 54 and I don’t have a single male friend I could call late at night. Not because something went wrong, but because men don’t have friendships like women do. The women I know build their friendships in the open, sharing details, hiding very little, and work hard at maintaining them. The men I know build their friendships around an interest, like cars or football, sharing very little. It’s a different thing entirely. A few years ago, midweek, my phone lit up at 11pm and I thought: ‘Oh shit, this must be bad.’ It was bad. A man I’d worked with for years – let’s call him Jason – his voice stuttering and defeated by the time it reached my ear. “I… sorry, sorry, I didn’t know who to call. Sorry, mate. Hi. You OK?” It took a snotty minute to get to the crux. He’d been in Belgium for nine days. He came home at 10.30pm, put his bag down in the hall, and walked into a front room with nothing in it. The forest green velvet sofa from John Lewis was gone. So was the television, the rug, the framed print they’d argued about. What was left was a rectangle of darker carpet where the sofa had been, and a piece of A4 in the middle of the floor with his name on it. He never told me what the note said. I never asked. For the next six months I stepped up. Jason and I were friends. He told me everything. Where he was sleeping, what he’d stopped eating, the things he’d said to her that he could never take back. Then, I tried telling him something I was struggling with once. He looked at the wall behind my head and said: “Yeahhhh”. Something strange but predictable happened. This man, who had laid his deepest vulnerabilities out for me, stopped contacting me. “How are you doing today?” was met by a shrug and a change of subject. A month after he went quiet, I saw him at a drinks party. He had a new girlfriend. Depressingly attractive. I wasn’t remotely surprised. He hadn’t recovered in those six months, or forgotten the pain and anxiety we’d so often discussed. What we call recovery is usually a jumble of pain and avoidance until the search for the next confidante begins. The vacancy had been filled, and once it was, he didn’t need me. Men don’t end friendships. We hide from ever having them in the first place. We get busy, we reply a day late, we let the gaps get longer until the pressure finally drops and nobody has had to say anything. Both of you can see it happening. Neither of you mention it, because mentioning it would mean stepping out from behind the football, the cars, or whatever the favourite subject happens to be. When I speak to my women friends, the only conversation on offer is a deep, open, vulnerable one. When women ask how you are, they mean it; they wait for an answer – the waiting is a whole technique. There’s no arrangement to it, no six pints of scaffolding to get through first. One of my women friends rang me recently to ask about a recipe and we were 40 minutes in before either of us remembered the haddock. That is not something I have ever managed with a man. The psychologist Niobe Way spent 20 years interviewing teenage boys about their friendships. Boys aged 13 and 14 aren’t frightened of loving each other. They share everything; they are bonded; it’s them against the world. Then somewhere around 15 or 16, they stop sharing. They don’t decide. They learn it and it happens fast. Around 14, needing people gets rebranded as childish, and coping alone becomes the proof you’ve grown up. And then they are taught that feelings have one correct address and it’s a girlfriend. Intimacy stops being something you have with a friend and becomes something you get from a woman. Boys don’t stop wanting it at 16. They learn there’s only one place they’re allowed to put it, and then spend the next 40 years quietly hoping she never leaves. At 16, none of us understood what we were losing. At 54, it’s hard to ignore.