Why Do Men Lose Friends as They Get Older?

Thirty-five years of friendship, terrible decisions and the quiet way men drift apart without ever really falling out.

When I was about ten or eleven, me and my best mate went over to the school to play football. We did that all the time back then. There was no arranging anything, nobody checking a family calendar or sending a message asking if half four worked. You picked up a football, knocked at someone’s house and hoped they were in.

When we got there, a few other lads were already playing, so we got talking and eventually joined in. Two of them were called Jay and both were really good at football. One had a Liverpool top on, I think, although I could be making that bit up after thirty-five years. The other was wearing a 1989 Everton shell suit and that one I definitely remember because it has scarred me for life. It was one of those proper Scouse shell suits made from a material that looked as though it had been developed specifically to help fire spread quickly. Had somebody lit a match within ten metres of him, Jay would have been no more.

Somehow, from that afternoon kicking a ball around, those lads became my mates. There was no conversation about it and nobody asked anybody to join the friendship group. Sometimes you just meet your type of people, something clicks and that’s it. Contract signed. You are now mates. No backsies. We played football that afternoon, probably did the same thing a few days later, and before long they were simply the people I did everything with.

I’ve spent years telling people that I’ve had the same group of mates since I was ten. My mum always used to comment on how nice it was that we had all stayed friends for so long, and she was right. Sort of. Because the other truth is that I haven’t seen some of them for a couple of years.

One of them messaged me recently to tell me he had a new number. I replied straight away, “Thanks mate, this will really help us keep in touch on a daily basis.” He laughed, and to be fair we have actually messaged back and forth a few times since, which probably represents a significant improvement in male communication. I suggested meeting up, but apparently he currently has no teeth and his mum won’t let him play out, so that remains a work in progress.

He has never completely disappeared. He likes things I put on social media and often comments when I write about my dad because he knew him really well. I also suspect he is still in the market for a woman because every now and again he uploads a new selfie to Facebook, some of which have the energy of Alan Partridge during one of those vivid flashbacks where he is wearing leather underwear and a jumper. He posts the photograph, I say something horrible underneath it, a few people like my comment and everybody moves on. Apparently this is how we maintain a thirty-five-year friendship.

The strange thing is that I could walk into a pub tomorrow, bump into any one of those lads and within about thirty seconds it would feel like I had seen them the day before. In reality, I don’t really know what is going on in some of their lives anymore and they don’t really know what is going on in mine. Yet I also know that if I rang one of them tomorrow and said I was properly on my arse, they would help if they could. There can’t be many relationships where you can know almost nothing about someone’s current life and still consider them one of your closest friends.

In fairness to my mates, they haven’t abandoned me. They still do a camping trip every year and there is usually a walk around Christmas. I don’t think I have missed one of the walks, but I have definitely been missing in action when it comes to the camping.

I love being outdoors. I walk, cycle, paddleboard and will happily spend half the day somewhere miles from home. What I have never really understood is why, after thousands of years of human progress, anybody would voluntarily leave a perfectly good house to sleep on the floor.

I tried it once when my son was about two or three. I arrived at the campsite, put the tent up, then grabbed James and drove about an hour back towards Liverpool because I was taking him to his first Liverpool game with my dad. We watched Liverpool play Arsenal, drove all the way back and got to the campsite at about ten o’clock at night. By then my mates were pissed and extremely loud, the inside of the tent was approximately four hundred degrees and every time I needed a shit or a shower I had to walk a hundred metres carrying toiletries like some sort of displaced person.

I woke up the next morning feeling as though I had been surviving in the wilderness for six months. It was roasting, my back was killing me and at some point I managed to spill milk all over the car. I packed everything away, drove home and quietly decided that my camping career had reached its natural conclusion.

The sad thing is that my mates still go every year with their wives and kids and absolutely love it. I am genuinely pleased for them. I am also a miserable shite whose back was not designed for the wilderness and who has developed a surprisingly deep appreciation for the acoustic properties of brick when trying to sleep. That bit is entirely on me.

Looking back, I think the real drifting probably started somewhere in our early thirties, although I doubt any of us noticed it happening. In your twenties life is much simpler. You work, Friday arrives, everybody goes out and if one person says they aren’t coming they get absolutely slaughtered until they either change their mind or spend the entire evening defending the decision.

Then adulthood starts filling in all the spaces that friendship used to occupy without asking permission. People bought houses, careers became proper careers and children started arriving. Around the same time, everybody seemed to get married, which meant everybody also started having stag dos.

I was invited to all of them and went to none.

Part of that was because things at home were difficult. My partner had been in and out of hospital after years of pregnancy problems, and there was a lot happening that my mates probably knew about without ever really knowing about. I wasn’t deliberately keeping them out, but there are periods of your life when you become so consumed by whatever is happening in front of you that everything else starts moving further away.

If I’m being fair, though, there was another reason. I also didn’t particularly want to go to Budapest for naked mud wrestling and a booze cruise, or Amsterdam to get off my head on mushrooms and cakes. It just wasn’t really my thing.

For clarification, the naked mud wrestling involved women. It wasn’t eighteen lads from Liverpool having some sort of beautiful male-bonding splash around together.

The odd thing was that even though I had chosen not to go, I still felt left out when they came home. They had all these new stories that belonged to them. Someone had been accidentally locked in a room for eight hours because nobody realised he was asleep in there. Another mate apparently got battered by his wife after somebody grassed him up about the mud wrestling. There are other stories I am unable to disclose for legal reasons, although that isn’t true either. They mainly got pissed, looked at boobs and had a brilliant time.

I had made the decision not to go, but I had also missed the memories that came back with them. I don’t think I understood that at the time.

A few years later, after everything we had been through, James arrived and I decided to get married. It seemed sensible to marry his mum.

By then my mates and I had drifted further without anybody ever acknowledging it. Most of them had children around the same time and their kids were growing up together, while I was only just beginning that part of my life about eight years later. Work had swallowed a fair chunk of me as well. I had my head down, arse up, trying to build a career, and after waiting so long to become a dad most of my attention was going towards this little lad who had suddenly arrived and become my favourite person in the world.

When it came to getting married, I said I didn’t want a stag do. I hadn’t been on anybody else’s and it felt a bit rich to suddenly ask them to put their hands in their pockets and spend a weekend celebrating mine.

My mates disagreed. Strongly.

Apparently I was having one whether I liked it or not, and when they asked where I wanted to go I said Keswick.

Yep. Keswick. Famous throughout Europe for its thriving nightlife, international culture and sophisticated bachelor-party scene.

What I actually wanted was to go gorge scrambling, have a decent meal, drink some beer and spend a weekend with my mates. They booked somewhere without telling me, I eventually found out where it was, took one look at the accommodation and told them to get fucked. I may have intervened slightly in my own surprise stag do and booked us a house just outside Keswick instead.

The first night we got pissed and at some point somebody produced a guitar, which was very quickly followed by several people telling him to put it away. We sat around the house talking absolute bollocks for hours and it was brilliant.

The next morning we went gorge scrambling and, from memory, kayaking afterwards. This was October in the Lake District, so the water was approximately three degrees warmer than death. Two of my mates nearly cried with the cold, proper grown men standing in freezing water looking at me as though I had personally betrayed them.

Another completely shit himself when it came to jumping off one of the rocks and refused to do it, so naturally we supported him through this difficult moment by taking the piss for the remainder of the weekend.

That night we went for food at one of those restaurants where your steak arrives on a hot stone and you cook it yourself. One of my mates had not completely grasped the concept. The waitress put the steak in front of him, he stared at it for a few seconds looking genuinely concerned and said, “I normally have mine a little more well done than that.”

Which was technically the exact problem she had just handed him the equipment to solve.

Afterwards we had a few drinks and headed back to the house. Most of us were done for the night, but one of my oldest mates, who I love dearly but who is also a fucking knobhead, decided that he wanted to experience the legendary nightlife of Keswick. A couple of the others agreed to go with him and apparently managed to find the one place in the entire town still open after midnight.

About an hour later they came back very loudly and I got up to see what had happened. It turned out my mate had been talking to some lad’s girlfriend, words had been exchanged and eventually the two of them had squared up. For reasons known only to themselves, both men had then removed their tops.

My mate was well into his thirties. The other lad, according to everybody who witnessed it, looked about sixteen.

My mate got knocked out.

Nobody offered him any sympathy whatsoever.

I would like to say this remains one of the funniest things that has ever happened to him, but the truth is I could probably write an entire blog about that man alone.

I loved that weekend and they did too. Afterwards everyone kept talking about how good it had been, and I remember thinking that nobody cared that we hadn’t gone to Prague, Amsterdam or Budapest. We had gone to Keswick, nearly developed hypothermia, failed to understand the basic premise of cooking a steak and watched one of our mates get knocked unconscious by somebody who might not yet have been old enough to buy a pint.

It had been magnificent.

The place had never mattered. It was the people, which I suppose we had already spent most of our lives proving.

When we were kids we were inseparable. We would spend all day together at school, go home, stuff our faces and almost immediately go back out looking for each other again. Sometimes we would sit in somebody’s house all evening; other times we would hang around near the school or outside the Thresher doing absolutely nothing.

That is another thing I miss about being young. You could do absolutely nothing for six hours and somehow have a brilliant night.

It carried on well into our twenties. Football, holidays, nights out, days out, somebody’s house, whatever happened to be going on that weekend. Friendship required almost no maintenance because life kept putting us in the same places.

Then, slowly, life stopped doing that for us.

I don’t remember the point where we started seeing less of each other because I don’t think there was one. Nobody fell out and nobody dramatically left the group. Work became more demanding, children needed taking places, mortgages had to be paid and parents got older. Weekends that once seemed to stretch on forever became things that had to be organised weeks in advance.

Without any of us really noticing, seeing each other all the time became seeing each other quite often. Quite often became occasionally, and eventually occasionally became hardly ever.

I think that is why this has been on my mind.

I have written before about loneliness, particularly after my dad died, and about the strange way grief can alter relationships within a family. What I had never really thought about were my mates, probably because I had always assumed they were still there.

And I suppose they are.

That is the strange bit.

You don’t choose your family, but somewhere along the way you choose a handful of other people and they become something very close to it. Then, if you are anything like us, you spend the next few decades demonstrating the importance of this profound emotional bond by calling each other dickheads.

There is not much ceremony around male friendship. Nobody renews the contract or sits somebody down after thirty-five years and says, “Just so you know, I still consider you one of the most important people in my life.”

You would probably get called a prick if you did.

So you just assume everyone knows. You assume the friendship can sit untouched on a shelf for two or three years and, when somebody eventually picks it back up, it will still work.

And strangely enough, sometimes it does.

I bumped into my oldest mate the other week while I was doing the school run. I spotted him in somebody’s front garden carrying a set of ladders, which initially looked a bit suspicious, until he saw me and came over.

It turns out he is a window cleaner now and, according to him, earning more money than Elon Musk.

He isn’t.

He has always been a bullshitter. This is the same man who once told us he had been Elton John’s bodyguard, and if I were Elton I would have asked for a refund.

We stood beside somebody else’s hedge talking while he had a ciggy hanging out of his mouth, and within seconds it was exactly as it had always been. He brought up the time his mum apparently saved my life when we were kids after I got stuck climbing through a window trying to break into my own house. Thirty-five years he has been holding onto that story, and apparently I am never being released from the debt.

“Remember when my mum saved your life?”

He told me I looked well, so I told him he was bald.

Nothing had changed.

And yet almost everything had.

We stood there for a few minutes fitting thirty-five years of friendship into a conversation beside somebody else’s hedge, then one of us said the thing people like us always say when we bump into each other.

“We’ll have to get everyone together soon.”

“Yeah, definitely.”

And I think we both knew there was a decent chance we wouldn’t.

I went off to collect my son and he went back to earning more money than Elon Musk.

That little conversation stayed with me, though, because maybe men don’t always lose their friends as they get older. At least not in the way we normally think about losing someone.

Sometimes we simply stop participating in the friendship.

We get married, children arrive, careers consume more of us than we expected and parents get older, sometimes disappearing altogether. Life quietly fills every available space and, because these people have always been there, we convince ourselves that they always will be.

Maybe that is how I can say completely honestly that some of these lads are among my closest friends while also admitting I couldn’t tell you what they did last Saturday.

There is something ridiculous about that, but also something quite beautiful.

Thirty-five years of stupid stories, weddings, funerals, football, holidays, children, terrible clothes, arguments, nights none of us can completely remember and jokes that would make absolutely no sense to anybody else.

The friendship doesn’t disappear simply because you stop seeing each other every week. It survives in all sorts of small places: the piss-taking, the occasional Facebook comment, someone remembering your dad, a new phone number appearing on your screen after you have apparently managed perfectly well without it for years.

Underneath all of that is the knowledge that if your phone rang at two in the morning and one of their names appeared on the screen, you would answer it.

No hesitation.

For years I think I would have said that was enough. Maybe that is just what friendship looks like after thirty-five years.

I’m not quite as convinced anymore.

Because sitting here thinking about all of them, and about how easily thirty-five years became a five-minute conversation beside somebody else’s hedge, I keep coming back to one thought.

The people you would call at two in the morning are probably worth calling every now and again at two in the afternoon.

Before you disappear...

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