Male friendship is in crisis

Most of my women friends work hard to keep ancient friendships alive; the seasonal lunches, shopping trips and afternoon teas are observed as scrupulously as the feasts of the liturgical calendar. ‘Friends make all the difference in life,’ my mother used to say. In her late eighties, she would defy the wobbles of Parkinson’s and haul herself on to a bus for the all-important ‘Tea with Daisy’, inscribed with a shaky hand in her diary. My sister was the same. In September last year she marched her girlfriends off to Whitby for a week of what I assume was slightly manufactured jollity (she was dying of cancer), but you’d never tell from looking at the photographs.

I’ve never thought male friendships were so robust and now, after lockdown, I’m certain of it. But it didn’t seem that way when we were young. Alcohol was our bonding agent at university and that wasn’t hard to sustain when my mates slid into jobs in merchant banking, and I landed in Fleet Street with an American Psycho expense account. Gradually we built new friendship networks and assumed, with the naivety of young people, that we could just slot them into our old ones. Then there was a spate of disastrous ‘trial marriages’ – Home Counties gold-digger hooks up with posh boy, only to discover he’s penniless, that sort of thing – and fractures started appearing. We took sides. The happy marriages didn’t help, either: wives with young children banned overnight stays by 35-year-old freeloaders who didn’t realise the rules had changed since we were 19.

And so we settled into a pattern familiar to middle-aged men everywhere. We relied on bumping into each other at parties – only by this time there was an equal danger of bumping into someone you disliked, or one of those annoying oddballs who show up like clockwork in A Dance to the Music of Time.