Maybe I’ve been overthinking it, or maybe it’s been our recent move, but lately, I’ve really been feeling like I need to spend more time trying to make friends.
My best buddies aren’t anywhere close to me, and there is only so much Xbox Live I can play with the homies online before my eyes cross. In other words, I need to find a way to make more local friends, and I even wrote it down as a goal for 2025, no matter how sad that might seem. Middle-aged Dads know what I’m talkin’ about here. It’s easy to get a bit lonely if you aren’t careful.
This “needing friends” feeling has been simmering since before we moved to Scotland, and since we’ve moved back to the States, I find myself in a perpetual “work-family-grocery store” cycle with seemingly no time for doing cool shit that doesn’t involve my kids.
As is so eloquently stated in We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends by Billy Baker, “Men need somewhere to go, something to do, and someone to talk to.”
Amen.
Billy writes how “Men need an activity to bond. This finding is supported in study after study, or from pulling your head out of your ass and simply looking around. […] men make their deepest friendships through periods of intense engagement, such as sports or military service or school.”
Having an activity is key, and what that activity is doesn’t really matter. Just playing or watching or working on something together, anything, is enough. It’s not only enough; it’s perfect because “an unmistakable distinction between men and women is that women talk face-to-face, men talk shoulder-to-shoulder.”
Still finding those people to go shoulder-to-shoulder with as an adult is hard because of all the scheduling challenges and busyness we adults surround ourselves with. When we get busy, it’s not work or family that tends to suffer, it’s friendships.
I guess it all boils down to who and what you prioritize and being able to counter balance it all.
One of my favorite snippets from the book goes something like this:
“All friendships are really accidents of proximity. The only friends that aren’t are called “family, and you don’t have a choice there. Friends are the family you choose, and we can only choose from the people who are in proximity.”
That’s as good a place to start as any. Time to get out of the house, create some proximity to others and say hi. Should-to-shoulder, of course.
Comments welcome!