How I made friends in my thirties

I have a new “note” in the The Hedgehog Review. I think it’s paywalled, but The Hedgehog is, for my actual money, one of the best little magazines out there, so you ought to subscribe. (Also, when I looked for the link just now I saw the outstanding Matt Dinan-themed Takis art for this piece, and it feels really great to be so well understood by The Hedgehog, which I’ve now been writing for for five years. It’s no exaggeration to say that I wouldn’t have a writing ‘career,’ such as it is, without The Hedgehog).

I called the piece “How I made friends in my thirties” when I submitted it, and I was trying to weave together the male loneliness phenomenon with the frequent observation about how difficult it is to make friends in your thirties. I was aiming for a sort of breeziness with the piece, and I hope it reads as light and conversational rather than scattered and unfocussed. I think the basic problem has to do with understanding what friendship is and how it is different from romantic love.

People read it as a sort of betrayal to imply that your spouse isn’t simply your “best friend.” Mine is, but we’re also married and thus the same reasons why I had no other friends put pressure on how I related to her not only as a spouse but as a friend. There’s this Austenian reading of idealized modern egalitarian marriage as Platonic eros + Aristotelian philia that many people think solves the problem. But I’ve been wondering if it doesn’t actually muddy the waters a bit. We might be at the point where we have to sort of wonder: what is friendship if it isn’t marriage or romantic love?

I landed on the apparent and actual superfluity of friendship as, in a way, the common root of the male loneliness problem and why it’s hard to make friends in your thirties. Friendship qua friendship does not respond to any specific need we can articulate. Nor does it make all that much sense as a priority given quite a few different versions of what the human self might be. But understanding that friendship arises between two basically autonomous individuals and creates not dependence per se (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) but a break from your own autonomy is where I landed. A friend is someone whose judgment you can borrow, whose taste you can defer, and upon whose reason you can rely. You begin from a position of basic self-sufficiency in friendship, but the second moment is the recognition of the limits of self-sufficiency that might be otherwise difficult or impossible to surmise.

So many of us in our thirties get good at a certain version of adult autonomy, which is good. And men, in particular, are taught that being a man is precisely to be autonomous in this way. I find it perverse that friendlessness is therefore shown to be an effect of men failing to flourish instead of one of its most important causes. A longer version of the essay might have looked a bit at the literature of friendship, the best contemporary examples of which sort of get at what I’m talking about it, I think. Anyway, I hope you’ll read it, enjoy it, share it, and talk about it. Even with me.