Out of the blue last fall, an acquaintance emailed me. “I want to start jogging, but I need someone to run with,” he wrote. I hadn’t run in years, but the possibility that jogging might lead to a friendship was enough for me to say yes.
Even before the pandemic frayed our social lives, Americans had fewer close friends than 30 years ago, a KFF study in 2018 showed. Another survey found adults were talking and relying on each other for support less often than in the past and feeling more left out.
And men in particular tend to face a harder time than women making and maintaining friendships, research suggests, and it appears to only be getting worse.
That decline in social connectivity has grown so severe that U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy in May sounded another alarm, declaring loneliness a public health threat as great as smoking, obesity and addiction.
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That link to health is among the findings of an ongoing major Harvard study on adult development and happiness that has found that people who are “socially fit” aren’t just happier but stay healthier and live longer.
“It’s analogous to physical fitness,” said Robert Waldinger, the director of the study and co-author of “The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.” “You don’t exercise today and say you’re done — I don’t ever have to do it again. People who had the strongest social connections were people who took care of those connections, who made it an active practice, working on and nurturing relationships.”
So with the nation’s covid-19 public health emergency officially ended, what does it look like to actively engage socially again? To reestablish a circle of friends?
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To find out, I went on a one-month quest, partly as a reporter, but also as a 71-year-old man who has few close friends. I listened to experts, trying my best to act on their advice, challenging as it sometimes was.
I grew up in California, moving with my future wife to the East Coast when we were both 28. We raised a daughter and two sons and planted roots in Hartford, Conn. Though I know a lot of people, I don’t have close friends, not the way my wife, Julia — who keeps up with friends from childhood, college, work and our kids’ school days — does, a fact that experts say underscores a common difference between how men and women treat friendships.
To begin my quest, I talked to David Klemanski, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine and a psychologist who does research on social anxiety and how mindfulness training may help people develop friendships. “With mindfulness, we’re teaching our brain to rein in all those extra thoughts and focus on what matters,” he said. “It’s a valuable tool for anyone who wants to cultivate a present moment focus without judgment.”
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For the month, I moved through my days focused on connecting to old friends, by email, phone and texting apps. I had rarely talked to or seen many of them over the past three years.
That first week I set up breakfast with Steven, one of those old friends I’d first met through other friends some 30 years ago.
“Coffee, two scrambled eggs, home fries, whole wheat toast,” I told the waitress, somehow remembering my typical order when Steven and I used to meet regularly some 15 years ago. We had seen each other a year ago, for the first time in 10 years, but not since then. I felt like I was using old muscles, excavating my memory to determine what to share: what our families were up to; his newfound woodworking passion as a retiree; how I was still trying to write part-time. We had a shared personal history. A month later, we were looking for another breakfast or lunch date.
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The next day, Rona texted me. My wife had recently had back surgery and Rona was checking in to see how things were going. She and her husband, Sam, had been good friends, but five years ago they’d both retired and moved from our Connecticut town to Manhattan. We’d had much less contact since.
Mindful of my quest, I called her instead of texting. We talked like we always had about our lives: how she was coping with her father’s death a few months earlier, helping her now-widowed mother, how she missed her old friends deeply but didn’t regret the move; how I was coping as my wife’s caregiver, cooking, doing laundry and daily chores that she does when she can bend, lift and twist.
I felt like we were back at Rona and Sam’s old kitchen table, sipping wine and sharing the stuff that shaped our days. I promised we’d find a date to visit them.
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On Friday, I took a run with Michael, the acquaintance who’d emailed me about a running partner. We had started to meet weekly after he’d emailed, jogging, walking and talking about our work lives and when or if to retire, our mutual joy, cooking, our adult kids, our spouses, and our religious lives, both of us engaged members at different synagogues.
Share this articleShare“Is he becoming a friend?” Julia asked one morning when I returned. We certainly had a lot in common, but the relationship hadn’t moved yet beyond the weekly runs. Were we becoming friends? “Maybe,” I answered.
That uncertainty underscored what Cynthia Post, a Silver Spring, Md., psychologist has seen in her nearly 30-year practice. “Men in general don’t feel particularly skillful in how to form friendships, how to maintain relationships, how to be honest and connected in a way that feels comfortable,” she said. That contrasts with many female relationships, “where there’s a lot more room for vulnerability,” she said, based on what she has seen among her patients.
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That’s an important point, Post said, because people tend to connect when they share their vulnerable feelings such as hurt, fear or sadness. Among her own patients, she said, “Men … tend to share protective feelings like frustration, anger, irritability, defensiveness, even guilt.”
In my second week, I took a walk with Jeff.
We had been part of a men’s group that for more than 25 years met monthly just to talk about what was going on in our lives. When the pandemic hit, the group disbanded. Jeff and I continued to go for walks, but usually only a few times a year. Prodded by my quest, I texted Jeff, and we agreed to meet for the first time in four months. We talked about our kids and how we can’t control their lives, our health issues and our respective spouses. We decided to try to get together more frequently.
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A few days later, I met Mitch for lunch. Another longtime friend, we had talked a couple years ago about a hike but never pulled it off. This time I proposed that long-delayed hike. A few days later, we met and hiked for more than two hours. And then we made plans to play pickle ball, a first for me. As I headed home, I felt almost giddy; suddenly my life was starting to feel more full of activity and connections.
But I also could see two challenges: developing and maintaining relationships had to be more than a one-month assignment, and this effort required commitment to scheduling and making time to see people in the flesh. Would I do that without the spur of a specific challenge? I wasn’t sure.
With a week left in my quest, I called two cousins and a childhood friend who all lived across the country. I hadn’t seen any of them since my dad’s funeral four years before. I was glad I’d reached out to them and they said they were, too. And again, each time I reconnected I felt a little surge of happiness.
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But I also was ready to find new people, although a bit nervous about that, too.
“To make new relationships,” Waldinger said, “volunteer or sign up for things you like to do. Doing them alongside other people is a very natural way to start conversations.” So, one morning, I joined a group from a synagogue I used to attend. The group walks around a community reservoir Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I’d read about them on Facebook months earlier but never acted on the information. I knew a few of the guys, but for whatever reason it didn’t feel like the right fit for me.
Klemanski had said to keep an open mind to where friendships might form, and not to discount intergenerational ones. Two days later, I joined a downtown running club that meets Tuesday evenings. I didn’t know a soul, which was a little daunting. As I walked toward the runners, mostly in their 30s, they were stretching, talking — and welcoming a few newcomers like myself. It turned out that after the run there is always a group dinner. “That’s when we really bond,” one woman said. I already had plans for that evening, but I promised I’d be back another Tuesday evening this summer for the entire event (my timidity notwithstanding).
As the month ended, I wondered how to keep it up. “For people you really want to stay close to, have a regular thing set up,” Waldinger said. He and his co-author, Marc Schulz, have had a call every Friday at noon for 25 years.
I asked him about the challenge of being real, about opening up.
“You send up trial balloons,” he said. “You see whether they change the subject or whether they share something that’s also personal. Some people will be happy to go there.” Others will just want to talk about yesterday’s baseball or basketball game, he said.
And this caveat: “Reaching out isn’t going to meet with enthusiastic responses every time,” he said. “It’s more like getting up to bat. You’re not going to hit the ball every time, but sometimes you are. And many people will be thrilled to hear from you or that you reached out or happy that you suggested a walk. Some people won’t, and that’s okay. You move on.”
Without the assignment to go find friends, I’m not sure I would have done the work — and at times it definitely felt like work. But I could feel my mood lift after my interactions and I think I’ve begun to feel more connected.
So for now, I’m determined to keep going.
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