In my opening post, I stated men need “GodBuddies” which are authentic and genuine friendships with two or three guys who help each other become better men. In this post, I describe the types of friends a man has over his lifetime and answer the question: How did I lose the good friends of my younger days?
Today, too many men have lost all their friendships. So we have to realize that friendships change over the course of our lifetime. Our childhood friends are much different than friends in our adult years. Our needs change, as do the needs of our friends. As we get older, we lose friendships at every stage of life. Here are the types of friends every man has throughout his lifetime.
Childhood Friends
As kids, we likely had multiple friends with whom we played baseball, kick-the-can, and did just about everything together. We went to the same elementary and middle schools. We built relationships with our neighbors and classmates. We made friends with members of the same Boy Scout troop or youth group at church. Then it was on to high school where we made some new friends. We competed with each other for a spot in the starting lineup and likely pursued the same girls for dates. We got into all kinds of trouble together. We outgrew our clothes fast and our friendships even faster.
Fraternity Brothers and Military Comrades
After high school, many of us go on to college or into the military and begin to find a new identity away from our parents. The values we’ve known since childhood turn into new responsibilities and new ideas about life. We learn some new things (both good and bad!) and make new friends with people of different ethnicities and backgrounds. We might join a fraternity at college or learn about brotherhood from others in our battalion. Both lead to family-like connections with other guys.
Relationships at this stage of life are considered friends of proximity. They are often short-lived and superficial since they frequently disband after graduation.
Young Adult Friends
After we graduated from college, we tried to keep in contact with the guys we just spent several years alongside each of in the dorm room or barracks. We started a new full-time job or moved back to our hometown or to a completely new part of the country. We learn new routines or return to old ones. The frequency of phone calls, emails, or texts with our high school, college or military friends becomes even less.
Activities are often the starting point for friendships at this stage but just hanging out together becomes more difficult in our new surroundings. The lack of time due to the increasing busyness of adulthood, minimizes opportunities to connect. We find a few softball or bowling or drinking pals or co-workers. But for the most part, those relationships also remain superficial.
Mid-life Friends as Couples
Once we are married, many of us enjoy getting together with other couples, most often arranged by our wife. Sometimes we find some commonality with the other husbands and our conversations quickly turn to sports, weather, and sometimes even politics. Rarely do we reveal anything about ourselves at this stage of life that the other guys could view as a struggle or a weakness. We’re still trying to fit into the culturally-induced masculine roles.
Eventually in mid-life, we may move out of the city and rent an apartment or buy a house in the suburbs. Our advancing careers begin to consume our time, we have children, and we settle into the great American dream. Life becomes so busy that we have no time for ourselves, much less any time for any friendships.
As couples, men tend to lose some of their freedom and are no longer able to hang out with their friends due to this change in lifestyle and added family duties. We find that the relationships with our best friends start to fade away. Our friendships become less of a priority.
Mature Life-stage Friends
During midlife, typically defined as ages 45-64, is when many teenagers start to avoid spending any amount of time around their parents. It’s also the time when men find a void in their schedules after attending sporting and school events for all those years. This means we have more time to work. So we do. We spend more free time in our proverbial “man-cave” and begin to isolate ourselves from the world to deal with our stress. We might get together with some of the guys to watch a game occasionally, but few of those relationships go any deeper than sports, weather, and politics.
Then in older adulthood, which typically starts around age 65, several other changes affect our friendships. Reduced family obligations after our children move out of the house, change our focus. Retirement increases our free time even more. Health limitations, and even death, also starts to reduce our existing friendships. Reduced mobility impedes our ability to meet with existing friends. Declining vigor reduces our motivation and energy to devote to making new friendships. With fewer and fewer friends, older men especially become even lonelier and spiral toward depression, often with sad outcomes.
Stress leads to Loneliness
As we move through life, many men begin to deal with the pressures of life by isolating themselves from everyone, including their family and any friends they have left. We go hide in our proverbial “man cave”! Men in particular resort to workaholism or addictive behaviors like over-eating, heavy drinking, doing drugs, gambling, or pornography. We become short-tempered and angry. These behaviors can lead to sadness, depression, and loneliness that are killing us physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
So what can you do about it?
We Need a GodBuddy
My belief is that throughout our adult years, all men— and I will go so far as to say all women, need to develop a few, very close friendships for support and encouragement through the ups and downs of marriages, raising children, job changes, and faith matters.
We all need “real” relationships when we are in crisis. These are friendships that can pull us up from the darkest of valleys and cheer for even our smallest accomplishments. These become our trusted confidant who is our sounding board for those really big decisions. These friends hold us accountable to a higher standard when we slip into behaviors that the world and TV commercials today suggest is the standard for manhood.
This type of friendship is that of a GodBuddy!
What do you feel contributes to the loss of our close friends? What is the effect of our loneliness?
Go ahead and comment below.
