How male friendships can survive without the pub

Men aren’t staying in touch through lockdown like women – and it’s all evolution’s fault

Young men clinking glasses at a pub
Men need physical closeness and an 'endorphin rush' to bond - and the pub is the ideal place Credit: E+/AleksandarGeorgiev

The last time I saw my friends was August 2019, writes Simon Lewis. That feels like something you’d confess to a therapist. But are we that unusual? We’re old school friends, scattered around the country by jobs and family, so a beer every few months is perfectly normal and we never worried about missing one. Lockdown looked easy enough to ride out. You can always stay in touch by text, right?

Except we don’t. We only ever texted to arrange drinks. In the past year, we’ve tried a couple of times to “drink from home” by trading insults on WhatsApp and playing Guess How Much I Just Paid For This Carrot. (Surprisingly fun.) But could I tell you how my friends’ jobs, relationships or middle-aged ailments are going? No. Those are things I’ll find out when the pubs reopen some time in… crikey, May?  

My wife, meanwhile, has enjoyed the full support of a wide network of friends. For them, it’s like lockdown never happened. What is going on?

“Women maintain their social relationships by talking together and men do it by doing stuff together,” explains Robin Dunbar, emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University. “So when the emotional quality of a friendship begins to decline – which our research shows it does after about two months – women can get on the phone, on Facebook or WhatsApp and keep those friendships going. That has absolutely zero effect on boys.”

What bonds boys, Prof Dunbar says, is “banging heads together” – whether literally, on the sports field, or metaphorically in the verbal jousting of a night at the boozer. Physical proximity is absolutely crucial to this, which is slightly dismaying when your friends’ feet smell as bad as mine do.

“What creates friendship bonds is endorphins. Laughter in company floods the brain with them. The name is a contraction of endogenous morphine: they give you a sense of relaxation and bonhomie, that everything’s right with the world. But Zoom does not release these endorphins. Men need to be in the same physical space.”

Men arm-wrestle in a 19th-century inn
'The feeling of friendship,' said Samuel Johnson, 'is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef' Credit: www.bridgemanimages.com

This explains why the second and third rounds of drinks cause even gruff mates like mine to degenerate from handshakes to back-pats to full-on hugging. It’s not a side-effect, Professor Dunbar says – it’s the whole point. So much so that the content of the conversation is all but irrelevant. That would explain why, when I get back from the pub and my wife asks what we talked about, I have no idea. It also explains why men are happy to say nothing on a fishing or cycling trip. As long as there’s something to kick off those endorphins, bonding happens. 

In a year without pubs, then, and without sports clubs and the other places men slap each other on the back, what will happen to British men’s friendships? If those bonds begin to fray, and if Zoom and WhatsApp won’t repair them, what then?

The ONS estimates that one in five adults has experienced some form of depression during the pandemic, which is double the number in 2019. Men and women worry about the same things but, according to clinical psychologist Martin Seager, men are half as likely to seek help. 

“Men are on average less likely to directly communicate loneliness in words,” Seager says. “Because we tend to blame men for this and push them to talk more, some of the ways in which men express their distress and despair may get missed.”

Seager says even when men do seek help for mental health issues they are often pushed towards face-to-face counselling or therapy, which works less well. The ideal therapy, he says, is a task where men can talk alongside each other rather than face to face.

Men at a pub
'As long as there’s something to kick off those endorphins, bonding happens' Credit: RICHARD KALVAR/MAGNUM PHOTOS Source: MAGNUM PHOTOS

Kenny Mammarella-D’Cruz founded the MenSpeak therapy groups as a place for men to discuss things they couldn’t talk about – perhaps surprisingly – at the pub. Subjects include ageing, sexual problems and money worries. “Often men will say I don’t want to take this to my friendship group because I might lose them,” Mammarella-D’Cruz says. Talking in these groups is impersonal – but it seems to be what’s needed when it comes to these subjects. Which makes you wonder, are men’s friendships all that great? All this doing-not-discussing… was it bad for us all along?

Mammarella-D’Cruz says many of the men in his groups are discovering this: “One guy messaged his WhatsApp group to say, ‘I need more from you lot. We’re supposed to be closest friends but all we do is drink and take the p--- out of each other. That’s fine, but things are serious now and I need to talk about things like my marriage and money. I’m scared.’ 

“This was the biggest risk of his life, to lose all his closest friends,” Mammarella-D’Cruz says. “But each and every one of them said, ‘I really need to talk about that too.’ ” 

Perhaps men will use this year apart to re-evaluate their friendships. 

“Before lockdown, I’d never heard a man say, ‘I need company, I need to be touched by my friends,’” Mammarella-D’Cruz says. “We’re so much more aware now. It’s not like every night out is going to be a therapy session but we’ll do it knowing how important it is.”

“Our bonding is more subtle than its cretinous appearance suggests”

Tom Ough’s closest male friendships consist of sports, drinks and copious insults

Tom and friends
Tom, second right, with his friends (from left) Ed, Jack, Benedict and Francis, attending the Shetland Pony Grand National at the Kensington Olympia in December 2019 Credit: Romilly Tahany

When I read Prof Dunbar’s comments (see main feature) that women service their friendships by talking while men do it by banging heads together, I chuckled. What oafs! I, a modern man, find plenty of time for meaningful conversation among my various head-butting commitments.

Then again, a higher proportion of my friendships with women are conducted via messaging or calls, whereas a higher proportion of my friendships with men are conducted via activity-based group meetups. I’d normally see male friends to drink in pubs, play five-a-side, or go bouldering. Squash and weightlifting too.

In lockdown, what do we have left? Our WhatsApp group chats have names like “activity enthusiasts”. Now that those activities are off-limits, they consist largely of meme exchange, football chatter and raillery.

What these group chats rarely consist of is earnest discussion of our lives and feelings. This is sometimes true of individual meetups too: over the course of a recent run, my friend James and I, busy talking about football, somehow failed to disclose to one another that we’d both moved house. 

To my girlfriend, Helen, this is a horrifying state of affairs, but to me it’s neither abnormal nor undesirable. Even though it’s not often explicit, I know from experience that my male friends and I can rely on each other for emotional support.

These bonds are reinforced in more subtle ways than we sometimes imagine. Shared purpose engages emotions we rarely experience in front of screens. Played well, team sports require an exhilarating form of empathy. For pubgoers to achieve the optimal level of fraternal boisterousness requires them to have been psychologically in-tune for hours. 

Male bonding, then, is as mysterious as it is uplifting. Helen says the fulfilment she gets from long calls to female friends is as basic as the fulfilment she gets from water, but has she tried calling my school friend Arnie a knob?

I do not do it frivolously. While filling the vast tracts of sport and pub-free time opened up by lockdown, I’ve been reading The Elephant in the Brain, a book in which Kevin Simler and the economist Robin Hanson explain the hidden motives behind human behaviour. Benign public insults, like calling Arnie a knob multiple times in the pages of The Telegraph, or referring in the same passage to the small ears, beady eyes and large forehead of, respectively, my friends Jack, Benedict and Ed, are apparently displays of the strength of a relationship.

Some part of me already knew that, but it took lockdown for me to learn it. Something similar goes for the value I ascribe to the occasions when my male friends and I can meet in numbers. I’ve always valued these occasions highly, but I’ve felt it most strongly when deprived of them. 

Come the end of the restrictions, my highest social priority will be resuming group activities with those friends and others. And it can’t be just anyone holding a pint, as Prof Dunbar seems to suggest. They’ll call me sentimental for saying this, but if you swapped my friends for strangers I’d almost certainly tell the difference.

“We don’t share – we perform”

You’d look hard to find support in Simon Mills’s friendships – but he swears it’s there

Simon and Jeremy
Simon Mills (right), with friend Jeremy, says “exposing is losing”, but that his mates offer practical help in a crisis Credit: Getty Images Europe/Darren Gerrish

Recently, with my days confined to small rooms and an immediate social circle that includes just three people, all of whom are women, I have been craving male company. A glass of wine or two with a friend in my back garden. A brisk morning bike ride to a café in a group of four. A countryside walk that takes in an hour or so in a public house. A long lunch that turns into a spot of late-night carousing in Soho.

What do I miss most? The breeze-shooting and smart-alecking about politics, sport and the high/low cultural zeitgeist. The joyfully harmless holiday from responsibility. When my mates and I meet, we never talk about our wives, girlfriends or kids. There is no discussion of money worries, health concerns or careers. Exposing is losing. Banter is a barrier. Offloading, rude and boring. 

In our more confessional moments, the women in our lives will gently suggest that sharing a problem with our friends might help. After all, it seems to works for them. But we don’t share. Instead, we withhold and suppress and divert, nonchalantly underplaying moments of gravity or doom. The dull, conversational kapok of “catching up” (“so, what are you driving these days?”) is just not interesting. We prefer the external to internal, fibbing, fronting and performing, to keep us guarded and unexposed. How are you? I am good. Phew, that’s the awkward bit out of the way then.

Even an event as life-changingly cataclysmic as a divorce (mine, for instance) is passed off with a words of awkward condolence. Then, after a couple of months, never mentioned again. If all this sounds a bit, well, sad? Well yes, it is in a way. It is hard to be friends with a man like me, perhaps with any man, because he is largely unknowable. He has spent so long affecting an easy-going, unruffled affability among his peer group that he barely even knows himself.

But there are benefits. Your man friend might not be much of a shoulder to cry on when you are going through a break up, but he will offer you his sofa bed or the room over the garage if you need to get away for a while. He will also be there with a rental van and an extra pair of hands when you have to move out. And if you don’t see your flaky mate for a while, your first, post-hiatus meet up will be a seamless continuation of the last encounter. No formality or small talk. No pity, blame or complaint. This works.

Recently my friend Chris and his wife were discussing what they looked for in friends. Chris’s wife explained that she wanted a small but intimately connected circle of good listeners to be there during the hard times, offering a shoulder to cry on, ready for an hour-long phone conversation during a marital or child-based crisis, or available for an honest critique of a new Mytheresa purchase via a Zoom call.

She estimated to have around eight to 10 friends who qualified for this role. And Chris? His answer was more reductive. “What do I look for in a friend? I want to be able to sit down, have a beer and get into a long discussion about David Bowie’s ‘Berlin’ period.”

Chris, beer. Bowie, Berlin. I miss you, guys.

“Older men don’t do social media”

For Nick Harding and best friend Andrew there is no substitute for a beer and a place to sit – even if it’s a railway station bench

Nick and Andrew
Nick (right) met Andrew 25 and a half years ago – and is missing their monthly dinners and drinks Credit: Handout

Andrew and I met in the rubble of a collapsed office block in Surrey on August 1 1995. At the time we were both young journalists from rival organisations and had been sent to the scene to cover the story. After all the bodies had been recovered, we made a gentlemen’s agreement to share any information we came across in the following days and swapped numbers. It was a tragic backdrop to the start of a beautiful friendship.

We kept in contact and over the following years our paths crossed – over a pint – during the court cases and inquests we both covered for our news organisations. We ended up working on the same newspaper together for seven years and had some hilarious adventures. On one occasion, we were sent on assignment to Amsterdam with a medical physician to conduct an experiment comparing the effects of alcohol and cannabis. Andrew agreed to be the cannabis guinea pig and gamely attempted to match me pint for joint until the doctor intervened.

In the past two decades, rarely a month has gone by when we haven’t met up and enjoyed a few pints and a late dinner. It is a tradition as vital to me and my wellbeing as contact with family. The boozer is an integral part of this ritual and it must be just right: for men in their 50s and beyond, there are strict rules. No loud music, plenty of available, comfortable seating, congenial ambience and a selection of decent draught ales and craft beer. Before offices shut, we met in London at our favoured hostelry in the West End where there was always a seat. When homeworking became the rule, we met halfway between our homes in Guildford, Surrey, and began to scout for new locations. We never found one because lockdown made life a wretched no-pub zone. Now, after a year of sporadic meetings, I am yearning for a normal night of male camaraderie.

We have tried alternatives to the boozer. When rules about meeting outdoors were first relaxed last year we toyed with the idea of meeting for a bike ride in the Surrey Hills, but ended up having a man-picnic (sandwiches from M&S and cans of beer). There was something undignified about it; two older men, on a bench drinking alcohol.

The last time we met, back in late September, all the pubs had shut their doors by 9pm and we wandered from hostelry to hostelry, begging to be allowed in. We ended up in a Tesco convenience store buying a multipack of IPA to drink at the train station. 

Mainly, older men don’t do social phone calls, and we are not au fait with social media. So, while Andrew and I have kept in touch through text messages, emails and phone calls, none of these are substitutes for pub talk. My social life is on life support.

“Lockdown has changed us”

The novelty of online friendship wore off quickly for Michael Hogan, but the bonds remain

Jimi, Michael and Charlie
Michael Hogan, centre, whose friendship with Jimi (left) and Charlie is still solid Credit: Handout

Remember Lockdown 1 last spring? The original and best lockdown, before the weaker sequels diluted the franchise? Those were halcyon days of baking banana bread, doing jigsaws, Joe Wicks-ing and doorstep clapping. It was also an era of endless, enthusiastic Zooming. 

Me and my mates – a ragtag group gathered at school, university or work, through playing sport or playing music – would schedule weekly calls. We’d do pub quizzes, play daft games or just drink and talk nonsense. It all felt faintly futuristic. It was like going to the pub without the bar queue or unsteady walk home.

Yet as the months passed and further lockdowns followed, the gaps between Zooms grew longer. The novelty wore off. Sitting in front of a screen felt like work, not play. Besides, everyone had less to say. There was no news because nobody had been doing anything. There wasn’t even much sport to talk about – the last refuge of the blokey conversation. This makes me feel slightly sad and guilty but it doesn’t worry me. Because ebbs and flows are how men’s friendships often work.

Our bond has survived marriages and divorces, parenthood and bereavement, illness and stints abroad. Sometimes someone disappears into a demanding new job or full-on relationship. It’s almost always temporary. We always come back and pick right up where we left off.

Our 20s were about partying, with several raucous nights out each week. Our 30s were about stag dos and weddings, meaning we saw each other weekends-only. Our 40s were about parenting, so we caught up when we could. Many of us passed our half-century in lockdown so who knows what our 50s will hold? They’ll certainly involve lots of delayed celebrations. 

We used to play football every week and cricket when we could. As our legs slowed, waistlines thickened and we started losing every week (no fun), this downsized into occasional kickabouts or knockarounds. Playing was replaced by watching Premier League and Test matches. Advancing years and increased commitments gradually decreased these activities. Now lockdown has kiboshed them, although we have high hopes for a summer renaissance. 

Zoom calls might be intermittent but we still text and email regularly. In-jokes are exchanged and memories relived on social media. Our children have online gaming sessions together, which means we keep in touch to eye-roll about them. 

When all this pandemic peskiness is over and we emerge from our shrunken existences, it’ll be exciting to move into the next phase of friendship. Lockdown has changed us. Beards have been grown. Careers have changed lanes. New hobbies (home-brewing, chess, guitar, bedroom DJing) have been taken up. Two of my oldest mates have given up drinking, allegedly temporarily. We’ll be a year older, perhaps even slightly wiser, but still firm friends – and more appreciative of that now than ever.

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