I Have Plenty of Mates, I Just Never Call Them

Men don’t have fewer friends than women. We just refuse to reach for the ones we have.

Image: Composite image created by the author with sourced photos and AI tooling (Source photos: Photo by Katarzyna Urbanek on Unsplash | Photo by hej_lian on Unsplash)

My mate — let’s call him Andy — had been going through it for about three months before I actually found out. His marriage had been falling apart. Quietly at first, then all at once, and I only heard about it via a mutual friend. Oddly enough, Andy’s name had been floating around in my mind for weeks. Guess I’d noticed the gap since we last spoke. I’d thought about him the way you think about booking a dentist appointment, my thumb hovering above his name on my phone on a few occasions whilst simultaneously looking for things to distract me from tapping it. So instead, I’d done the modern man’s version of reaching out, which is to post a golf meme into our shared WhatsApp and call that enough.

I didn’t ring him because I didn’t want to make it weird. I literally said that in my own head as justification. I don’t want to make it weird. What a genuinely spectacular reason to leave a mate drowning while you stand on the shore going, “Nah, too weird.”

If I’m honest, I was scared. Not of Andy, although he is kind of a big, intimidating dude. I was scared of the call — of the fact that if I rang and asked how he was actually going, there was a real chance he’d tell me.

There’s a version of the male loneliness crisis that makes us feel pretty good. It goes something like this: men have been structurally abandoned. The local pubs have closed. The footy club folded. We never had the coffee catch-up culture that women built; nobody taught us to be emotionally fluent. We’re lonely because the scaffolding was torn down around us.

I come across this version often. Sometimes it's on a podcast segment about men’s mental health. Other times, a government report with a stock photo of a bloke staring at a wall.

And it is a deeply satisfying story. “We’ll soldier on,” we tell ourselves, “despite the hardships thrust upon us.” It positions loneliness as weather — something that happened to us, beyond our control. It lets us be victims of a system, which is much more comfortable than accepting we could be architects of our own isolation.

And I’m no close follower of the men’s wellness industry, but a passing glance indicates they’ve decided the cure for our social atrophy is a cold plunge and a journaling habit. But I’m not sure.

A Pew Research Centre study from January 2025 threw a spanner into the comfortable narrative. Men, it turns out, don’t report having fewer close friends than women. They don’t report feeling lonely more often, either. We’ve got mates, the group chats, the lads we’d call if we got arrested. But compared to women we turn to those friends less often for genuine connection and emotional support.

Same number of friends. A lot less reaching.

This is the part that should embarrass me and every other man who’s ever scrolled through his contact list and felt sorry for himself. I’ve got a mate I’ve known twenty-five years. His number, his address, his wife’s name, his kid’s name, what footy team he supports. I could call him right now and he’d pick up. I have not called him in… it’s got to be years. If you asked me why, I’d definitely give you a reason. Just probably not a very good one.

Quite a few not-very-good reasons spring to mind, and none of them are flattering, so let’s just go through them.

The first is reciprocity debt. If I call Andy and have the actual conversation, I’ve created an obligation. He’ll feel like he has to check in on me. Therefore, I’ve made myself someone who needs checking in on. Why would I need that? I’ve got my shit together, I don’t need no one checking in on me. It’s an emotional transaction that costs more than I’ve budgeted for, so it's better not to be owed anything — which means staying invisible, which means another month goes by.

The second is the fear of being the needy one. Somewhere along the way, most of us learned that need is unattractive. That the man who calls his mate to say “I’m having a rough one” has failed a test of self-sufficiency. He’s soft. So we don’t call. We perform ‘okayness’. We get very, very good at it.

The third is that we’ve dressed the avoidance up as a virtue. We call it being low-maintenance. We call it respecting people’s time. We say “I don’t need much” and mean it as a point of pride — but what we’re describing is a practised refusal to let anyone see inside. I guess it is low-maintenance but in the same way a garden can be low maintenance, which is to say nobody comes along much to give it attention. That’s absence disguised as maintenance.

But I don’t want to be too harsh because not all of this is purely male hopelessness.

Some of it is genuine consideration and respect for people’s time. Everyone’s busy. They’ve got kids, ageing parents, weekend sports, a boss who doesn’t understand boundaries and other situations of their own doing. Me calling a mate at 8pm on a Tuesday to offload is noise he doesn’t need. The “just be vulnerable, bro” complex that’s sprung up around men’s mental health, the retreats and podcasts where men sit in a circle and talk about their fathers, I find that a bit repellent and just a little narcissistic, too. Not because vulnerability is wrong — I’ve written a bunch about vulnerability, particularly in the workplace — but because it feels performative and has nothing to do with real friendship.

So yes. Sometimes not calling is kindness. Sometimes the right thing is to let a man eat dinner in peace. We should give ourselves that.

But only if we also acknowledge there’s a difference between “I won’t dump my problems on him at a bad moment” and “I will never, under any circumstances, let him know I need him.” The first is considerate. The second is a slow way of cutting yourself off from everyone who gives a shit about you while kidding yourself about being polite.

I know the difference because I’ve been on both sides. I’ve been the mate who got the call too late, who found out a friend was falling apart weeks after it started, and the first thing I thought, before sadness or sympathy, was, why didn’t you call me, you idiot. Why did you sit on that by yourself? But then I’ve had hard times — an illness diagnosis some years back comes to mind— where I did the exact same thing to everyone else.

Here’s what having lots of friends but limited connection can look like: It’s a Wednesday night where you could name fifteen people who’d be glad to hear from you, and you scroll through their names like a menu at a restaurant you’re not hungry enough to order from. It’s a group chat that runs hot all day, memes and sports score predictions and someone’s kid doing something funny, and the one time someone types “rough week tbh” the chat goes quiet for forty minutes before someone sends a thumbs up and changes the subject. It’s “we should grab a beer”, said thirty times by both parties over two years until the phrase loses all meaning and becomes a greeting card, a way of saying “I acknowledge that we are friends.”

The cost isn’t just to you (though it is to you). It’s to the mate going through the thing, whose dog photo you liked and moved past. He’s sitting there with the same man-wiring, telling himself the same lies. He doesn’t want to bother anyone either. And the two of you are going to orbit each other for months, each waiting for the other to crack, and neither of you will, because you’ve both been trained to treat the reaching as weakness and the silence as strength.

I don’t have a five-step framework. No app recommendation or journaling prompt. What I have is the thing that worked with Andy, once, and it was stupidly small.

I sent him one text. It was awkward and not quite worded right. “Hey mate, I’ve been thinking about you. Hope things are better. You wanna chat or be left alone?” He replied and said thanks but he was just needing some space. So I left him alone.

A few days later I texted him a photo of a pelican. No caption. He replied with three laughing emojis and “you right mate?” I said “yeah just thought you’d like a pelican.” He gave a thumbs up, which I took to mean that he did.

That was it — the whole intervention. A pelican on a Wednesday morning. But underneath it, I’d reached and he’d reached back, and for about ten seconds neither of us was pretending we didn’t need people. He knew I knew he was struggling. I knew he knew I’d noticed. Neither of us had to sit in a circle and pass around a talking stick. We just had to stop pretending the contact wasn’t worth making.

The awkwardness is the point. If it were comfortable, you’d already be doing it. The weird, tentative, slightly-too-late message is doing all the work of telling someone they crossed your mind, and that you acted on it and those two things together are rarer than they should be.

So, who is your Andy?

You know who it is. There’s a name already surfacing of someone you’ve been not-calling. Someone whose situation you know about secondhand, or whose silence you’ve noticed without answering, or who you miss in a vague, unexamined way you haven’t done anything about.

You’ve got your reasons, and they’re the same as mine, and they’re all reasonable, and they’re all, in the end, just the sound of a man avoiding connection.

But stuff all that. Bother them.

Not later. Today. Send the text. Ring and leave a voicemail if that’s easier but not with a plan or a vulnerability performance. It’s OK if it’s short and slightly imperfect. Don’t overthink the wording and ignore the urge to delete it because it sounds weird. Send it anyway. Celebrate the weird. I sent a picture of a fucking pelican, after all.