Pillar

Friendship & brotherhood

How to make friends as a man in your 40s and 50s is a real question, not a soft one. Most of us let the friendships go somewhere in the middle of life. Here is how to build them again as an adult - and why a room of other men matters more than you think.

Questions

How do you make friends as a man in your 40s or 50s?

You make them the way you did as a kid: through repeated, low-pressure contact around something - a sport, a class, a regular table, a men’s group. Proximity and repetition, not a grand plan, is what actually builds it.

Why is adult friendship so hard for men?

Because the built-in structures that used to make friends for us - school, early work, a shared social circle - fall away in midlife, and most men were never taught to build them deliberately. It gets easier once you treat it as a thing you do on purpose.