" ... he discovers that his predicament is universal. Men have a friendship problem."
‘Our friends are curators and co-authors of our life stories. They have a voice in much of what we’re doing, in our characters and in many of the memories that we make together.’ So said Professor William Rawlings in a recent Radio 4 programme called To Absent Friends.
‘Absent friends’ would have been a good title for Max Dickins’s book, because it focuses on the fact that in Western society most 30-something men have vanishingly few close friends – just under half in a recent large-scale survey said they had no male friend with whom they could share their worries or seek advice. In the UK, three in four suicides are male. Suicide is the biggest cause of male death in the under-45 age group. Compared with women, men fare badly once involuntarily separated from a life partner. Three-quarters of the public funerals in Britain each year – roughly 4,000 – are for men.
But Dickins didn’t start from this end of the telescope, and nor is his book written in shades of black. Part autobiography; part dissertation and part comedy script, it hurtles through the lanes and byways of the strange and lonely world of (straight) men, asking the right questions, taking part in activities (think Louis Theroux) – and brimming with compassion and good humour. In the right hands, this book can spark conversations and change lives.
So much for the blurb. Billy No-Mates is a quest – a journey of discovery – and it begins with a problem. Dickins confides to his two (female) flatmates that he’s going to ask his long-term girlfriend (Naomi) if she’ll marry him. One of his cohabitees asks, ‘Tell us then – who are you thinking for best man?’
This becomes the blue touch paper for what follows. Working at glacial speed, Dickins writes down the names of (very few) candidates on Post-its and sticks them on his bedroom wall. Standing back and surveying his work, he describes his list as ‘a cemetery of friendships’ – and promptly Googles ‘Getting married – no best man’. To his astonishment (and to this reader’s), he discovers that his predicament is universal. Men have a friendship problem.
One of the academics he consults – an American psychologist – is very direct:
‘You don’t have any friends to call your best man because of the culture in which you were raised. It doesn’t have anything to do with who you are naturally. How you feel now is not the way you were born. What happened to you, Max? What specifically got in the way?’
This response comes down firmly on one side of the nature/nurture divide. But it isn’t the only view. Some evolutionary psychologists posit a genetic disposition, that men’s social isolation reflects a pre-historic division of labour (hunter-gatherer). Women looking after hearth and home; big butch men building alliances and killing creatures (and each other). The problem with this way of thinking is that it lets men off a shed-load of hooks (‘Can’t clean the bathroom darling, I’ve not got the right genes’). It’s also pretty depressing (kill me now).
Thankfully, that’s not the only game in town. Dickins discovers that pre-school boys are more emotionally expressive – both in range and intensity – than little girls. But once they start school (‘shades of the prison house’ and all that) they slowly but surely change: boys ‘start to behave like boys and girls start to behave like girls.’ And boys learn to stifle emotions: they stuff them away because tender feelings aren’t for public display. They start to invest in their future of isolation. Boys’ friendships grow thinner and noticeably cooler from the age of 16 and by the time they’re 30, many men are so caught up in the responsibilities of romantic relationships, family commitments and work, that old friendships wither and die.
This isn’t the same for women. Dickins reports on numerous studies that suggest women are better at maintaining (and deepening) their relationships. They have more freedom to acknowledge and express feelings without the risk of the usual male put-downs (‘Shut up you wuss’). They invest more time on keeping in touch; friendship is seen as a valuable component of who they are.
Taking stock of all this, Dickins is characteristically upfront: ‘Somewhere along the way I’d let work dominate my identity. I had let a vague notion of “my career” crowd out almost everything else. I was working all the time, often way past the point of being productive. I didn’t know who I was when I wasn’t working: I didn’t know what to do. Ambition was not just a healthy part of my ‘self’ – there was nothing else there at all. I wasn’t so much a human being, as a human doing.’
Many men will recognise themselves from Dickins’s account. They know that male response to experience is carefully policed; that expressing feelings can invite either an awkward silence or a move to shift a conversation onto something more congenial. Men keep the lock turned on each other’s lives.
But acknowledging a problem isn't the same as fixing it and in the second half of the book, armed with research findings and with a modicum of self-knowledge, Dickins starts to do some field work: society becomes his lab. Does he have the capacity to revive old friendships? Can he make new friends? What support is there out there?
To make new friends, a psychologist suggests that rowing might be a good place to start, yet when he arrives for his first session, he discovers that his co-rowers are all fifty-something women, which wasn’t really part of the plan. He joins a male choir (apparently a sure-fire way of making friends) and finds the experience powerfully satisfying. Attending a stag weekend is repulsive (for all the usual reasons) and organising a weekly five-a-side football match ends in failure. But he finds a men’s group rewarding.
Although he had gone to the group full of preconceptions – expecting that it would be run by ‘an old bloke known as White Falcon who would be wanging on about the rejuvenating power of eating tiger hearts’, it was nothing like that. It was a strictly no-banter zone: a place where men of all ages and ethnicities could discuss issues that concerned them. The watchword, Dickins writes, was ‘responsibility’. The men worked together to find solutions to problems ‘that men tend to push on to the women in their lives’ – the ‘emotional labour’ that is mysteriously absent from the obligations recited in conventional marriage ceremonies.
Although he goes on to recount other experiences (a day with a woman from RentAFriend; an absorbing interview with a man who peopled his house with sex dolls), the men’s group seems to offer a way to help attendees reconnect with buried bits of themselves. Kenny – the convenor of the group – says of men: ‘Showing off: we’re good at that, but showing up? That’s a new thing. A different sort of energy.’
Soooh, what did Dickins learn – and did he find a best man? To answer the last question first – yes, he did – but you’ll have to read the book to find out what happened on the great day (no spoilers). And as for learning, it is obvious that Dickins has the capacity for prolonged introspection and a powerful desire to fix what he regards as broken. He does the research and explores options but at the end of it all, the role models live within his domestic sphere. He writes of his flatmates: ‘It was how they showed up that was crucial. Unafraid to show emotion, nor to disclose information about themselves. Through their approach and example, the space that (they) created allowed me to express the full breadth of myself. To rediscover the bits of me that I had hidden until I couldn’t see myself any more. This was full-fat friendship.’
Billy No-Mates is published by Canongate.
More of Nick's reviews:
The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars by Paul Broks
The Antidote - Happiness for People who can't stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkmann
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