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Comment by deodar | Hacker News Reader

I always saw men in my father's generation (he was born in the 1940s) have many close friends that would get together regularly. These close and decades old friendships are especially critical now that he's retired. Without them, he'd be completely isolated.

A significant percentage of men not having any close friends feels like a recent development in the last 1-2 generations.

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Going by the stories I’ve heard from my dad and uncles, they all had lots of male friends and drinking buddies, guys they knew from the union, the bowling league, the VFW, the Lions Club, etc. All those institutions that have either completely collapsed or become irrelevant for young people in America. I don’t think any of those guys went to church much.

The take that GP is expressing feels like a very post 1980s thing.

I wonder how much of it is men having to move more for work than in the past. Easier to stay in contact with your highschool friends if you can all find good jobs in your hometown. If that friend group overlaps with the bowling league and the union, so much the better. Much harder to join a bowling league and make friends from scratch with no pre existing connections to the social fabric.

>Going by the stories I’ve heard from my dad and uncles, they all had lots of male friends and drinking buddies, guys they knew from the union, the bowling league, the VFW, the Lions Club, etc. All those institutions that have either completely collapsed or become irrelevant for young people in America.

None of those friends and support groups would be "close" friends per TFA's definition because they weren't acting in the quasi-therapist role that the author apparently thinks is required of "close" friends. Yet clearly those relationships filled the need.

You need people like yourself to be a community with, and we're all too fragmented now. Men needed friends as a foil for family responsibilities, and now that the ideal of the nuclear family has been cancelled over the last couple of decades, men don't have any use for friends anymore.

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