Treat Your Friendships Like Exercise

I have a group text with six guys. We send memes. We talk about nothing important. We share links and make dumb jokes.

And I think it keeps us sane.

I know some people would say that doesn't count. That real friendship means showing up in person. Sitting across from someone. Having deep conversations.

But I'm not going to dismiss what happens in those text threads. Those guys check in on me. I check in on them. It's a form of connection that I value.

That said, there's a bigger problem here. And a writer named Michael Mooney captured it well in Deseret Magazine.

The Silence Is Getting Louder

Men have fewer close friends than they did 30 years ago. Way fewer. The percentage of men with no close friends has jumped several times over since the early 1990s.

And the consequences are real. Men are nearly four times as likely as women to die by suicide. In Japan, researchers estimate over 600,000 men aged 40 to 64 have become extreme recluses. They call them hikikomori.

This didn't start with COVID. The pandemic made it worse. But the trend was already moving in a bad direction. The male friendship crisis has been building for decades.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023. That's not a headline. That's an official government advisory. Loneliness now carries the same health risk as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And men are disproportionately affected because they have fewer people to call when things get hard.

Why Men Go Silent

Part of it is cultural. Society celebrates emotional control in men. Being stoic is rewarded. Vulnerability is seen as weakness. Or at least that's what we're taught.

Part of it is technology. We have more ways to communicate than ever. But social media can create distance instead of connection. It's easy to scroll through someone's posts and feel like you're caught up. You're not. In-person connection is different on a biological level. Your brain responds differently when another person is actually in the room.

And part of it is just life. Work travel. Family obligations. Moving to a new city. Every transition is a chance to lose a friend you don't replace.

Mooney talks to a guy who retired after decades of service and suddenly had no one to talk to. His work friends were his only friends. And when the work stopped, so did the friendships. I hear this story all the time. Men lose friends at every major life transition and most of them don't rebuild.

I know that drop. When our family business sold, I went from a team of 70 people to nothing, overnight. Meetings, phone calls, everybody wanting my advice. Then silence. The bank account changed and nothing else did.

I'm not asking anyone to feel sorry about that. But it taught me something I hadn't seen before. Almost all of my contact with people was running through work. When the work stopped, the contact stopped with it.

Treat Friendship Like Exercise

Here's what stuck with me from Mooney's article. You have to treat friendship like exercise.

Mooney's comparison is the same one I use for hosting. Just like going to the gym, it's a muscle you can build.

Your first one is always the hardest. That's true of running, of a new sport, of anything worth repeating. My first party took me about four hours to put together. These days I can do one in an hour or two. Nothing about me changed. I just put in the reps.

It's a habit. It requires consistent practice. You can't do it once a year and expect results. You don't skip the gym for six months and wonder why you're out of shape.

Friendship is the same way. Schedule a monthly dinner. Set up a weekly game night. Or yes, keep that group text going. Small, regular touchpoints add up.

I think about my friend group text. It's not deep conversations about our feelings. But when someone posts less than usual, we notice. When someone's going through something, it comes out. Gradually. In the way guys tend to share things.

Building a Friendship Routine

Here's what an actual friendship routine looks like. I'm being specific on purpose because "be a better friend" is too vague to be useful.

Daily: Check in on your group chat. Send a link. React to something. Three seconds of engagement keeps the thread alive.

One more trick for the low-effort rung. I used to log people's half birthdays and wish them a happy half birthday. Everybody gets 25 messages on their actual birthday and they know most of them are automated. Nobody expects one six months later. I don't do it anymore, but it worked.

Weekly: Call one friend. Not text. Call. Even 10 minutes on the phone is better than a week of emoji reactions. Your voice carries emotional information that text doesn't.

Monthly: See someone in person. Dinner. A walk. A side-by-side activity like playing pool or going to a game. Put it on the calendar like you would a doctor's appointment.

Yearly: Plan a trip with friends. Even a weekend. Extended time together builds bonds faster than anything else. Research says it takes 40-60 hours to become casual friends. A three-day trip can cover that in one shot.

On cadence, here's the number I give people. Something every six weeks or so. If that's too much, once a quarter is plenty. I wrote The 2-Hour Cocktail Party around a formula you can actually repeat at that pace, and I keep a step-by-step version of it on this site.

The reason to care about cadence is compounding. One party is a nice night. A habit is a social life. Most people host once, get exhausted, and never do it again. That's the failure mode you're designing around.

What You Can Do

• Schedule it. Put a recurring hangout on your calendar. Monthly dinner. Weekly pickup game. Whatever works.
• Start a group text. I'm serious. Five or six guys who share an interest. Memes are fine. The point is staying connected between hangouts.
• Don't wait for the big moment. You don't need a crisis to reach out. Text a friend right now. Ask how they're doing. That's the exercise.
• Show up in person when you can. Text threads are good. A trip together is better. But don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
• Be honest when you're not OK. Someone in your group is probably waiting for permission to be real. Be the one who goes first.

The Small Stuff Counts

I don't want to pretend that a group text fixes the male loneliness crisis. It doesn't.

But I also don't want to dismiss it. Those daily messages from my friends matter to me. They're proof that someone is thinking about me. And I'm thinking about them.

Here's the part that gets me. Nobody teaches adults how to make new friends. So friendship turns into a game of attrition. People drop off as you get older, and replacing them gets harder every year.

So ask a different question. What changes if you become the person your friends meet people through? The super-connector in your town. That job is open and almost nobody applies.

Treat your friendships like exercise. Small reps, done consistently. That's how you stay in shape.

And just like exercise, the benefits compound. The first workout is the hardest. The first text to an old friend feels awkward. But after a month of consistent effort, it becomes natural. After a year, you can't imagine going without it. That's where you want to be.

The friendship recession is real. But nobody is stuck in it permanently. You just need to start moving.

(Related: Why Texting Your Friends Isn't Enough and The Friendship Recession: A Complete Guide)

Source: Michael J. Mooney, Deseret Magazine (April 2024)