Men make friends side-by-side.

Idle chit-chat is where connection starts.

Trust is built by participating in low stakes activities.

Smartphones distract us from making space for idle chat.

I’d be hard pressed to name a male friend of mine that I did not meet because of some sort of event. For most men, friendships are made when we’re doing something. We tend to need that framework in order to build enough trust to actually open up and talk about what’s on our minds. That’s the reason most men get emotional when drunk or after some sort of victory.

The thing is, it’s not the actual activity that’s the friend-making part. It’s far more simple and sometimes harder than that.

Why Most Friendship Advice Misses Men

Most friendship making and keeping advice are universal and genuinely useful. In 9 Proven Ways to Nurture Old and New Friendships, Susan Newman Ph.D., gives some fantastic advice about reducing fear of loss, providing safety, listening deeply, and prioritizing your friendships.

The gap that I see in all this advice, though, is in how friendships usually start between men. Everything that Dr. Newman mentions assumes that a certain level of trust and emotional availability already exists. For many men, trust and emotional availability come after an activity, since it's easier to gauge someone’s personality when there is a low stakes activity involved. This is also one of the differences between how men and women make friends.

Side-by-Side vs. Face-to-Face

The core difference between most men and women when it comes to making and keeping friends is how they go about it.

In his book Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships, University of Maryland researcher Geoffrey Greif argues that male friendships tend to be "shoulder to shoulder" rather than "eye to eye" — men bond while doing something together, not by sitting across from each other and talking about their feelings. To be clear, it’s not that men don’t want to talk about their feelings – that’s not the case at all. It’s just not what men lead with.

NYU developmental psychologist Niobe Way spent decades interviewing boys about their friendships. Her research, detailed in Deep Secrets and a recent Harvard EdCast interview, found that boys start out craving close connection — and then cultural pressure teaches them to shut it down. The capacity for friendship doesn't disappear. It gets suppressed and only finds its way back when it’s among highly trusted friends or during times of rest.

It's in times of rest surrounding activities, or the in-between, that idle chit chat transforms into real connections.

Why Men Need the In-Between

The in-between is the unstructured time that surrounds an activity. Things like the ride over, cleaning up after, breaks between innings, after the game beers, or driving the trash to the dump. It’s these low-stakes, low-pressure, and agenda-free times that create the place where the real talk sneaks in. The main thing that makes the in-between so special is that you’re not trying to connect – you’re filling the silence with who you are. Those moments start to accumulate and before you know it, you start opening up because the comfort and trust has been built.

The one other thing about the in-between is that it’s hard to replicate online. You need to be physically present and physically taking a break from an activity for the in-between to take place. Sure, online spaces can do some of that, but the In Real Life (IRL) aspect of it is critical, because it is when people are together that you can sense the level of comfort and anxiety between you.

How Modern Life Killed the In-Between

Nowadays, we are obsessed with our smartphones and hardly a minute seems to go by that we’re not scrolling to see what we missed. We’re so trained in this that any kind of downtime or awkward silence is replaced with the single thumb doom scroll on social media. That single habit has slowly killed the in-between.

So times like waiting before the game starts, cooling down after a workout, or even grabbing a drink after an event, have all been co-opted by the endless dopamine rush of the latest cat video meme.

Another factor that also plays a role is our avoidance of the unproductive look of lingering, especially in the US. The smartphone nicely fills the “unproductive” gap and makes us look busy. It also contributes to loneliness.

The U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on loneliness flagged the decline of what sociologist Ray Oldenburg famously called "third places" — the parks, bars, libraries, and gathering spots outside home and work where informal connection used to happen naturally. The advisory called rebuilding this kind of social infrastructure its first priority for reversing the loneliness epidemic.

While rebuilding it is essential, we do need to train ourselves away from always having to look at the shiny object in our pocket.

What Men Can Actually Do

Men need places where they can interact side-by-side so that the in-between moments arise naturally. Men need to work to reclaim these moments because it will help them build lasting friendships. Here are a few places where the in-between happens naturally:

Recreational sports leagues: Don’t just go to the game. Go to the bar after.

Martial arts: Lingering is built into the culture and it’s hard to have your phone around as well.

Volunteering: Work with a crew of like minded people. Resist the urge to do it solo.

Social events: Go to places where people are and phones are discouraged.

The thing to remember is that once you're in-between, the rest of the friendship advice — listen, reduce fear of loss, provide safety, etc. — will naturally happen.

Friendship Doesn’t Have to Be a Big Moment

Most male friendships rarely look like a meaningful conversation about life. What it normally looks like is two or three guys still in the parking lot after the game, talking about nothing in particular, not quite ready to leave.

That's it. That's the in-between. And that's where close male friendships start.

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