Being a man comes with plenty of advantages that get discussed often. What gets discussed less is a specific, well-documented cost that’s grown sharply over the past three decades: a steep decline in how many close friends men actually have. The clearest data on this comes from the Survey Center on American Life, which ran a nationally representative survey in 2021 asking Americans directly about their friendships. The results, compared against similar data from 1990, showed a significant shift. In 1990, 55 percent of men said they had six or more close friends. By 2021, that number had fallen to 27 percent, roughly half. Even more strikingly, the share of men reporting they had no close friends at all rose from 3 percent to 15 percent, a fivefold increase. Among men who were both unmarried and not in a relationship, the situation was starker still, with roughly one in five reporting zero close friends.
The same survey found that men weren’t just seeing smaller numbers of friends, they were also getting less emotionally out of the friendships they did have. Women were substantially more likely than men to say they turned to friends for emotional support or talked about personal problems with them. The gap wasn’t in whether men had people around them so much as in how much they used those relationships for anything beyond shared activities. Researchers point to a fairly specific cultural pattern behind this: traits often coded as masculine ideals, self-reliance, stoicism, handling things independently, work reasonably well for getting through a single hard day, but they tend to work against the ongoing maintenance a friendship needs to survive across years, especially through transitions like moving for a job, having children, or a marriage ending, all of which are known to disproportionately shrink men’s social circles compared with women’s.
Why this matters goes beyond loneliness as an unpleasant feeling. A 2015 meta-analysis by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues, published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, pooled data from decades of research and found that social isolation, loneliness, and living alone were each independently associated with a meaningfully higher risk of early death, increasing the odds by roughly a quarter to a third depending on the specific measure. The review’s authors noted that the size of this risk was comparable to other well-established, medically taken-seriously risk factors for mortality. Friendship decline, in other words, isn’t simply a quality-of-life issue sitting off to the side of physical health. The research treats a thin social network as something closer to a health risk factor in its own right.
It’s worth being careful about how directly to connect these two bodies of research, though. The friendship survey measured how many close friends men report having, not their mortality risk directly, and the Holt-Lunstad meta-analysis pooled many different studies measuring isolation and loneliness in a variety of ways, not all of them focused specifically on close friendship counts or on men as a distinct group. The honest version of the connection is that these are two well-supported but separate findings that point in a consistent direction, not a single study proving that the exact decline in men’s friendships documented since 1990 is directly shortening lives by a specific amount. Establishing that precise causal chain would require research that, as far as the evidence currently available shows, hasn’t been done.
There’s also a reasonable question about how much of the decline reflects men actually being worse off versus reflecting a narrower definition of friendship that undercounts real, if less emotionally expressive, forms of male connection, workplace camaraderie, activity-based relationships, family closeness that doesn’t get labeled “friendship” in a survey. Researchers studying this take the question seriously rather than dismissing it, but the survey data on emotional support specifically, not just headcounts of friends, suggests the gap isn’t purely a matter of how the question was asked. Men in the same survey reported lower emotional engagement with the friends they did have, not just fewer of them.
None of this describes every man, and plenty of men maintain deep, sustaining friendships throughout their lives. But as a documented population-level trend, the shrinking of men’s close friendships over the past three decades is one of the more concrete, measurable ways that being a man in this particular era carries a specific, researched cost, one that isn’t really about toughness or resilience at all, but about a kind of connection that’s gotten harder to hold onto.