Men and Friendship: We’ve Got a Problem
How to make friends as an adult man: six road-tested tactics.
Men have a friendship problem and it’s getting worse. In 2021, the Survey Center on American Life identified a male ‘friendship recession’: since 1990, the number of men reporting that they have no close friends has jumped from 3% to 15%. In the UK, a 2018 study by the male mental health charity the Movember Foundation suggested things are even worse: one in three men asked could not name a single close friend. These sorts of stats are not outliers either: for decades social scientists have found that men generally have fewer friends — and especially fewer close friends — than women.
Sadly, it’s a situation I know very well indeed. A couple of years ago, when I was planning on proposing to my girlfriend, I realised that I had no one to call on to be my Best Man.
Where have all my friends gone? I wondered. And what can I do about it?
I went in search for the answers, talking to world-leading experts and treating myself as a human guinea pig testing their recommendations. I wrote all about it in my book Billy No Mates.
If you recognise yourself in the grim statistics above, don’t worry — I’ve got your back. This is the playbook for maintaining and making friendships as an adult man. Read on for six simple, science-backed, road-tested tactics.
Start here
First up, we need to change the mindset that most undermines ‘grown ups’ in their friendships:
We assume that friendships should happen ‘naturally.’
After-all, that’s how things worked in our youth; when we existed in those glorious loops of friendship: school, university, the flat-share. But by the time we turn into the corridor of our thirties, we can’t rely on the same templates. If you wait for your friendships to just happen then that is a bad strategy — it’s going to take some initiative.
OK, that said, let’s dive into the numbers…
How many friends does one person need?
Whenever I do media appearances talking about Billy No Mates, I get tweets and emails from furious men bleating some version of:
‘I DON’T HAVE ANY FRIENDS AND I DON’T CARE!’
Or, ‘I ONLY HAVE ONE FRIEND — MY FRIEND GARETH — WE BREW BEER TOGETHER AND SEND LETTER BOMBS TO APPLE, AND I’M FINE!’
Ok, maybe that last one was mean, but you get my point: people get really irritated if you suggest that their penchant for solitude is somehow bad. Let me be super-clear: there is no ‘correct’ number of friends to have.
Loneliness is not an objective fact: it is a subjective feeling. Basically: are you happy with the level of social contact you have or not? What counts as a satisfying level will obviously be different for everybody.
Your personality type is relevant here. Dr Robin Dunbar is Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford and regarded as the Godfather of friendship research. His studies have shown that introverts and extroverts have very different strategies when it comes to their friendship circles.
As time is the limiting factor in our friendships — more on this in a moment — we make an inevitable trade-off between depth and breadth. Extroverts prefer to have lots of (often fairly shadow) friendships, while introverts focus all their time on a few much deeper bonds. Again, neither strategy is right or wrong: it’s all to do with your preferences.
So, we all have different social appetites, but what has now been proved by scientists — beyond reasonable doubt — is that we all need some friends. The health risks if we don’t are stark. Sociologist Robert Putnam summarises the research in the 2020 update of his classic Bowling Alone:
‘Over the last twenty years more than a dozen large scale studies […] in the United States, Scandinavia, and Japan have showed that people who are socially disconnected are between two and five times more likely to die from all causes, compared with matched individuals who have close ties with family, friends, and the community.’
He continues:
‘As a rough rule of thumb, if you belong to no group but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half.’
There are real stakes when it comes to making and maintaining friendships as an adult. So, with all that in mind, let’s talk tactics.
The Tools
1) Auden’s Razor
When I examined my own friendship problem, I realised that it wasn’t so much that I had no friends, it was more that we never saw each other anymore.
This perennial holding pattern is a common challenge in friendships, especially the male variety. And it happens because social interaction is contingent on leadership: whether it’s two friends trying to have a beer, or a group of guys wanting to get together and talk bollocks, someone has got to stick their neck out and make it happen. But blokes often don’t bother. Thus, these dormant friendships — the low hanging fruit of our social world — remain exactly that.
Social network scientists use the phrase ‘social broker’ to describe those people in a network who connect otherwise unconnected people or groups. Professionally, being someone who does this is closely linked with career success — especially in the start-up world. But it’s a phenomenon we see everywhere: think about the ‘social secretary’ you had on your college sports team, for example.
It happens more informally, too. Dr Marisa Franco — a psychologist and friendship expert — calls these folks ‘igniters.’ ‘I see it with my college students,’ she told me, ‘At the end of class, someone will say, “Anyone want to get lunch today?” Suddenly ten people put up their hand. Someone creates the infrastructure, then everyone benefits from it.’ People are desperate to socialise; they just need someone to go first.
A cynic might point toward a danger here, however: the potential for free riders. Social skinflints who benefit from everyone else’s initiative in the group and never return the favour. It can be demoralising to always be the one who steps forward. Yet, we can’t let this put us off.
Instead, we must think of it as an inevitable cost of doing social business. Something we must absorb into the bountiful profits generated from our friendships overall — from the friendships that would never have happened if we hadn’t gone first.
The poet W.H Auden had it right, I think:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
2) The Friendship Dashboard
At what point in your life, do you think you had the most friends?
The data suggests that our social world peaks in our late teens — early twenties and then shrinks from that point. This is true for both men and women, but the decline is more severe for men. So, what goes wrong?
Well, a few things, but the number one limiting factor in our friendships is time. And the time we spend with friends is something we can’t cheat: it’s a use it or lose it situation, although Robin Dunbar’s research suggests that our oldest friendships seem to be able to cope better with absence — but only because we’ve got an awful lot of credit in the bank.
So, time is crucial, but look what happens as we get older…
What this chart shows is something you have probably already experienced yourself. As we get deeper into our twenties (and beyond), all the big scary stuff arrives: our careers get more demanding, we often enter serious romantic relationships, many people have children.
Suddenly the amount of time we have available for our friends decreases — let alone the time for making new ones.
Given all of this, as we get older it seems we are faced with two choices:
1) Throw our hands up in the air and resign ourselves to our lonely fate. (i.e. let it become an excuse for doing nothing.) Or,
2) Ask ourselves a more empowering question…
Given time is scarce, what can I still do to make and maintain friends ANYWAY?
The short answer? Be organised. Here’s how….
Step One: The Fag Packet Audit
As cynical as it sounds, friendship in middle age is largely a management problem. Imagine a new CEO trying to turn around an ailing business. What are the key steps an effective executive would take? I’d venture the following:
- He would clarify the vision/objective for the business.
- He would make himself aware of how all the key resources in the business — time, energy, and so on — were currently being spent.
- He would set clear priorities for where these resources should be invested in the future, so that the business was more effective at meeting the defined objective.
- He would set-up a dashboard or on-going review process so that, moving forwards, he might measure performance against these key priorities and adjust course where necessary.
We can treat out social life in the same way. Now, I am not saying you should create some-sort of psychopathic CRM system for your friendships, (although some tech bros have tried). But I do suggest you get clear on the following:
- Who are your top 15 fifteen friends? Who would get into the top 5?
Jot down a list. No need to overthink it: trust your gut. This sort of audit is something we very rarely do in life and it can be an illuminating process.
- When was the last time you saw each of these people? Or sent them a message?
Could you arrange a meet-up with one right now?
- Who are you going to see less of, or stop seeing entirely, in order to focus on your key relationships?
You might also consider this more broadly: where could you make a little more time in your life?
Step Two: Understand that it’s not beers or nothing
Fellas: sometimes when we don’t have time to meet with friends, we ignore them totally. And this is a dangerous game because without contact, the friendship will gradually and imperceptibly decay. As Dunbar put it to me:
‘I always describe it like servicing a car. If you don’t service it, it will jam up and it won’t work.’
A simple tip that worked for me: whenever a friend crosses your mind — you see something in a shop that reminds you of them, say — send them a message and let them know. It doesn’t have to be gooey or intense, just check-in. Research shows we massively underestimate how much our friends appreciate it when we do.
Step Three: WhatsApp Zero
How many times have you sent a message to a bloke and have them ignore you?
They don’t mean anything by it — they’re just being crap — but it doesn’t feel good, nonetheless. Don’t be that guy: you’ve probably heard of Inbox Zero but try to get to WhatsApp Zero. Not necessarily everyday — you have a life — but once a week. This is very doable if you use the dead time we all have — sat on trains, in waiting rooms, watching the kettle boil — to clear your social to-do list.
Step Four: The Tent Peg Strategy
OK, this is the big one. One of the key reasons our friendships fall by the wayside as adults is that — despite the best of intentions - we get busy, lose mental bandwidth, and our friends cease to be front of mind. When this happens, the logistical admin that goes into managing our social life doesn’t get done and — lo-and-behold — we go months without seeing our mates. Eventually, life calms down for a moment, we finally meet-up and apologise to one another for the lack of contact. We promise to ‘do this again soon’… and then the same thing happens. The Sisyphean world of adult friendship.
The solution here is to organise recurring rituals or gatherings that mean you can meet-up regularly with friends without each having to re-invent the wheel every time.
For me this means fortnightly five-a-side football games. For others, it’s a regular poker night. My father-in-law has his monthly reunion with all his old football club mates in a local pub.
It’s more than the regular contact, it’s what this contact leads to. It creates social momentum: you hang out with someone who then invites you to their birthday drinks where you meet someone else who asks you to guest on their quiz team.
What existing celebrations (Christmas, Halloween etc) or rituals (birthdays etc) can you leverage?
What all of these tactics have in common is that they involve accepting our fallibility and building it into the process. As James Clear puts it in his monster-selling Atomic Habits:
‘We don’t rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems.’
We often think that ‘real’ friendship should be spontaneous. Good luck with that when you’ve got bums to wipe, client drinks to attend, and a paunch to get rid of.
3) Help Yourself Be Lucky
Why is it so hard to make friends as an adult?
It’s a question I kept returning to when I wrote Billy No Mates. As we just saw, time is a massive factor. But there’s also something else going on. If we think back to when friend making was easy — school, college, our early-twenties — what sort of environments were we hanging out in? They were places where we had repeated collisions with people, with whom we shared something in common.
We had what social psychologists refer to as propinquity: the social and psychological proximity to other people.
If you want to see the power of propinquity in action, take this study by Mady Segal, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland. She wanted to predict who from a group of police cadets would become friends. As Dr Marisa Franco summarises, she discovered the secret to friendship was last names:
‘Those cadets with last names that started with the same letter — say, Carlton and Cassidy — had a higher likelihood of becoming friends. It actually wasn’t about last names, per se, but rather the implications of last names. Cadets were seated alphabetically, and Carltons and Cassidys were likely to sit next to each other. When each cadet was asked to nominate someone else in the academy as a close friend, a whopping 90 percent of cadets listed someone they sat beside.’
We like to think we choose our friends carefully. That we scrutinise their character, explore their most deeply held values, marvel at their idiosyncratic sense of humour — it’s a miracle of syncing souls! It turns out it’s much more prosaic: we end up being friends with people who are near us a lot. Friendship is basically Stockholm Syndrome.
That was a joke. (Sort of.) But the broader takeaway here is that making friends is much closer to a science than we think — and we have much more control than we often admit. It’s about regularly putting yourself in locations and situations where friend making is more likely to happen. As the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg put it to me:
‘Generally speaking, we build relationships with people not because we wake up in the morning and say, “Today I’m going to get up and go make a friend.” Rather we build relationships in the context of doing things we enjoy.’
- So, what do you enjoy? Or, what hobby/skill do you want to try or learn? Where are groups of people gathering together to do, learn, or talk about these things?
Activities that have worked for me in this respect include joining my local CrossFit gym and taking improv classes. Yes: I’ve become an insufferable wanker, but by surrounding myself with other, like-minded wankers, I’ve also replenished my stock of friends.
4) Own It
In 2021 Saturday Night Live, the American comedy show, broadcast a sketch called ‘Manpark.’ A parody infomercial.
‘Man Park,’ goes the voice-over. ‘It’s like a dog park, but for guys in relationships, so they can make friends and have an outlet, besides their girlfriends and wives.’
On screen we see guys chucking a football around, bellowing Mr Brightside by the Killers, supping IPA, and barking the word Marvel at one another.
‘Which one’s yours?’ says one long-suffering spouse to another.
It’s funny because it’s true. As Professor Robin Dunbar explains:
‘Because men are socially lazy, what tends to happen is the wife ends up driving the social environment for the household. The guys end up becoming friends with the partners of their wives’ friends — because they’re there.’
Research consistently shows:
o Married men have better health and social lives than never married or divorced men .
o Unmarried men are generally more lonely than unmarried women. (As John Ratcliffe, a researcher at the Centre of Loneliness Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, puts it: ‘For men who don’t have a partner, loneliness can be particularly severe.’)
What these patterns show us is that men are often very reliant on women when it comes to building and maintaining their social lives.
While a man might share contacts in a friendship circle with his partner, he doesn’t really ‘own’ any of them — they belong to the relationship. So, if the relationship ends, he stands to lose not just an intimate partner but a social circle as well.
We see a similar phenomenon in the workplace: usually the other great source of friendships for men. Again, a man doesn’t ‘own’ these contacts either — if he moves jobs, the contacts don’t come with him.
To make our friendships more resilient we need to develop what social network scientists call ‘multi-plex ties.’ Simply put, we need to be connected to someone in more than one way. For example, you know your mate John because he is your wife’s friend’s husband — but you also play golf with him once a month etc.
- If you like someone at work, in the local pub or wherever, can you arrange to see them independently of that place? Can you find something else in common, beyond the context? Can you take responsibility for the relationship?
5) Avoid the WhatsApp Trap
Is it really true that we don’t have time for our friendships?
Earlier this year I downloaded AppBlocker onto my phone. It does exactly what you’d imagine: you select certain apps that you don’t want to be distracted by, and then it stops you from accessing them. When I opened AppBlocker for the first time, it presented me with a breakdown of how long I had spent on my phone in the previous seven days. It came to just over 23 hours.
I was shocked. But when I headed to Google to find out the average — on my phone, obviously — it turned out that I was actually doing pretty well: one report estimates the typical person spends 4.5 hours on their phone every day.
Of course, some of this time we spend with our devices is on social media platforms, interacting with friends. (Such as, liking a photo, commenting under an article we haven’t bothered to read, sharing a video we’ve found of a golden retriever, dressed as a bishop, administering Mass).
There’s nothing wrong with interacting with friends online, per se. Often, it’s the best we can hope for. A problem arises however, if that’s all the interaction we have with them.
Most of us don’t withdraw from real-life socialising entirely, we just do less. We labour under the illusion that friendships can be maintained if we use technology to keep the plates spinning. We get stuck in the WhatsApp trap.
- We need a (re)balancing act
Professor Jeffrey Hall, Director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at the University of Kansas, has a useful concept here: the social biome. Hall borrowed this metaphor from the world of biology, where ‘biome’ is used to refer to the unique ecosystem of various bacteria and other microbes that exists in our gut. And which, when in balance, keeps us in good digestive health.
Analogously, a person’s social biome is the ecosystem of relationships, conversations and interactions that they share with others over a given period of time. What Hall and his colleagues tried to work out was, on average, what balance of social interactions is optimal for our happiness?
They discovered that happy people have a mix of deeper social interactions with those who mean something to them, light chit chat with a rainbow of others (including on social media), and time to be alone.
Pretty obvious, you might think. Yet Hall’s metaphor is a useful one, deriving as it does from the idea that our social interactions, just like the food we eat, have ‘calories’ that can make us feel socially nourished — or not. And often our diet is not quite what it should be.
How often in the modern world do we get by with the sugar rush of social media? On the shallow conversations of a work Zoom call?
Hall’s study showed that the happiest people held more meaningful, deeper conversations with others 2.5 times more frequently than the least happy.
This is something I hear again and again from readers of Billy No Mates: it’s not that men feel friend-less, more that they feel friend-light. Not entirely socially starved, just getting by on fast food, longing for a richer feed. Which leads me onto perhaps the most important section in this article…
6) Have better conversations
My major theme so far has been that if you want to make and maintain friends as an adult, you’ve got to show initiative. Now, I want to take this one step further: having a bevy of mates isn’t enough: men also need to be intentional in forming a few intimate friendships, too.
This is the area where men typically do worse than women. Take that large study from the Survey Center on American Life that I quoted right at the start — the one that identified a male ‘friendship recession.’ It showed that women were twice as likely as men to receive emotional support from a friend (or to share something personal with them) over the span of a week.
We all know that not all friendships are created equal. We intuit that there is a difference between a stranger and an acquaintance, an acquaintance and a friend, and a friend and a close friend — but where those boundaries lie is muddy and disputed.
There is a school of thought that men define what a ‘close’ friendship is differently to women, and that — while they may appear on surveys to have less emotional intimacy in their friendships — this is not a pathology, simply a gendered preference.
‘Social style is very different between the genders and we pick that up in a number of respects,’ Professor Robin Dunbar told me, when we explored his research for my book.
‘Women have very personalised, intense friendships: their friendships tend to be focussed on the individual as the individual. So, who you are is more important than what you are, whereas for the boys it’s the reverse: what you are is more important than who you are.’
According to Dunbar men’s social world is much more club-like.
‘So, what qualifies you to be a friend is that you belong to the club, however that’s defined — it doesn’t really matter, it’s almost irrelevant. It could be the guys who play 5-a-side on a Saturday, the guys who go out for a beer on a Friday night, the guys that go canoeing, the guys that climb mountains. It’s almost always activity based in some form.’
You might recognise this phenomenon from your own social life: guys tend to bond around a third thing, whatever that may be: the sport on the TV, a pool table, fishing.
The question is, however: do men really want less intimacy in their friendships, or is it simply something we’ve got used to because that’s always been the only sort of male friendships on offer?
Here’s what we do know: having friends to confide in is important for our mental health. Scientists have found that of 106 factors that influence depression, having someone to confide in is the strongest preventor.
Then there’s loneliness, which scientists — including the late pioneer of social neuroscience John Cacioppo — have shown comes in many different flavours. We don’t have to go into all of them now, but what is clear is that, yes: to avoid feeling lonely we do need (some) people to hang out with, but we also need something else.
We need to feel like some of these people truly know us. We need to be witnessed and validated in our multiple dimensions. (And to feel that we truly know these people back, in the same way.)
‘The desire for intimacy is the desire to uncover the “real you” and the “real me,” so as to connect them,’ as the writer Ziyad Marar has put it.
Simply adding more friends to your social circle isn’t going to sate this desire. The only way to do it is to deepen a few of the friendships that you’ve already got.
And that process unavoidably begins with vulnerability.
Vulnerability is about revealing information about yourself — stories, experiences, feelings, thoughts — and particularly the stuff which carries emotional stakes.
So not: ‘Seriously it’s so boring being asked out by models all the time — I’m exhausted just thinking of new ways to say “no”.”
But: ‘My wife says that if I won’t go to couple’s counselling, she’s going to leave me.’
Vulnerability has a twin effect in friendships. First, by disclosing some of your self I get to know you better. Second, it gives me implicit permission to do the same.
Men can often find vulnerability difficult. ‘If you want vulnerability, then safety has to come first,’ psychologist Dr Marisa Franco explained to me. ‘Men [however] learn that vulnerability equals rejection or punishment.’
Think about how guys often respond to vulnerable talk: they make a joke, change the subject, or jump to suggesting a glib solution — cutting off the conversation in a different way. We can do better than that.
Vulnerability for Beginners
1) Go First
If we want our friends to ‘go there,’ then we are probably going to have to make the leap first. This can feel scary, but we can take solace in what psychologist’s dub ‘the beautiful mess’ effect. Studies suggest that we systemically overestimate the judgement we will receive when we are vulnerable. (When, actually, people often perceive us more positively; as honest, brave, and authentic.)
There are a couple of tactics that can make vulnerability less intimidating, however.
- Start small: as Marisa Franco has put it, ‘The next time you meet up with a friend, tell them something you are struggling with. That’s it.’ And then, when you’ve got some practice here…
- Raise the stakes: start sharing things that feel heftier or more squirm-inducing.
2) Be a Good Audience
How we respond to another person’s vulnerability will define if they feel safe sharing intimate information with us again — or if they reserve that privilege for somebody else.
- It begins with listening (and listening to understand, rather than merely respond.)
Try to patiently sit in the messiness of what is being said, actively curious, without forcing the situation into a simple mould. In a desperate rush for a conclusion, it is tempting to reach for a cliché. Or to flatten the complex truth under the weight of our assumptions about our friends.
As Ziyad Marar wisely writes, ‘[W]e need to be ready to be surprised by the people we think we know.’
- Another useful skill here: ask direct questions.
Men can be reluctant to do this. Despite some stereotypes, we aren’t emotional dunces: we often sense that something is ‘up’ with a friend, or that there is more to be said on some issue that they are skirting around. Yet, rather than calling it out, rather than pursuing the emotional nub of the issue, we can retreat to our comfort zone of talking about, well, anything else.
3) Watch the Context
If we want depth in our friendships, it isn’t purely a matter of learning how to ‘do’ vulnerability. It’s also about being with our friends in spaces where vulnerability would even be possible.
As Dunbar has shown, men generally prefer to socialise in groups, and while groups can have their own satisfying dynamic, the individuality of the composite members can become lost within it.
To solve this challenge, try to occasionally switch the contexts in which you see friends:
- Arrange one-on-one catchups away from the group, in spaces more conducive to talk — walks work really well for this.
- If you only ever see a friend in the context of a shared interest, activity or workplace, try and spend time together somewhere else — a café for example.
- If you generally see a friend in order to party together, arrange a meet-up that does not involve the consumption of drink or drugs.
End Here
The longest longitudinal study of adult life that’s ever been completed is the Harvard Study of Adult Development. It is the centre piece of one of the most viewed TED talks of all-time, by Robert Waldinger, the current director. Every year since 1938 Harvard researchers have followed the lives of 724 men, from cradle to grave. Recruited as either sophomores at the university or from the poorer areas surrounding Boston, the original cohort contained none other than future present John F. Kennedy. Many of the survivors are now in their 90s.
The researcher’s aim was to understand how the health and happiness of the participants changed as they got older, and what factors made the difference. In his TED talk, Waldinger explains that the study’s findings could not have been any clearer. The most important factor in people’s health and happiness is social connections. And it’s not just the number of our social relationships that matters, it’s their quality.
In the spring of 2010, the graduating class at Harvard Business School asked the legendary business professor, Clayton Christensen, to address them on how they could apply his management principles not to just in their careers — but in their personal lives. The Harvard Business Review article spawned by Christensen’s resulting lecture — How Will You Measure Your Life? — has become one of HBR’s most widely read.
‘[A] company’s strategy is determined by the types of initiatives the management invests in,’ he writes. ‘If a company’s resource allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emerges from it can be very different from what management intended. Because companies’ decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies short-change investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.’
According to Christensen, we are all vulnerable to the same mistake: ‘Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent, ultimately shape your life’s strategy.’
‘When people who have a high need for achievement… have an extra half-hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward.’
‘People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers — even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.’
I’d only change one thing in that last sentence: I’d add the word friends.
There are only 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 360 days in a year, and around 76 years in a life. Trade-offs are inevitable: we cannot do everything. The trade-offs we make tell the world what we value and who we are. There are thousands of worthy ways to live a life. You might be going all-in pursuing a dream, building a skill, or a business and have no time for relationships at the moment. That isn’t necessarily bad, if you get meaning from the choices you have made. It’s not a question of moral judgement, more one of self-awareness. Are you aware of the trade-offs you are making? Are you happy with them?
If the answer is ‘yes,’ then that’s great — good for you!
But if the answer is ‘no’ — and that is what I realised, when I was confronted with the consequences of my choices — then hopefully you’ve found some tactics here to help you change things.
I appreciate that loneliness can feel overwhelming in the modern world, which seems to make social interaction both as easy and as difficult as possible. Yet things can be simple.
Michael Pollan, the best-selling writer on food and nature, having spent years reviewing diet fads and health advice, managed to reduce healthy eating to just one sentence:
‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,’ he wrote.
Here’s my own version, for a healthy social diet:
‘Have friends. Some close. Refresh the stock.’
Good luck.
*
Max Dickins is a writer and a comedian. His funny and honest memoir about men and friendship, Billy No Mates, is out now in hardback, e-book and audio book. www.maxdickins.com
