A Set Night and a Computer Game. So Why Is That What Worked?
I have three layers of friends and have only recently been honest with myself about the first one. What saved the innermost layer was not effort or good intentions. It was a fixed slot in the week, and a game none of us will admit to in public.
Men are supposed to be bad at friendship. I am not going to argue with that, because most of the evidence in my own life supports it.
What I would add is that we are not bad at friendship exactly. We are bad at maintenance.
I Have Friends, and Then I Have Friends
There are three layers to it, and I have only lately been honest with myself about the first one.
The outer layer is everyone picked up over twenty-odd years of work — colleagues, clients, the people who were at the same stag dos and the same group events. I like them. When we meet it is good and the conversation is easy.
But I would not naturally pick up the phone to any of them, and I suspect a few think of me as more of a friend than I think of them. That is not a comfortable thing to write down. It is true, though, and I doubt I am unusual in it.
The middle layer is a small group I see regularly, mostly around something we both do. The shared activity is the excuse and the conversation is the point. These are people I would help without needing to be asked twice, and I know it runs the same way back.
The Few
Then there is the innermost layer, and there are not many in it.
These are people I have known for years and years. We can go months without speaking, sometimes considerably longer, and when we pick it up again it is as though the last conversation finished yesterday.
They are also the ones I could ring at three in the morning. No judgement, no explanation required. They know it works identically in the other direction.
That is the whole definition, as far as I am concerned. Not how often you speak — whether the line is open.
What Families and Distance Do
For a long stretch we very nearly lost it anyway.
Commitments arrived. Children for some of us, pets, partners, work that expanded to fill whatever it was given. Everyone ended up in a different part of the country. Nobody fell out and nobody stopped caring — the time simply went, absorbed by lives that were all perfectly good and all entirely separate.
That is how these things actually end. Not with a falling-out. With a gap that gets slightly longer each time.
A Set Time on a Set Day
What fixed it was embarrassingly simple.
A few years ago we agreed a time and a day, every week, and we have kept to it. It is a virtual meet-up, and what we do is play computer games.
I am aware of how that sounds. Grown men with jobs and responsibilities, logging on to play games on a school night.
It works because nothing depends on everybody turning up. If two of us are online, that is a session. Nobody has to organise it, nobody has to be persuaded and nobody has to find a window — the window is already there.
I Am the Worst Attender
I should be honest about my own record, which is the poorest in the group.
Work, the children, the sport. I miss more than I make. They know it and none of them holds it against me, which is its own kind of statement.
That is the other thing a fixed slot does. It takes the guilt out. Missing a week is not a failure to maintain a friendship, because the friendship is not resting on that week — it is on again in seven days.
The conversation ranges further than anyone would guess. Some nights we are into genuinely difficult personal territory. Some nights it is a straight group vent. Most nights, according to my wife, it sounds like a group of fourteen-year-olds talking absolute rubbish, with the jokes to match.
All three of those are load-bearing. I could not tell you which one matters most.
And Now We Turn Up in Person
More recently we have started meeting properly as well, every couple of months. A meal, the cinema, crazy golf. The activity has never been the point.
Different parts of the country, and we find the time.
I did not appreciate until fairly recently how much of a support network this is. It was never designed as one. Nobody proposed it, nobody named it, and if anyone had put it to us in those terms at the outset we would have taken the mickey out of them for a fortnight.
We arranged a game on a set night. The friendship carried on underneath it, which is the part none of us planned.