2.5M men 'have no close friends'

I&#x27;m in this boat right now as a 22 year old junior in college. I honestly don&#x27;t have anyone I can call to just chill. I go to movies alone, I eat at restaurants alone, I go to concerts alone, most things I do I do alone. It makes me sad to think that this point in my life is supposed to be a high water mark for having a social life, and I shudder to imagine how much lonelier things are going to be after college graduation.<p>For the most part I&#x27;ve made peace with loneliness and being by myself to the point that it&#x27;s not crushing, but the emptiness of not having anyone close is always there. I think the problem - or at least my problem - isn&#x27;t necessarily a lack of basic social or people skills, but an inability to escalate from casual acquaintance to close friend.<p>Sorry for the stream of consciousness post. I guess I just wanted to say that I relate to this article, and I don&#x27;t know how to fix myself.

My wife and I have this conversation a lot. I have a bazillion acquaintances and only a few people I consider close friends. She has a much broader group of friends.<p>I&#x27;ve identified that one of the characteristic of women interacting is a asking questions in an unprompted sort of way. Something I consider to be &quot;prying&quot;, and yet it opens up other conversations which deepen the relationship.<p>My current position is that I was never exposed to good role models for building relationships with other men, and childhood homophobic sorts of taunts actually sensitized me to a notion of being &quot;too close&quot; to someone. While my wife has no trouble at all saying &quot;love you&quot; to her friends, my early programming makes that really hard for me with my male friends.<p>The process of building friendships is a process of developing trust and vulnerability, something which is hard to do outside of shared life threatening experiences. At some level in my younger days I always felt I was in competition with the other men around me. How do you make yourself vulnerable to your competitor? You don&#x27;t of course. To get past that I&#x27;ve had to reassess a really large chunk of the structure in my brain about evaluating my own success and understanding whether or not I was under or over performing on my internal metrics of success.<p>Bottom line for me is that unpacking all the threads that were hindering my ability to make close friendships walked me back to kindergarten. That is a lot of unpacking to do :-)

Note: that headline number seems absurdly low, because it is only counting British men.

I&#x27;m 50 and have no close friends. I haven&#x27;t for at least a decade. I am married so I&#x27;m not a recluse but I don&#x27;t have a buddy.

I strongly encourage others to read &quot;How to Win Friends and Influence People.&quot;