How to Make Friends as an Adult Man: Start Side by Side

If you are searching for how to make friends as an adult man, you are not alone, and the problem is not you. Most men do not build friendships by sitting across from someone and talking. They build them by doing something next to someone, repeatedly, until the talking happens on its own. A game table is one of the best places to do that, and this article explains why and how.

Why is it so hard for men to make friends after 30?

The numbers are stark. The Survey Center on American Life found that the share of men reporting no close friends rose from 3 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2021. Men were also far less likely than women to say they had received emotional support from a friend in the past week: 21 percent of men versus 41 percent of women.

The causes are not mysterious. School and early jobs supply friends for free: same room, same schedule, same problems. Then careers scatter, marriages and kids absorb evenings, and the structures that made friendship automatic disappear. Nobody replaces them.

There is a second layer that is specific to men. Many men were raised to see asking for connection as a kind of weakness. “Want to grab coffee and catch up?” feels like a confession. So they wait for an invitation that the other man is also waiting for.

Dr. Vivek Murthy’s 2023 Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness named this as a health problem, not a social one. The advisory put the mortality risk of lacking social connection on par with smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and above the risk from obesity or physical inactivity. For men, who already die earlier on average, that is not a small thing.

How do men actually form friendships?

Researchers who study friendship have noticed a pattern for decades. Women’s friendships tend to be face to face: talking, sharing, processing. Men’s friendships tend to be side by side: a shared task, a shared enemy, a shared project. Geoffrey Greif, a social work professor who interviewed hundreds of men for his book Buddy System, called these “shoulder-to-shoulder” friendships.

This is not a deficiency. It is a different route to the same place. Men who fish together, lift together, or fix cars together end up knowing each other deeply. The activity gives them permission to be in the same space for hours, and the talk fills in around the edges.

The problem is that most of the traditional side-by-side activities have gotten harder to access. Pickup basketball needs knees. Hunting needs land and gear. Volunteer fire departments and union halls and bowling leagues have thinned out. Robert Putnam documented the collapse of exactly these institutions in Bowling Alone more than 20 years ago, and it has not reversed.

What is left needs to be cheap, indoors, available on a weeknight, and not dependent on being fit. That is a short list, and board games are near the top of it.

Why is a game table the ideal on-ramp?

A game night solves the specific problems men run into when trying to make friends. Here is how.

It gives you a reason to ask. “Want to come over Thursday? A few of us are playing Catan” is an invitation to a thing, not a request for intimacy. The other person can say yes without either of you acknowledging that you are lonely.

It gives you somewhere to look. Eye contact is hard. A board between you is a relief. You are studying the map in Ticket to Ride, not each other’s faces. Conversation that happens while your hands are busy feels safer.

It gives you a shared enemy. Cooperative games like Pandemic or The Crew put everyone on one side against the game. Nothing bonds men faster than a common problem. You will remember the night you barely cured the fourth disease long after you forget what you talked about.

It makes repetition natural. Friendship needs many hours, and research by Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas suggests it takes more than 200 hours of time together to turn an acquaintance into a close friend. A game night that recurs every other week banks those hours without anyone having to plan a new activity each time.

It permits competition and warmth at once. Men often show affection through trash talk. A game is the one setting where that is the expected register. You can tell your friend his trade was idiotic and both of you will be smiling.

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What games work for a group of men who barely know each other?

Pick games where the rules are light and the table talk is heavy. Avoid anything that needs a 40-minute teach on the first night. Some reliable picks:

• Codenames. Two teams, one-word clues. You learn how each person’s brain works within ten minutes.
• The Crew. A cooperative trick-taking game. Quiet, tense, and over in 20 minutes. Perfect for men who do not want to talk much yet.
• Catan. Trading forces negotiation. Negotiation forces conversation.
• Wavelength. Guess where a teammate placed a dial between two extremes. It is a personality test disguised as a party game.
• Skull. Bluffing with four coasters. Costs almost nothing and runs on nerve.
• Pandemic. The classic co-op. Shared failure, shared victory.

Save the long campaigns like Gloomhaven or a Dungeons & Dragons group for later. Those are extraordinary friendship engines, but they require a group that already shows up. Build the habit with short games first. We cover the mechanics of a group that lasts in this guide to standing game nights.

How do you make the first move?

This is where most men stall. A few concrete steps:

1. Pick two names. A coworker you like. A neighbor. The other dad at practice. You do not need a crowd. Three people is a full game.
2. Name the day and the game. “Thursday, 7 pm, my place, we’re playing Codenames.” Specific invitations get accepted. Vague ones get a thumbs-up emoji and nothing else.
3. Keep food simple. Pizza and whatever is in the fridge. Hosting is not the point.
4. Set the next date before anyone leaves. This is the most important step. Momentum dies between sessions. Lock the next one while everyone is still laughing.
5. Expect a slow start. The first night is a little stiff. By the fourth, someone will mention his dad’s health or his job frustration between turns. That is the shoulder-to-shoulder mechanism working.

If you do not have two names, go where the tables already are. Libraries, game stores, and cafés run open play nights. Showing up alone to one of those is uncomfortable for about 15 minutes and then it is not. If you have recently moved, we wrote about that specific situation.

What changes after a year of this?

Men who keep a standing game night for a year tend to describe the same shift. The game becomes almost secondary. Someone misses a week and gets a text asking if he is okay. Someone’s marriage gets rocky and he says so, over a losing hand, to three men who have become his people.

That is the goal. It is also why the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has tracked men’s lives since 1938, concludes that close relationships predict long, happy lives better than social class, IQ, or genes. Not money, not career, not fitness. Relationships.

You do not have to become a different kind of man to get there. You just have to sit next to someone and play.

For the full method, whoever you are and wherever you live, see our guide on how to make friends as an adult.

FAQ

How do adult men make friends if they are introverted?

Choose structured activities with built-in silence, like cooperative board games, where you can participate without constant talking. Introverts often do better at a game table than at a bar because the game carries the conversation.

Is it normal to have no close friends as a man in your 30s or 40s?

It is common, with about one in seven men reporting no close friends, but common is not the same as healthy. It is also very fixable with a recurring activity and two or three names.

What is a shoulder-to-shoulder friendship?

It is a friendship built through a shared activity rather than direct conversation. Men tend to bond this way, and the talk develops naturally once the activity is a habit.

How long does it take to make a real friend as an adult?

Research suggests roughly 50 hours of time together to move from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 hours to become friends, and more than 200 hours for a close friend. A biweekly game night gets you there in about a year.

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The Ludarium exists to make the first move easier. The newsletter sends new pieces on getting people to a table and keeping them there, and it is the first place we will announce the Indianapolis lounge. Subscribe at theludarium.com.

The game is the reason. The people are the point.

Sources

• American Men Suffer a Friendship Recession (Survey Center on American Life, 2021)
• The State of American Friendship (Survey Center on American Life, 2021)
• Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation (U.S. Surgeon General, 2023)
• Study reveals number of hours it takes to make a friend (University of Kansas, 2018)
• Good genes are nice, but joy is better (Harvard Gazette, 2017)