Back in March 2020, John Mulaney told a joke during his SNL monologue that I still think about all the time. âMy dad has no friends, and your dad has no friends,â he quipped. âIf you think your dad has friends, youâre wrong. Your mom has friends, and they have husbands. Those are not your dadâs friends.â A typically sniper-precise Mulaney observation, and about as succinct a synopsis of the male loneliness crisis as youâre ever likely to hear.
That bit was especially top of mind a few weeks ago, when my wife Sumer told me she was planning to host a girlsâ night at our place that Friday and Iâd need to make myself scarce for a few hours. At first, this felt like a sublime opportunity to revisit some of my single-guy pastimes of yore: dining solo at the bar of some fancy restaurant, optimistically toting a book along before spending the entire meal watching NBA highlights on my phone; going to see the most brain-dead action movie possible, blowing the GDP of a small island nation on candy, and taking bathroom breaks during the boring parts to watch NBA highlights on my phone; aimlessly strolling the streets of Manhattan while watching NBA highlights on my phone.
Then I realized that Sumerâs friends all being preoccupied on a Friday evening meant that their husbands were probably also gearing up for solitary, Anthony-Edwards-dunk-filled nights of their own. And, unlike John Mulaneyâs dad, my wifeâs friendsâ husbands are, in fact, my friends.
In 2019, not long before Mulaney took the stage in Studio 8H, I moved to NYC from Toronto on the cusp of 30, leaving behind a tight-knit circle of pals in the process. The existing friends I had in New York, mainly from college, were largely in different stages of life than I was thenâalready married, having kids, preparing to move out to Jersey, Long Island, Westchester. I barely had time to get to know my new coworkers IRL, meanwhile, before the pandemic reduced them to just another set of distant faces on a Zoom call. All of which conspired to leave me, like many men in their thirties, struggling to forge meaningful new connections.
Meeting my now-wife Sumer in 2021âgenuinely the best friend Iâve ever had and the person I want to do most everything withâsolved that problem in myriad ways. Among the biggest was that my new partner came complete with a fully-formed social scene of her own, one that I managed to slot into relatively seamlessly. Like her, Sumerâs friends were smart and funny and coolâand their partners were, too. Suddenly I had house parties to look forward to where I could reliably expect to talk at length about baseball, pro wrestling, Michael Mann movies, Larry McMurtry novels, and the relative merits of Mount Rushmore. You know, guy stuff. Eventually, many of those large-gathering conversations gave way to genuine friendships. These guys became, as an astute tweet once put it, the homies-in-law.