The Social Ritual That Made Me a Better Man
· The Atlantic
My early days of expatriation were disorienting. It was 2011, and I had recently gotten married and moved to Paris. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my friendships to that point had depended on proximity: Once I crossed the Atlantic, many of them dwindled to digital approximations of intimacy. I went long stretches without talking to Carlos, my closest confidant since high school, even though we’d been like family when we lived in Brooklyn.
Visit fishroad-app.com for more information.
At the age of 30, I was learning just how fragile friendship becomes in adulthood. A jungle of solitude is the norm, and it grows back when we’re inattentive. In 1990, Gallup found that one-third of men reported having 10 or more close friends. By 2021, according to polling from the Survey Center on American Life, just 13 percent did—a figure that has barely budged even since the pandemic. The number of men who said they had no close friends rose from 3 percent in 1990 to 17 percent last year.
But I found luck in Paris. By way of my sister-in-law’s partner, Steve, I was invited to join a tight-knit band of friends on their recurring guys’ night out. These men knew some simple and worthwhile truths, like where to eat, what to drink, and how to welcome a stranger. In a time of transition and self-imposed exile, the outings became a source of stability and nourishment. Most fundamental, they revealed to me how potent rituals are as antidotes to isolation—capable of making us not only happier but also better.
My weeks assumed a familiar and comforting logic when the text message arrived: “C’est booké!” On the appointed Thursday or Friday night, we’d meet at the local p’tit bar for fatty sheets of charcuterie and glasses of chilled burgundy, trading wisecracks with the mustachioed proprietor. Some evenings he’d present us with an off-menu concoction—slow-cooked pig’s feet, or a mason jar of fried ants that he’d rubbed in a sensational blend of Mexican chiles—that was without fail one of the best dishes I’d ever eaten. Our appetites opened, we’d venture into the Paris night for dinner.
[Read: Are they still your friends if you never see them?]
Though I might not have put it this way back then, I had been adopted into a kind of brotherhood. With my basic French and their accommodating English, we built a hybrid language in which we talked plainly about our fears and the people we loved. Steve was a successful business owner, five years my senior, who modeled a level of elegant generosity I still haven’t seen paralleled. His son, my nephew, was born within months of my arrival. Capable and never flummoxed, Steve was the first man around my age whom I’d seen inhabit the role of patriarch and provider. His closest buddies, Julien and Michaël, were musicians. By chance, I’d been listening to Julien’s deep-house records since college, and I often praised his work. This didn’t sit well with him, given his extraordinary humility, so he immediately set about reading my memoir to return the attention.
Among these men and others in their orbit, I found myself surrounded for the first time by friends who had spouses, children, and real responsibilities. Back in New York, no one in my social environment was seriously discussing the possibility of parenthood. I had often gone to restaurants, bars, and clubs with male friends, but we didn’t conceive of those evenings as guys’ nights out. We were guys, and we were out, but even among those of us who had long-term girlfriends, we never felt the need to demarcate these gatherings from any others.
That changed in Paris. As my savings diminished and—to my astonishment, though it had been planned—I became a father, the couple of evenings a month that I shared with Steve and the others became for me a safe and premeditated truancy from domestic commitments. The ceremony amounted to a pressure valve. Once released, it sent us home tired and inebriated but also kinder, happier, and more giving.
This wasn’t just in my head. In a 2017 study led by the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, researchers at the University of Oxford found that nights out with friends support mental and emotional well-being. Other research has shown that strong friendships are associated with increased generosity, lower rates of depression and anxiety, and even a more robust immune system.
Those long evenings provoked tears of laughter, sometimes sorrow, and occasionally both in the course of a meal. They affirmed the choices and sacrifices I had made: turning away from an established career path in America, and redirecting my energy and resources to less self-interested ends. Over the slow procession of weeks, months, and years, these nights out helped me grasp new and unforeseen opportunities that my growing family and French society could extend. They made me a better friend, partner, and father.
The end came not because of any grand falling-out but simply because some of us assumed new priorities. That the p’tit bar shut down didn’t help. Our collective bond, which once felt imperishable, began to decompose without the movable feasts that had sustained and renewed it.
[Read: How the passionate male friendship died]
I am old enough now to realize that my true fortune in life has been amassed in friendships. My marriage came apart several years ago, and I now split my time in America, where I’ve found another iteration of what I first experienced in France. My friend Carlos never left New York, and when I began to spend half the year in the city, we resumed our long conversation as though it had never been paused. The two of us, along with Ari, Carlos’s close friend of 20 years, have made our own guys’ nights out here. As divorcés and single fathers, each of us has confronted loss and disappointment. Each of us has also learned that even satisfied ambition and material success will never suffice. To an extent that would have probably been unthinkable to me as a younger man, Carlos, Ari, and I have formed a fraternity in which we do not feel the need to dissemble or compete.
Because of our squeezed itineraries and complex custody arrangements, these New York nights require the kind of rigorous planning that makes me grateful at least two of us are lawyers. Perhaps because these gatherings require so much forethought, spending the entire evening in a single establishment feels wasteful. So we go to three, fully aware that at our age the next drink will ruin Sunday morning.
Despite the joy that these outings provide—probably because of it—I still feel a sense of nostalgia and even something like grief for those old dinners in Paris. Relationships, whether platonic or romantic, change subtly. Couples who seem inseparable gradually grow untethered, and even best friends disagree in ways that leave them strangers. It is hard to perceive in the midst of laughter that this exquisite meal is never to be repeated. And yet, there comes a night when the group will have been seated, as it has so many times already at that familiar and well-set table, for what will be its final supper.