As male loneliness becomes the focus of an increasingly urgent conversation, men across Canada are finding surprisingly simple ways to reconnect: getting together, doing things and remembering that friendship requires showing up.
As male loneliness becomes the focus of an increasingly urgent conversation, men across Canada are finding surprisingly simple ways to reconnect: getting together, doing things and remembering that friendship requires showing up.
There was a time when seeing your friends required almost no effort at all. They were sitting beside you in class, living down the hall, showing up at the same bar on Friday night or occupying half your couch on Sunday afternoon. Nobody opened a calendar. Nobody created a Doodle poll. Nobody texted, “How does the third Thursday of next month look?” You just saw each other.
Then adulthood arrived.
Careers got busier, relationships became more serious, children came along, people moved across town or across the country, and the friend you had once seen four nights a week became somebody you mostly communicated with by sending Instagram reels. Getting four guys together for dinner began requiring the logistical precision of an international summit. Eventually, without anybody actually deciding that it should happen, some friendships became birthday texts, occasional group-chat appearances and promises that you really should get together soon.
For plenty of men, that’s simply what friendship looks like as they get older, but increasingly some are beginning to question whether that has to be the reality. The conversation around male loneliness has become difficult to ignore. In 2025, research from the Canadian Men’s Health Foundation found that one in two Canadian men were at risk of social isolation, rising to 67 per cent among men between the ages of 19 and 29, and 73 per cent among men who live alone. The numbers are troubling, but they can also obscure something much more hopeful: across Canada, men are finding ways to rebuild something that adulthood has a habit of slowly dismantling. They’re meeting in workshops, joining running clubs and recreational sports leagues, creating men’s groups, organizing standing dinners, and sometimes simply putting a recurring date in the calendar and refusing to cancel it.
What they’re doing isn’t particularly revolutionary. In fact, that may be the point. They’re showing up.
Whatever happened to all our friends?
Friendship doesn’t usually disappear with the drama of a breakup. There is rarely a final argument or an awkward exchange of belongings. More often, it fades through a series of entirely reasonable decisions. You’re exhausted tonight, so you skip drinks. Your friend has a baby and isn’t around as much. Someone accepts a job in another city. The weekly hockey game ends. You start working from home. Months pass. Nobody is angry with anybody; life has simply filled the space where friendship used to live.
For men whose friendships have traditionally formed around shared activities, the disappearance of those structures can be particularly consequential. You played on the same team, worked together, went to the same gym or met every Thursday at the same pub. The activity provided the reason to see one another without anyone having to explicitly say that what they were really maintaining was a friendship.
Research into men’s social connection has challenged the familiar assumption that men simply aren’t interested in deeper relationships, suggesting instead that some men may have fewer models for maintaining those relationships once the structures that originally brought them together disappear.
Technology has complicated things further by making it possible to remain technically connected to somebody almost indefinitely. A friendship can survive for years through memes, reels, likes, birthday notifications and messages fired back and forth from opposite sides of the country. That contact certainly has value, particularly when distance makes seeing each other difficult, but it isn’t a substitute for being together. In 2025, Statistics Canada found that 87 per cent of Canadians who connected with friends both virtually and in person were satisfied or very satisfied with those friendships, compared with 63 per cent of those whose interactions were entirely virtual. Those maintaining both kinds of contact were also more likely to report having people they could depend on.
The group chat can keep us connected—but sometimes we still need to get off it.
Somewhere to go, something to do
When David St. James first discovered the Men’s Shed in Grande Prairie, Alberta, friendship didn’t come easily to him. In a story shared by Alberta Men’s Sheds, St. James described struggling with social anxiety, depression and stress, rarely leaving his home and, by his own account, not having any friends. His family encouraged him to get out more, but meeting people felt overwhelming. Then he noticed a flyer for the local Men’s Shed.
His wife suggested he give it a try, so St. James went to a Tuesday night meeting. He didn’t say much. He drank coffee and listened to the conversations happening around him, but even that felt significant: it was one of the first times in a long while that he had ventured out socially. So he went back.
At his third meeting, he met a man named Brian. The two hit it off and eventually went for coffee together, something St. James says he wouldn’t previously have imagined himself doing. As the weeks passed, he learned more names and became increasingly involved with the group, eventually joining a woodworking project despite having previously suffered a traumatic carpentry accident in which he lost fingers. Then he took another step and started a model-building group of his own, which grew as other men showed up to build plastic and diecast models, share what they knew and spend time together.
St. James has described the Shed as giving him a sense of belonging he hadn’t experienced in years, and his family noticed the difference too. His daughter was so moved by the friendship between her father and Brian that she offered to write Brian a letter thanking him for the support he had given her dad.
That is essentially the philosophy behind the growing Men’s Sheds movement. Originating in Australia in the 1990s before taking root in Canada in the early 2000s, Men’s Sheds are community groups where men gather to learn skills, work on projects, drink coffee, volunteer and spend time together. Men’s Sheds Canada says there are now more than 200 operating across all 10 provinces.
The movement is grounded partly in the idea that men often connect comfortably “shoulder to shoulder,” allowing conversation to develop while two people are fixing a table, building something or sharing a coffee. They may begin by talking about whatever is in front of them and, eventually, find themselves talking about everything else.
That distinction matters because conversations about male loneliness sometimes begin with the assumption that men are doing friendship incorrectly: men should talk more, open up and be more vulnerable. There may be value in encouraging those things, but it can overlook the ways many men have always built intimacy—gradually, through repetition, shared experiences and simply spending time alongside one another. Men’s Sheds don’t treat the activity as an obstacle to connection; the activity helps create it.
Recent Canadian research offers some support for that model. A study of the Squamish Men’s Shed in British Columbia interviewed 12 members aged 55 and older and identified four recurring themes in their experiences, including meaningful use of time, giving back and finding friendship within the Shed. Interestingly, improved well-being tended to emerge as a by-product of participating rather than being the explicit reason men initially showed up. Sometimes the route to feeling better isn’t walking into a room to talk about feeling better. Sometimes it’s walking into a room to make something and discovering that you like the guys making it beside you.
Friendship is something you do
A strange thing happens to friendship in adulthood: we start treating it differently from nearly every other relationship that matters to us. We schedule date nights, family dinners, meetings, appointments and vacations, because we understand that important things need space reserved for them…while friendship is often expected to survive on whatever time remains.
Perhaps that’s why one of the most useful lessons from men deliberately rebuilding their social lives is also one of the least glamorous: you have to make the plan. Not “We should grab a beer sometime,” but an actual day and an actual time. It might be breakfast on the first Saturday of every month, a Wednesday night hockey game, a Sunday morning walk, an annual cottage weekend or dinner every six weeks. The activity matters less than the repetition. Friendship needs opportunities for nothing particularly important to happen, because those unremarkable hours are often where closeness is built.
The same applies to making new friends, one of adulthood’s most strangely uncomfortable challenges. Plenty of people are perfectly comfortable saying they’d like to find a romantic partner, yet admitting that you’d like a new friend can feel almost like confessing that you somehow failed at friendship the first time around. But friendships have life cycles. People move, relationships change and interests diverge. Someone you loved spending time with at 25 may no longer fit naturally into your life at 45—not because either of you did anything wrong, but because two decades happened. Making room for new people doesn’t diminish the friendships that came before them; sometimes it simply means accepting that you’re still allowed to meet somebody and think, I like this guy. I’d like to hang out with him again.
Maintaining those relationships can also mean learning when to move beyond the automatic answer of “fine.” That doesn’t require turning every beer into a therapy session or forcing emotional conversations that neither person wants to have. Friendship isn’t measured exclusively by how much two people disclose to each other; the strongest friendships leave the door open for somebody to say something real when he needs to.
The friends who show up
Maybe that is what the lost art of friendship really is. Not some romanticized vision of an earlier era when men supposedly had deeper friendships and nobody ever felt alone, and not an argument for deleting social media, abandoning the group chat or deciding that every male friendship needs to become a weekly heart-to-heart. It is simply showing up often enough that another person becomes part of the architecture of your life.
It’s knowing which friend will help you move a couch and which one will answer the phone at two in the morning. It’s remembering to ask how the interview went, going to the funeral, sending the stupid meme but also making the dinner reservation, and noticing when somebody who is usually the loudest guy in the room has suddenly gone quiet. Most of all, it’s refusing to assume that friendship will simply take care of itself.
When we were young, life created those opportunities for us. School put our friends in the next desk, university put them down the hall and our first jobs put them at the next workstation. We could mistake proximity for permanence because we had no reason to imagine that one day simply seeing the people we cared about would require effort.
Adulthood changes that. Eventually, friendship becomes something we have to choose.
So make the reservation. Join the team. Take the trip. Call the guy you haven’t spoken to since Christmas, and don’t begin by apologizing for how long it has been. Just ask when he’s free.
The lost art of friendship, it turns out, may not be lost at all. We may just have to start showing up again.
RELATED:
