For the better part of a decade, Tuesday evenings belonged to Jamie. We’d claim the same two stools at the same pub, order the same first round without needing to ask, and talk until the second round turned into dinner more often than either of us planned. Jamie Jamison came to Tulsa from England as an advocate for New Urbanist planning — walkable streets, real neighborhoods, cities built for people instead of cars — and somewhere between his ideas and my own thirty-eight years of watching Tulsa grow, he became one of the most important friendships of my life. For years he split his time nine or ten months in Tulsa, the rest back home in England. The ritual held, and it held so reliably that I never thought to ask what would happen if it didn’t.
The change, when it came, wasn’t dramatic. The political climate here shifted something in Jamie, and gradually — not all at once — his time in Tulsa shrank. Nine or ten months became a couple of visits a year, each one four or five weeks long. That sounds like enough time, until you live it. It’s barely enough to get back into the rhythm of a friendship before it’s over again. We’d start finding our footing — a Tuesday here, a dinner there — and just as it started to feel normal, he’d be packing for England again, with no fixed date for when I’d see him next. Each goodbye carried a particular kind of sadness I hadn’t felt with him before: not the sharp grief of losing someone, but the slower ache of watching something you’d counted on quietly stop being something you could count on. I’m still getting used to that. I’m not sure I’ve fully gotten there yet. That’s what losing male friendships after retirement quietly looks like — not one clean break, but a slow erosion of a structure two people used to share.
What’s replaced the pub is Messenger and WhatsApp — an hour of video call standing in for what used to be a pint across a wooden table. I’m grateful for the calls. I’ll say clearly that they are not the same thing. Something about looking at a friend’s face on a screen, rather than sitting beside him, leaves the conversation feeling complete and unfinished at once, and the sense of loss hasn’t been replaced by anything since.
It wasn’t just Jamie’s company I was losing. It was the ritual — the same stools, the same order, the unspoken permission that a Tuesday evening existed for exactly this and nothing else.
I didn’t expect that distinction to matter as much as it does. I assumed a friendship, once real, simply continues at a lower volume when geography intervenes. What I’ve learned instead is that it wasn’t just Jamie’s company I was losing. It was the ritual — the same stools, the same order, the unspoken permission that a Tuesday evening existed for exactly this and nothing else. Take away the pretext, and even a strong friendship has to work far harder to survive.
Research on older men bears this out more starkly than I expected. The impersonal nature of digital contact, one study on isolation in older men concludes, may simply not substitute for the emotional connection needed to stave off loneliness — phones and video calls maintain a friendship’s pulse without necessarily feeding it. Nearly one in five older men report contact with friends less than once a month, and the share of men who say they have no close friends at all has more than doubled over the past three decades. I don’t think of myself as part of that trend. But the honest truth is that I’m one skipped visit away from drifting toward it.
There’s a second admission harder to make than the first, and it isn’t about Jamie at all. It’s about the friends still within driving distance — men I genuinely care about, whom I do not call nearly often enough. Building The Encore Project has given me a socially acceptable excuse: I’m busy, I’m building something, surely that counts for something. It does. But it also means weeks pass, then months, and I notice the gap only after it’s already there. At eighty-one, without a workplace and without what researchers call a “third place” — a regular table, a regular room, a reason to show up — building a friendship, or even sustaining one, doesn’t happen by accident anymore. It takes deliberate effort I haven’t always been willing to spend.
I don’t think that failure is a personal shortcoming so much as a structural one, and understanding that has made it easier to look at honestly. Men’s friendships, more than women’s, tend to be built around shared activity rather than direct emotional conversation — a workbench, a workplace, a weekly round of golf, a pub. Researchers studying the “Men’s Sheds” movement describe this as bonding “shoulder to shoulder” rather than face to face: put men in a room with something to build, and the friendship happens as a byproduct, almost without anyone naming it as the goal. Remove the shed, the office, the pub — remove the third place — and the friendship has nowhere to happen. It isn’t that older men stop wanting connection. It’s that we lose the scaffolding that used to make connection easy to reach for.
If I’m honest, I haven’t found my own equivalent of a Men’s Shed. What I have found, without setting out to, is something else entirely: writing the Meet series. Interviewing men about their own lives — their careers, their setbacks, their losses — was supposed to be work for The Encore Project. It has turned into something closer to friendship. There’s a particular kind of kinship that opens up between two men once one of them has admitted, out loud, that he’s grieving something or someone. I didn’t build the Meet series to solve my own isolation. But it has, more than I expected, given me back some of what retirement and distance had quietly taken away — and the group of contributors is starting to feel like a kind of fraternity, a set of guys who each found their own reason to sit down and tell their story.
That’s given me an idea I haven’t fully acted on yet, but keep circling back to. I’ve thought about hosting an occasional group video call with the Meet contributors who’d be willing — no agenda, nothing to accomplish, just a rough weekly or monthly round-table where whoever shows up talks about whatever’s going on in their life. It wouldn’t replace a Tuesday at the pub. Nothing will, and I’ve stopped expecting it to. But it might be a version of the same thing Jamie and I built without realizing it: a standing reason to show up, repeated often enough that it becomes something you can count on again.
It might be a version of the same thing Jamie and I built without realizing it: a standing reason to show up, repeated often enough that it becomes something you can count on again
I wish I could say I’ve solved the harder problem — that I now call the friends nearby without hesitation, that I’ve found a way to make the Tuesdays with Jamie feel whole again across an ocean. I haven’t. What I can say is that I notice the gap now instead of ignoring it, which is its own kind of progress at eighty-one. The pub stools are still there, waiting for someone else most Tuesdays. Jamie and I still talk, still care about each other exactly as much as we did in person. That’s what losing male friendships after retirement asks of you at eighty-one: not a solution, just the willingness to keep noticing. I’m working on believing that’s enough, while I build something new out of the men who’ve been generous enough to sit down and tell me their stories.
