He sat at the wooden bar, staring at the amber liquid in his glass. Two missed calls from Mike glowed on his phone. Three months had passed since they’d spoken. It was his oldest friendship. Twenty years. He thought about returning the call. He didn’t. He would tomorrow. Maybe. The bartender refilled his glass. He nodded thanks and continued staring at the phone.
The Hidden Currency of Male Friendship 💰
Let me set the record straight: men think about their close friends far more than they’ll ever admit. The stereotype that we’re emotional islands who only connect over sports scores and car engines is complete bullshit. But there’s something real beneath that stereotype that’s worth unpacking.
I work with executives who command thousands of employees Monday through Friday but can’t tell you the name of their best friend’s youngest kid. I coach professional athletes who’d take a bullet for their teammates but haven’t called their childhood best friend in three years.
This isn’t because they don’t care—it’s because they’re operating with outdated emotional software.
What nobody tells you about being a man: Our emotional bytes around friendship get coded differently than women’s. While women’s emotional scripts often prioritize regular maintenance and verbal expression, men’s scripts tend to organize around what I call “proximity-based reactivation”—the ability to pick up exactly where we left off, even after months of silence.
The Attachment Paradox 🔗
Research consistently shows that men tend toward dismissing attachment styles in friendships. But here’s what the academics miss: dismissing doesn’t mean not thinking about friends. It means thinking about them through a different emotional frame.
Let me put my cards on the table. Ten years ago, I nearly lost my closest friend Jason because I was operating on autopilot. We’d been tight since college. When he went through a divorce, I sent the obligatory “here if you need me” text and thought I’d done my duty. Six months later, I discovered he’d been hospitalized for depression. He hadn’t called me because I’d trained him not to expect real support.
That’s when I realized something crucial: men create invisible structures around friendship that privilege strength over vulnerability, availability over consistency, and crisis support over daily maintenance. These structures become our emotional scripts that run automatically without our awareness.
The Straight Shot: Men think about their friends through the lens of potential action rather than continuous connection. We’re not wired to maintain daily thought patterns about friends unless there’s a reason to mobilize (help them move, celebrate a promotion, address a crisis).
What Your Emotional Bytes Are Really Saying 🧠
When men establish close friendships, we create powerful emotional bytes—packages of sensation, needs, and narratives—around those relationships. These bytes contain all the same emotional depth women experience, but with different activation patterns.
Truth is, these emotional bytes get triggered all the time: when we see something that reminds us of an inside joke, when we accomplish something our friend would appreciate, when we need advice only they could give. But our emotional frames often lack the pathway to convert these thoughts into immediate action.
I see this with my clients daily. One corporate VP I work with keeps a running mental list of things to tell his best friend when they next speak. He thinks about his friend constantly but only reaches out quarterly. His attachment style creates an emotional script where communication happens in concentrated bursts rather than consistent streams.
The most revealing pattern? When I ask men in my workshops to close their eyes and imagine who they’d call in a genuine crisis, they never hesitate. Every man has at least one friend they think about regularly—they just don’t have the emotional granularity to recognize these thoughts as meaningful connection.
On The Balance of Things ⚖️
Here’s what researchers miss when they focus on communication frequency: men tend to measure friendship quality through reliability rather than regularity. A friend who calls daily but disappears when needed ranks lower than one who hasn’t called in months but would drop everything in an emergency.
Reading between the lines of attachment research reveals something crucial: men’s emotional scripts for friendship prioritize different needs. While the psychological need for relatedness is universal, men’s attachment patterns often prioritize autonomy within connection.
The game-changer for most men I work with isn’t learning to think about friends more often—it’s developing the meta-emotional intelligence to recognize when they already are thinking about friends, and creating intentional experiences that translate those thoughts into meaningful connection.
Next time you catch yourself thinking about a friend, don’t just note it and move on. That thought is a data point from your emotional navigation system. Act on it immediately, even with something small. Text them the meme. Share the victory. Ask the question. The emotional byte is already there—you just need to transmit it. 📱
—Jas Mendola, knowing that the strongest men aren’t those who need their friends the least, but those who have the courage to need them most openly 💪
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672231195339
https://ijip.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/18.01.198.20241202.pdf
https://laconciergepsychologist.com/blog/attachment-style-friendships/
http://myweb.sabanciuniv.edu/emreselcuk/files/2019/09/GillathKarantzasSelcuk17.pdf
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1024&context=honors
https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/dissertations/AAI9930651/