Why Your Dad‘s Fantasy Football League Might Be Saving His Life

Actor Andrew McCarthy drove 10,000 miles to reconnect with the men in his life, and a Harvard behavioral scientist thinks the fix for the male loneliness crisis might already be sitting on your couch

Men today report having fewer close friends than at any point in recent memory, and 15 percent say they have no close friendships at all. On The Happiness Lab, host Dr. Laurie Santos argues that the fix isn’t more casual acquaintances. It’s a return to the kind of emotionally rich “bromances” that once defined male friendship, and that many men, she says, have simply stopped prioritizing.

A Question From His Son

Santos’s is joined by 1980s Brat Pack actor Andrew McCarthy, who had built a career playing onscreen best friends in films like St. Elmo’s Fire, but had let his own real-life friendships wither under the weight of career and family. The wake-up call came from his teenage son. “He just kind of looked at me and he said, ‘You don’t really have any friends, do you, Dad?'” McCarthy recalled. He brushed it off in the moment, but afterward admitted to himself it was true: “I had these friends who were very instrumental in my life when I was a young man…I hadn’t seen some of these dear friends in decades.”

Why “Strong Ties” Are Disappearing

Santos distinguishes between the “weak ties” that still serve men well, like a friendly barista or gym buddy, and the “strong ties” that are vanishing: close friends who really see you. Thirty years ago, most men reported at least six close friends; that share has since dropped by half. The stakes are high. Santos cites the long-running Harvard Study of Adult Development and research from psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad, whose famous study found that people with strong social bonds were 50 percent less likely to die over a given period than those with weaker connections. Santos traces the decline partly to a shift in cultural norms around the late 19th century, when new ideas about gender pushed men toward stoicism and self-reliance, replacing centuries of openly affectionate male friendship that stretched back to the ancient Greeks.

Ten Thousand Miles to Reconnect

Determined to fix things, McCarthy hit the road, driving over 10,000 miles across 22 states to visit old friends, a journey that became his book Who Needs Friends: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America. The trip started awkwardly: he showed up unannounced at the Baltimore condo of an old friend, Sevi, who’d been repeatedly canceling on him and turned out to be hiding a shopping addiction behind cluttered doors. But hours of real conversation dissolved the tension, and McCarthy said the drive home left him “feeling more like myself than I had in ages.” Along the way, he approached dozens of strangers to ask about their male friendships. “No one said no to me,” he said. “Almost everyone at the end of our conversation said, ‘You know, I never talked about this before.'”

The Case for Watching the Game Together

Santos’s second guest, Harvard Kennedy School behavioral scientist Todd Rogers, offers a lower-effort fix. Rogers, who studies what he calls the “male connection crisis” through the Fandom and Social Connection Initiative, points out that 75 percent of American adults are sports fans, and that fandom offers exactly the “shoulder to shoulder” structure researchers say men gravitate toward, activities where you don’t have to make eye contact to bond. In one experiment, Rogers found that simply nudging people who planned to watch a game alone to invite someone instead caused 45 percent of them to do so, and those who did reported feeling far more connected than expected, connections that persisted in later weeks too.

By his final stop in California, McCarthy got to test the change himself. When his son called mid-visit to share a new guitar riff, McCarthy, for once, cut the call short: “I’m with a friend. Can I call you back tomorrow?” It was, he said, the same son who’d started this whole journey. “I felt like me,” McCarthy said. “I didn’t realize how much that had been lacking.”

Listen to the full episode on The Happiness Lab.