Tenuous Ties

For American men without college degrees, new relationships are hard to make and existing ones are easy to break.

“I ain't had too many friends in the last 5-10 years. They mostly all faded away …” - Austin

Austin is a 39-year-old father of three who lives in northern California and works construction for a big paving company. He has one close friend—a family friend since childhood—but aside from her, all of his friendships have faded away throughout adulthood.

To him, this slow fade was about effort. “I didn’t make the effort [to keep in touch], and I guess they didn’t make it either,” he said. Today, Austin is largely alone. He has few friends, no community, and, since his dad passed away, no mentors. Austin described the impact of these losses, especially the loss of his only mentor, in moving terms: “I felt the big difference, the big emptiness since then.”

Austin is far from an outlier among men without college degrees. In conversations with him and 29 others for Nobody to Call, our research project on friendship, community, and purpose among men without degrees, the unavoidable takeaway was that most were almost completely disconnected. Many had no close friends, no community, and no mentors or role models. It wasn’t just one thing that was missing for living a flourishing, connected life; it was often almost everything.

Still, the story that emerged from our interviews was more nuanced than the simple binary of connected versus disconnected. It was a story of increasingly precarious lives leading to increasingly tenuous ties—one friend, one mentor, or one group—which became single points of failure. For these men, new relationships were hard to make, and existing ones were easy to break. As a result, common life changes like a move or a job change often made the difference between living somewhat connected lives or living in isolation. Within a decade or two after high school, many men looked like Austin: all alone, with nobody to call.

The cruel irony was that the men blamed themselves for their isolation, and saw it as their personal responsibility to “fix” their relational lives on their own. But we place the blame elsewhere. This is on us: We designed a society that made a college degree the golden ticket for living a good life, undermined the material foundations of working-class life, and prized a form of consumerized choice at the expense of the commitments and communities that have historically bound us together.

The responsibility, therefore, is also on us. We must call these men in to connect, contribute, and belong to something bigger than themselves.

The Cliff and the Drift

These men were not lifelong loners. But for many, the loss of the consistent structure of high school, coupled with the lack of a new structure like college or the military, contributed to the gradual atrophying of their relational lives.

Some of them experienced a friendship cliff immediately after graduating from high school. Before graduation, they had friends who they could interact with day-in and day-out because they participated in the structure of school and extracurriculars. But as soon as their time in high school was up, their friendships started to wither. Many of their peers went off to college. Some joined the military. But they were left behind, and no structured environment for human interaction took the place of school.

“When I was in high school, I had friends that I would see on a regular basis. I had classes with them, I’d see them at lunch,” explained Silvio, a 28-year-old from Washington. “You keep these people at a distance for a reason, because you know you may never see them again after senior year and you graduate. … I might have made close friends if I’d gone off someplace else, but I haven’t left where I am. I’m still here.”

For others, the post-high school social atrophy wasn’t as much a cliff as it was a slow drift. Several men used “drifting” and “fading” terminology to describe the gradual process of losing friends after high school. They couldn’t point to any particular breaking point that caused them to lose their friendships. Instead, they talked about how this slow drift happened in the background, often going almost completely unnoticed.

“I’m just trying to figure out what I want in my own life,” Deion, a 29-year-old from Ohio, said. “I guess [my old friends are] trying to do the same thing. They got their own problems, stuff they’re trying to do. We’ve really just grown apart and lost contact.”

The friendship drift only accelerates with age, especially as peers begin forming families. Men who started families described their spouse and kids becoming a top priority, which left them with less time and energy for friends. Meanwhile, many of the men who didn’t start families described how their friendships faded as their peers became fathers.

For instance, Jordan, a 43-year-old from Tennessee with no kids, talked about how this “life-ing” made sustaining adult friendships more difficult. “As adults, it becomes harder and harder to have those friendships, because you end up ‘life-ing’ and they’re ‘life-ing,’” he said. “Once you start having kids and spouses, because you only have X amount of hours in the day, you start prioritizing family over friends, and then you just lose touch.”

The story most of the men told could not be much clearer. When high school ended, no consistent communal structure took its place, and friendships faded away.

Work: Structure Without Friendship

While work could theoretically replace the structure of school—it was the one source of structured human interaction many men had left—it nonetheless often contributed to the social fragility and decay. Work was often precarious and unstable, with inconsistent hours, frequent job changes, and a perpetual risk of termination. As a result, such work mostly failed to facilitate close, lasting friendships.

Some of the men described their colleagues as “work friends.” But they clearly delineated between people with whom they were friendly at work and “close friends.” These relationships rarely extended beyond the workplace, and work friends were not seen as people who could be counted on during a time of need.

“I work with a very small team, so we are all friendly—you could say, to a degree, friends,” said Christian, a 27-year-old from Arkansas. “I’ve gone over to their house before, but I don’t talk to them too much outside of work. I don’t call them or text them and say, ‘What’s up?’ It’s mostly a work thing.”

But even the men who described making friends through work talked about how these friendships rarely last after they or their colleagues change jobs. They told us the same story time and again: A job change almost always led to a lost friendship. For some, the loss of these workplace relationships were seen as losses of genuine friendship.

“I got to a point where I felt like all my workplace connections were good friends, and then if someone left the job, you never heard from them again,” Benjamin, a 39-year-old from Nevada, said. “So I got to a segue where I just started not making as many close friends because I was worried that they would go away and then I’d never hear from them again.”

Men who experienced getting fired were punished twice over. Not only did it sever their connections within the workplace, it also triggered downward spirals which led them to cut themselves off from relationships outside of work. The experience of depression and self-imposed seclusion weakened their existing friendships and inhibited the possibility of cultivating new ones.

“In 2023, I was working at [large e-commerce company] … But I got caught up and I got let go,” said Manuel, a 27-year-old from California. “So that put me in a pretty rough spot. I was pretty depressed. Then I lost another job, and I just kind of secluded myself.”

Work, once a foundational pillar of a connected life for the working class, now contributes to its precarity. Despite being the one remaining structure for human interaction most of these men had, work both fails to be a source of relationships in the workplace and hinders relationship formation outside work.

Single Points of Failure

Without the structure of school, work, or community to sustain relationships, most of the men we interviewed were left with tenuous ties—one friend, one role model, one community group. These fragile ties, in turn, created single points of failure in their relational lives. Relatively common life changes often made the difference between having friends and community or being almost entirely disconnected.

Many men described how moving severed the tenuous ties they had. Moving presented challenges on both sides: They experienced difficulties sustaining connections in the places they left and cultivating new ones in the places they moved to. Jorge, a 39-year-old who recently moved to Rhode Island, explained how moving ended his New York relationships:

In Manhattan, before I moved, I had … three other guys that used to hang out with each other. To this day, the only one that I know from there … He told me someday that he was going to come around here, and he still hasn’t texted me or nothing … I’m like, ‘Hey, if I already told you to come over and I already invited him, I’m not gonna keep begging him to come over.’

Other men identified changes in their kids’ lives as breaking their already fragile communal ties. Fatherhood had served as the core source of purpose and connection in their lives. But when their kids aged out of elementary school and became more socially independent, they became more disconnected.

“I cut all the bullshit out of my life,” said Jacob, a 47-year-old from Florida who works nights at a convenience store. “I focused on being a dad and being a goofball and being there, and now it’s like, ‘Oh, you [kids] aren’t coming this weekend? Okay, cool. Shit. What am I supposed to do?’ … I’m just gonna curl up and go to sleep.”

But perhaps the most common, and tragic, point of failure for men’s relationships was the death of a loved one. Familial relationships often emerged as the only bright spot in the lives of the men we interviewed, but, by the same token, these very relationships often were the only ones they had left. Several described the passing of a family member as the cause of their disconnection from community and relationships.

“But then my grandmother passed away … and right after that, my mother passed away. And when she passed away, we all kind of quit going [to church],” explained Douglas, a 40-year-old from South Carolina. “I still have a relationship with God. I still pray to him and talk to him all the time. I just don’t go to church that much.”

For these men, precarious lives made for precarious ties, which reinforced the precarity of their lives. Because the relationships that remained were loosely held and easily broken, the line between connection and isolation was often razor thin.

A Collective Responsibility

Men without college degrees have been left alone by society, yet the dark irony is that most saw it as their personal responsibility to rebuild their relational lives from scratch.

But relationships aren’t entrepreneurial prizes to be earned; they’re gifts to be given, received, and inherited within the context of community. By making a college degree the price of admission to living a good life in America, we as a society have let these men down. But we also have an opportunity—a responsibility, even—to lift them up.

We must address the post-high school friendship cliff by creating alternative structures for relationship formation during the adult transition. Policy should play a role here. We need more state service year programs like Maryland’s Service Year Option and vocational training programs like YouthBuild that create accessible, structured, and cohort-based pathways for relationship building during the transition into adulthood.

Policy alone is insufficient though. We also need mass experimentation to renew and re-embed rites of passage into manhood within the context of local communities. What if, by 2035, every region was home to a locally embedded initiative like Journeymen Triangle in North Carolina or The College of St. Joseph The Worker in Ohio?

We also must ensure work can again become a foundational pillar of a robust relational life for Americans without degrees. Here too, policy change is necessary. We need fair workweeks to make work more stable, living wages to make work more fruitful, and worker boards to make workers more powerful. We also need policies like paid family leave and an expanded child tax credit to strengthen the material foundations of working-class family life. A long-term vision for the flourishing of the working class that does not include stable work and stronger families is an empty one.

But because workplaces are often the only structured outlets for human interaction these men have left, we need to consider activating these workplaces—especially in the highly precarious retail and service sectors—to become pathways to friendship and community outside of work.

Take Walmart, for example. According to its website, the company cares about creating a “culture of belonging” for its 1.6 million associates (47% of whom are men). If that’s actually true, Walmart should prioritize partnering with community groups like the YMCA, men’s groups like F3, and local houses of worship. The rationale is simple: When men change jobs—which is a practical certainty—they can have another web of association to catch them.

Perhaps more than anything, we need to call these men into community rather than continue leaving them alone to figure it out. This begins with families—the one form of connection most working-class men still have—seeing it as their responsibility to get their isolated sons, brothers, fathers, and uncles more connected with friends and community.

Religious, community, and neighborhood groups need to step up too, both creating programs to support families and making dedicated efforts to intentionally invite disconnected men to participate and belong. The YMCA formed 175 years ago to foster the spiritual, social, and physical formation of a generation of alienated and isolated young men, and we need to inject the same spirit into our institutions today.

Most of the men we spoke to were yearning to be called into this type of communal contribution. This brings us back to Austin, whose aspirations were clear. “I would like to do something that would change my community, or something that would leave a mark,” he said. “I want people to say, ‘Hey, this person did something to change the community, and here’s the effects of it.’”

Austin, like so many working-class men, was ready to step up. Will we?