Advertisement
Commentary
It can be tough for men to make friends. My solution? Darts, dive bars and showing up
At one of the weird and nondescript bars my darts team frequents, Built to Spill comes on the digital jukebox for 20 minutes every week. “It’s the best bang for your buck,” someone will say. Built to Spill’s live cover of Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer” is 20 minutes of winding guitar noise, and the captain of our darts team counts on it to drown out background conversation as he throws. It may seem like a small thing, but these weekly darts sessions, along with the playing of “Cortez the Killer,” are a vital part of all our lives.
Over the past three years, darts has become our refuge from the troubles of everyday life — relationships, work and the general malaise of the world-at-large. It’s a safe space. The odd collection of nine middle-aged men with various backgrounds and professions — professors, salesmen, electrician, writer, brewer, pastor — evolved into more than a weekly hobby.
We’ve become friends: the people we call on during our darkest days to help us through difficult times, and to share the good ones as well. While the team changes each season — a player coming, or going — we never lose touch. When someone needs to take a break, or something else in their life comes up, hampering them from making the weekly trot to a legion hall or a dive bar in central Massachusetts, the group chat grows. Former members even show up on some Wednesday nights to hang out.
All of this is increasingly rare today when men are having a more difficult time than ever making friends as adults. According to a 2021 survey by Survey Center on American Life, friendships for middle-aged men have dwindled since 1990, when 55% of men reported having at least six close friends. A similar study showed that only 27% of men have six or more close friends, and 15% have no close friendships. And this is concerning because a study at Brigham Young University found that chronic loneliness raises the risk of premature death by 26% to 32%. Friendship, not just marriage or a long-term relationship, can help us live longer.
But making friends is difficult. I find it almost impossible in most cases. The small talk is boring, yet necessary, and I’m terrible at it. Forced friendships through proxy — children’s activities and spouses — feel, well, forced. There are work friends, but that’s its own bag of trouble. There is something to be said for school friends around whom we spent years cultivating our personalities, but those friendships change as we move away, create families and plans don’t align. A group of my high school friends has been trying to schedule one meet-up for nearly six months, after years of not seeing each other outside of weddings. How can we be expected to make new friends when we can’t find time for our old ones?
And while, Facebook and Instagram keep us up to date on the surface details of most of our friends’ lives — we see that so-and-so is sick or so-and-so moved — we don’t feel the need to connect. We are friends adjacent, having lost touch under the illusion that they're still within reach.
It’s all a bit much.
A friendship is a give and take and it requires trust and active participation. For men, that seems to get more difficult as each year passes in their lives, and studies show that it’s more difficult for men than it is for women to maintain friendships as life gets more complicated. For me, it was difficult to find meaningful friends in middle age. That changed when I started playing darts.
Over the past three years, darts has become our refuge from the troubles of everyday life—relationships, work and the general malaise of the world-at-large.
I joined the darts team in the winter of 2020. A friend I played soccer with posted on Facebook that his team needed another player. I had thrown darts in my parents’ basement before and grew up hearing stories about the team my dad threw on in the ‘80s with my uncle. They played in the Minuteman League, which is one of the biggest and best in the country, out of Darbo's Restaurant and Pub in Milford, which closed the same year I was born. Years ago, when getting ready to go off to college, I found my dad’s team shirt — a blue polo — in a box in our attic. When I saw the Facebook post I thought, why not? I could have my own team, create my own memories. I could have my own stories to tell someday. What I found instead wasn’t just stories, and not more acquaintances either, but relationships.
The team had been together for more than a season when I joined. It won the playoffs in its inaugural go in the Worcester Dart League. That was way back in the C3 division; we’re now in A2 after a steady climb. What that all means is that with each week, our darts get better. Our friendship grows too.
Soon after I joined the team, COVID hit. When the world shut down, darts was the furthest thing from most of our minds, but soon enough it became an outlet. One teammate set up weekly Zoom games. Once we thought it was safe to meet outside, he set up a board and hosted games outside on his deck. When his wife abruptly left him, it was his teammates who he texted and who met him. When he needed a ride after injuring his leg, it was us he reached out to. When another friend got divorced, darts gave him something to look forward to: a night away and a group he could confide in. All in all, our interests and backgrounds may differ, but our weekly games bring us together, no matter what else is going on in our lives.
Recently, my brothers joined the team. Now the three of us meet up once a week, too. In a time when our calendars are filled, getting to see them each week has meant more than I could have expected.
The space has given all of us a place to talk about adult problems and skip over the niceties of small talk. It’s something I look forward to, and something I can count on. It’s a ritual, to meet up and see the same people waiting for you to say “hi,” and to compete against another team in a time when so much of our lives are spent alone in our homes or running the rat race of life. All that, and Built to Spill.
