Because what I found here is the thing I’d stopped believing was available to a man my age, the thing our whole culture insists is finished for us by sixty — a real friend, made late, from scratch, for no reason but that we chose each other, again and again, over a truck and a table and a bench and ten thousand cups of coffee.

I spent most of my life believing what men are taught to believe, that friendship is a young man’s luxury, that a grown man’s job is to be self-sufficient and stoic and alone, that to need people is a weakness you grow out of.

It is the great lie of my generation of men, and it kills us — quietly, in our recliners, in our paid-off houses, tens of thousands of us dying years early of a loneliness we were too proud to ever call by its name.

I almost died of it myself, in a way, in that big empty house in the city, a self-sufficient man seeing out his days.

I don’t say kills us for effect.

I’ve read the things they write about it now — the surgeons general and the studies, the numbers on how loneliness does to a body what a pack a day does, how the men who make it past sixty-five with no real friends die sooner and sicker and sadder than the ones who have them.