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My son makes friends like you wouldn’t believe. Just the other week I took him to a playground; he saw some other kids on a climbing frame, ran straight up to them and shouted: ‘I’M FOUR-AND-A-HALF YEARS OLD.’ Bang. Just like that. Three new best friends, loyal to the last, and all he did was scream out his age.

I suspect this wouldn’t necessarily work for me. This is partly because ‘I’M NEARLY 40’ sounds more like a cry for help than a request for companionship. But it’s mainly because the world of adult friendship can be fraught with difficulty.

I am terrible at making friends. I work from home on my own in a shed all day, so I don’t have any colleagues to chat to. My friends from school grew up, moved away and all exist in the same semi-comatose, early parenthood exhaustion that I do, none of which particularly lends itself to first-class chumminess. My son recently asked who my best friend was and I realised that it was someone who I haven’t even texted for four months. I’m too busy to initiate new friendships and too lazy to maintain old ones.

But at least I’m not alone — as it were. A YouGov survey last month discovered that almost one in five men admits to having no close friends, with a third claiming to not have a best friend. The figures are better when it comes to women in friendship; they’re more likely to have made a new friend in the last one to six months. Women, according to research, are more likely to make their friends from school, the community or even through informal conversations in cafés. Men, however, make the bulk of their friendships through work, which often means that they’re plunged into loneliness the moment they retire.

Luckily, this doesn’t really affect me. Loneliness is essentially the deficit between the number of friends you want and the number of friends you have; I’ve always erred towards the side of solitude so I don’t feel particularly starved by my lack of close friendships. Except, here’s the thing: maybe I do. Maybe society has just conditioned me to think that I don’t because it’s thought that the number of men who feel lonely is actually much higher than the number of men who admit to feeling lonely.

On paper, women are more likely than men to admit to feelings of loneliness but that may well be down to their comparative comfort when it comes to expressing vulnerability. Meanwhile, us blokes are taught to be strong and silent, not to speak about our needs, not to ask for help. And that’s bad enough in any situation, let alone when what you need is someone to talk to about the fact you don’t have any friends. That could be read as an admission that people don’t like you, which in turn is an admission that you lack worth. Better to just zip up your coat and unhappily plough on by yourself. Except that approach can actively make things dangerous.

Dr Alexandra Pitman, co-lead of the Loneliness and Social Isolation in Mental Health research network at University College London, told me that loneliness can manifest itself in very real ways. ‘The physical health effects of loneliness include an increased risk of strokes and of chronic physical health problems and an increased mortality risk,’ she said. ‘Indeed, the physical health impacts of prolonged loneliness have been likened to that of obesity, smoking or physical inactivity.’

There’s a big mental health aspect, too, which can be a vicious cycle. First you feel lonely, then you become depressed, then your depression makes you want to stay away from people. It’s a hard pattern to break.

Loneliness can be caused by a number of factors, from poor social support to a life event like a trauma, bereavement or house move. Groups most likely to describe themselves as lonely include people in their early 20s, people who rent rather than own their own home and people who don’t feel a strong connection to their neighbourhood, which is a pretty good description of lots of people who live in London.

My friend Simon fits this bill exactly. He’s always been relatively happy in his own company but since moving to London two years ago, he’s struggled to cope with feelings of loneliness. Part of the problem, he says, is the city itself. ‘I grew up in a small village where everyone knew everyone else’s business intimately,’ he says.

But when he arrived in London, ‘I just found it so anonymous. And at my age, there’s also an expectation that you should be taking the city head-on. If you can’t keep up — if you aren’t out every evening having the best night ever — it can really affect your sense of self-worth.’

“I’m too busy to initiate new friendships and too lazy to maintain old ones” Stuart Heritage

Finding a solution to the loneliness crisis is harder than it sounds, Pitman says, because ‘there are very few studies exploring what interventions are effective at reducing loneliness and it is hard to specify what would benefit someone who feels lonely’, but she states that men in particular would do better if we’d just get out of our own way.

‘Men characteristically do not consult a health professional when they feel depressed and this may be due to the stigma of mental ill-health,’ she says. ‘We clearly need to counter this by encouraging men to seek the appropriate psychological treatment when they feel low. This is particularly important given the public health problem of suicide in young and middle-aged men in the UK.’

On a wider scale, she suggests that ‘the Government do more by investing in community services that meet the needs of isolated people, particularly in rural areas, and for marginalised groups defined by ethnicity, gender and sexuality’.

When there is a breakthrough, though — when men do make that first step towards confronting their loneliness — it’s almost heartbreakingly lovely to witness. If you watched last year’s series of The Great British Bake Off, you’ll remember contestant Rahul; not because he won but because he revealed that when he first moved to Sheffield, he baked cakes to help him make new friends.

Similarly, when 27-year-old Chris Best told the Liverpool Echo that he struggled to make friends after two years living in the city, he was swamped with offers from locals eager to take him under their wing. It can happen. It just takes that first step.

Last week, Mr Porter launched its Health in Mind campaign exploring the effects of male loneliness and how men can ‘open up better’ to their mates, in partnership with the men’s health charity, the Movember Foundation.

‘Men generally put a guard up when it comes to their feelings, bottle up their frustrations and try not to show vulnerability and weakness through opening up to others,’ says Jeremy Langmead, brand and content director at Mr Porter. ‘But there comes a point when it may all get too much. We all need help sometimes.’

Things might be changing for me, too. My son has started school now and I’m already on nodding terms with a handful of other parents. And I’ve joined a gym that I attend at an objectively unsociable hour and I’ve started to get Facebook friend requests from a few of the other exhausted, early-morning grunters I see there.

Perhaps things are turning around. Perhaps putting myself out there a little is going to result in a wider social circle. Tomorrow I’m going to run up to my new acquaintances and scream my age at them as loudly as I can. That’ll probably do the trick.

If you are affected by the issues mentioned in this piece, call Samaritans on 116 123.