I'm not here to talk about my marriage. Though not wanting to talk about my marriage is part of the reason we were in couples therapy in the first place. Let's just say I had drifted, in my early forties, from a midlife malaise—the graying temples, the softening gut, the wandering eye—into a full-blown marital crisis. There are two sides to every story, and my side is that it was all my fault.

In early 2009, my wife—whom I desperately wanted not to lose—and I started spending Friday afternoons sitting on a sectional sofa in a Manhattan apartment belonging to a woman I'll call Jocelyn. In her company, we cataloged the symptoms and tried to excavate the causes. "You know," Jocelyn said to me during one session, "maybe you need some new friends." Appropriate friends. Men. My own age.

What is she talking about? I thought. I have plenty of friends! Colleagues I sometimes had lunch with. College buddies I saw when they were in town. The network of simpatico couples with children the same ages as ours who constituted our main social circle. If it was true that I lacked a pack—a collective entity I could call "the guys"—wasn't that a sign of my enlightened rejection of the savage rituals of male bonding? I'd done my time—in grade school, riding bikes to the 7-Eleven to peek at Playboys; in college, debating French movies over bad red wine and Camel straights in filthy dorm rooms—and evolved beyond it.

If it was true that I lacked a pack, wasn't that a sign of my enlightened rejection of the savage rituals of male bonding?

Even if Jocelyn was right, it was hard to see how to put her advice into practice. At the time—and still, as far as I know—there was no such thing as platonic, homosocial Tinder. There was also the daily, difficult work of marital repair, which demanded my full attention. Things began to get better. Though the acute crisis eventually passed, I settled into my old malaise, a state of remission well short of a cure.

"Hey, do you play poker?" Jeff asked me one bright Sunday morning in the dugout of a Brooklyn softball field, about two years after the therapy session. I'd known him for a while; our daughters were on the same team, and over a half-dozen springs we had become friendly acquaintances, which was as close as I got to friendship in those days.

Against my habits and instincts, I said yes. Which wasn't a lie, exactly—I had played a couple times in college without great distinction or enthusiasm. But I was bluffing. Self-bluffing, really: I would have to back up the gamble of accepting Jeff's invitation to join the monthly game he played in by proving myself worthy of it, by being the kind of guy who could sit at a poker table, drinking and shooting the shit. To me, that represented an all-in existential bet.

For Jeff (not his real name; I'm the only one in this story called on to show my hand), it was a far simpler matter: Saturday's game, at a guy named Paul's house, was fast approaching and they were in need of new bodies. If I could spare forty dollars for the buy-in and wasn't a total asshole, I would do. Jeff would text me the details.

Paul's game started in Chinatown in the nineties or maybe earlier—most of the regulars weren't around then, and those who were tended to be hazy on the details—and was headquartered in the place of business owned by a guy I'll call Emerson, allegedly a pioneer in the field of Internet pornography. The cards were dealt, so the story goes, amid lighting rigs and tripods, bed frames and velvet pillows.

Like most origin stories, this one strikes me as at least partly mythological. Nobody knows what became of Emerson the Porn King. But given our current accommodations—usually the kitchen table of Paul's row house, sometimes Jeff's dining room or my basement—his sleazy legend serves as a counterweight to our essential squareness. We carry a trace of Emerson's outlaw DNA, a collective memory of vices less anodyne than kitchen-table tequila shots and joints passed around in the backyard. The real Emerson, Ralph Waldo, wrote that "people wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them." The game is a gesture in that direction, a cultivated plot of wildness within the tidy garden of our lives. For one night a month, we can feel reckless and rebellious, dangerous and nihilistic.

Everett Collection

That wasn't remotely how I felt on that evening in May 2011—was it that long ago? was it that recently?—when I first knocked on the ground-floor window of a handsome brownstone, my heart in my throat and a six-pack of IPA in my hand. I was instead in the grip of a familiar apprehension, the blend of dread and hope that marked most Septembers of my childhood. Growing up in an itinerant family, I went to six different schools in four different states. I learned the camouflage and field-reconnaissance skills of the new kid: how to scan the room for bullies and possible allies against them; how to mimic the local idioms; how to keep my head down until everyone else got used to seeing my face, at which point I wasn't the new kid anymore.

Not much had changed in thirty years. As the kitchen filled up and the hands proceeded—mostly high-low split-pot games, some with multiple wild cards, others more orthodox—I noticed that the players conformed to schoolboy archetypes. There was the jock, the nerd, the artist, and the foreign-exchange student. There were a few varieties of class clown: the nonstop joker, the sardonic mocker, the uncensored psyche. There was the cool kid who was everybody's pal, and the cool kid who sat enigmatically in the corner. (That one turned out to be Jeff.)

For one night a month, we can feel reckless and rebellious, dangerous and nihilistic.

There was also a girl: Jennifer, whom the rest of us underestimated at our peril. This was not a boys-only clubhouse, but a gender quota seemed to be in effect, as in an action movie about a squad of highly trained assassins with a token female.

John Updike wrote that "a man, in America, is a failed boy." The purpose of our play is to undo that failure, at least temporarily: to light out for the territory, to restore the sense of adventure and irresponsibility of childhood.

Which may be why I initially resisted the poker game. I was attached to my grown-up status, to the badges of my failure. The first time, having bought a few stacks of chips, won a few hands, and lost most of my money—that's what the new guy is for, after all—I got home in the wee hours, wired and confused, breath rank and head throbbing. I tried not to wake my wife, and failed. "Did you have a good time?" she asked. "What was it like?"

Those were harder questions than she meant them to be. It was kind of fun, but I wasn't sure I wanted to go back. Was it because I didn't like losing? (She knows I don't like losing.) No, it was because I worried that I didn't fit in. The only role I could imagine myself playing was that of the new kid, and I wasn't sure I knew how to be—or wanted to risk becoming—someone else.

Nonetheless, I was at Paul's door a few weeks later. I would like to say that I had at last awakened to Jocelyn's wisdom, but the truth is that, at least initially, I didn't come back for the friends; I came back for the cards. Poker turned out to be a more interesting game than I had thought, and I sensed the potential for improvement. As my wife and Jocelyn had pointed out to me many times, I was already in possession of the requisite skills.

Poker rewards deceit, manipulation, and stone-faced indifference toward others. A touch of sadism doesn't hurt. The way to win is to force other players to act against their own interests by means of guile, concealment, and outright bullying. These are not the attributes of a good husband, but they're what I had to work with. My hidden inner gambler—who went all in with an iffy hand; who called others' bluffs; who raised in the early rounds to scare competitors away—was my alter id.

My better self—the gracious, generous, loyal version of the bastard with the cards—was still present, but he became a spectator. Such was the case with each player. It was as if the two sides of ourselves were arrayed around the table in concentric circles. The inner layer was a gladiatorial arena of predatory aggression, with every man for himself and the gods of luck against all. Outside was a ring of fellowship, sweetness, and good manners.

The inner layer was a gladiatorial arena of predatory aggression.

To master poker—as a social game, at least; the grind and thrill of the casino and the dopamine frenzy of the Internet are different matters—is to cultivate this doubleness, to learn to sit in both chairs. Playing is pretending. I adopted a series of personas: the guy slow-playing a well-hidden full house, or brashly representing a flush when all I had was a pair of sevens. I was a champ, a sucker, a bystander. My skill was rewarded. My hubris was punished. I sometimes got away with murder. More often, I fell victim to the cruelty of fate. After a few months, I had even made some new friends. I fit in.

The poker game is, in many ways, a Night of the Living Dads. We talk about politics or sports or our kids or our jobs. We take cigarette breaks (except for anyone whose wife might be reading this), eat pizza, and drink whatever's around. As the night goes on, the games get crazier and the pots get bigger. There are cries of exultation and howls of aggravation. Poker is the inverse of golf, in which the birdies and the perfect drives are remembered and the missed putts and the time in the rough are forgotten. There is a masochistic pleasure—and a measure of glory—in losing grandly. The losses are never too bad, even when the pile of chips looks huge. Nobody is putting down the deed to his house, the keys to his car, or his wedding band. The chips—a two-dollar limit until the last betting round in a hand, when it jumps to four dollars—are symbolic of those graver risks, and talismans against them. If we keep coming back to the game, nothing too terrible can happen. Only as far as we are settled is there any hope for us.

That's magical thinking, of course. Life follows its usual path outside the game. Since I joined, there have been a few divorces among our ranks, and a couple marriages, too. Babies have been born. Kids have gone off to college. We've written books, started and lost businesses, changed jobs, won prizes.

But the deeper intimacy—the mysterious bond that brings us closer and keeps us interested; the extracurricular emotional investment that saved my marriage, as Jocelyn supposed it might—resides in the play itself. You learn a lot about someone when, over a span of years, you try to read his mind and prevent him from reading yours. You observe his reactions to success and failure, the boundaries of his audacity and the contours of his insecurity. You know that he is watching you in the same way. That all of them are.

When I come home from a game, my breath is still foul. My head still aches. Sometimes I manage not to wake my wife. Other times I fill her in on what's going on with my pals, some of whom are now her pals, too, and report on my triumphs and disasters, which never fails to put her back to sleep. I'm glad it's over—poker is a stressful game—and already desperate for next time. There is the ever-renewing bliss of drifting into slumber next to the person who knows me best, and the still-surprising pang of missing my friends. If our luck holds, we'll grow old together, and break even in the end.

This article originally appears in the May '17 issue.