Staying socially connected is often a huge challenge, no matter what your stage of life. In childhood we all want to have our friends, our best friends, playmates, buddies and this is even more complicated by helicopter parents who only permit their delicate little boobums to socialize with each other on playdates or in day cares and schools or however they want to outsource their kids' childhood. When I was a kid we were all free range and this made childhood friendships all the more enchanting and exciting with the afternoon adventures we were always going on together, without even a whisper of parental interference.
As teenagers things get more intense, more constrained, more competitive and more lonely. High school social hierarchies are every bit as legendary as they are notorious for the young formative lives that have been permanently ruined by the godlike scorn of the cool kids.
As young adults we continue to cling to our groups, cliques and best friends forever, best friends de jour, friends with benefits, lovers, one night stands and whatever it takes to staunch the edge of loneliness as we seek in one another the code that will decipher for us the mystery of ourselves.
Most of us eventually pair off, marry, have and raise children and isolate from one another, a noble sacrifice for that sacred family unit. Old friends often fall out of contact, for men anyway, since women seem to be much better at staying in contact with their friends. In the majority of cases the husbands become dependent on their wives for maintaining social contact and connection as well as for their own emotional nurturing. True it is that men still tend to marry their mothers, expecting their wives, if ever-so-tacitly, to go on wiping their stinky asses for them.
Many end up divorcing there spouses, a few become widows or widowers. The men, being the emotionally dependent party, usually fare worse and the women more often flourish in their new liberation, not from male dominance, but from masculine oedipal co-dependence (Shut-up, Sigmund Freud!) The newly single men will try to re-mate or remarry as quickly as possible, because few of them can endure having to look after themselves, or they will continue to slide downhill, often into the misery of addictions or mental illness and poverty.
It is rather different for those of us men who have always been single and without children (to our knowledge, anyway!) It isn't just that a lot of us are gay. Some are conventionally heterosexual, some asexual, some, such as myself, refuse to be labelled. We are single not because we are losers whom nobody wants, nor because we are too fussy, but we are simply too busy or too interested in other things to care much about settling down with someone. We are rather more like cats than like dogs. We enjoy companionship and fellowship, but can also do rather well, sometimes even better, without it.
What is unfortunate is the way the rest of the world tends to judge us, or worse, completely ignore us, as though by not legislating our sexuality and marrying and breeding, we are somehow inferior, or not even completely human. This can make it particularly difficult for us to find and flourish in strong and meaningful friendships, since our married peers often tend to hold us in suspicion. While this is more likely to be a problem in more traditional and conservative societies the permanently single male even in liberal and progressive Canada is still tainted by stigma.
Ageing often comes with social isolation and loneliness. This does not have to be inevitable. Attitudes on both sides could stand to change a little. Single men, especially older ones tend to be very self-centred and rigid and set in their ways. This isn't true in all cases. I myself owe the fact that I am enjoying some strong and vibrant friendships to the fact that I have taken an ongoing stand against becoming a self-centred, miserable fossil. This hasn't been easy. It has meant staying as open as possible and making a concerted effort to not judge people younger than me as idiots just because they do things differently.
My faith in Christ, at its better moments, arms me with compassion for people and other beings, and a love for life as well as for learning new things and knowing people and caring for others. As long as I maintain this focus I can rise even a little bit above the crabbed, miserable and solitary stereotype that would otherwise imprison and hobble me. I try to see myself as a friend first, before seeking friends, which I think helps make me a better friend. By seeking to learn from others, I won't necessarily stop ageing, but I will maintain a youthful resiliency of spirit and mind, knowing that there will always be others nearby to reach back to me as I reach out to them.
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