Peter Attia & Arthur Brooks | Three Types of Friendships

So Aristotle wrote a lot about friendships, and he talked about these escalating levels of friendship in terms of the satisfaction they bring and the virtue that they bring to our lives. At the lowest level is the friendships of transaction. So these are, you know, friendships where people work together, and they’re really—you know, you’re a shirt manufacturer, and you’ve got a guy who sells you cloth. And you’re friends, like, you probably really are. I mean, you like him, he likes you, you’re really friendly with each other, you take care not to offend each other. But if you stop making shirts, you’re probably not going to continue that relationship.

Above that are relationships of admiration or beauty, where you admire each other. You know, and that’s a really good thing too. But that’s dependent on a particular quality.

The perfect friendship, or the friendship of virtue, is just inherently satisfying. You like being together. And frequently it’ll revolve around a third kind of useless thing—like baseball, right? It’ll be that thing. This is what guys do. It’s like, I don’t know. What do you guys do together? I don’t know, we build birdhouses or whatever it happens to be. And it’s that third thing that is kind of the focus. But what you’re doing in parallel is developing a very beautiful friendship. That’s a very positive link.

And that’s what these real friendships have in common. They’re intrinsically satisfying, and they’re frequently focused on the cosmic third. It doesn’t have to be useless, by the way. I mean, I have a very close friend—one of my very closest friends—he’s in Atlanta. And we have the same religion, and we talk about that a lot. And our discussions about that are quite deep. And he also wants to know what’s going on with my marriage and my kids. And he knows—he knows my secrets, is the bottom line.

You alluded to something that I think most people intuitively would appreciate, but I’m curious as to why. What is it about men that makes it harder for us to have those really deep friendships? Again, if I were to consider my parents, you know, I don’t think my father has one such friendship. I think my mother has many—I mean really many. She’s rich in friendship. Maybe they’re an extreme example. Why do you think that is?

Well, there are some generational differences between men and women, and there are probably some intrinsic differences as well. The generational differences largely have to do with the fact that in conventional family setups—I mean, I’m going to guess that your dad was super hard working. He probably was busting his pick all the way through your childhood. He put you through college, he did all that stuff. And he knew that he was gone all day, and that if he went down to goof around with his buddies after work, he was stealing from his family. And so he came home.

The truth was that his intimate relationships were in his family, and his business relationships were at work. And there was a firewall between the two such that he could afford to spend adequate time—where he had adequate time—to spend with his family. And so it was a very traditional situation.

Meanwhile, your mom was making sure that you kids were properly brought up, and you had friends. And she knew your friends’ mothers. And the result was that she was reinforcing friendship relationships and therefore getting better at them.

Now, the distressing thing is that friendship is a skill that requires practice. It’s like a muscle, and it will atrophy. You can get worse and worse at friendships. And so I’ll meet these 60-year-old guys—guys who are a little older than me—and they’ll be like, “What do you want me to do? Call up some other dude and ask for a play date? I mean, how does one do this? I don’t know how to do this. I haven’t had a real friend since I was in college. And ever since then I got married, and you know, I had my family, and I worked really, really hard, and now I’m lonely. And so what do you expect me to do?”

And the answer is: you have to actually learn how to make and maintain friends—real friendships. And that’s a skill that a lot of men lose because of our traditional social circumstances.

So what do you say to that guy? So the 60-year-old guy comes to you—and let’s make this a dramatic case—either his wife, you know, he and his wife have divorced or she’s died, his kids are grown up. And using the example you said, I mean this is a guy who hasn’t had an intimate friendship with somebody in 40 years. And he comes to you. And let’s say he’s bought into what you’re saying—which is a crucial part of his happiness for the remainder of his life is going to be intimacy through friendships. And maybe some of those are not platonic, right? Maybe he meets another woman. But let’s focus on the platonic side of that.

Yeah, so the truth is, it’s not an easy nut to crack. But you have to do the work like anything else. We know that there’s enough plasticity in the brain, and there’s enough emotional plasticity as well, that we can learn all kinds of new skills. I mean, people can learn lots of skills. They can’t be as good playing the cello starting at 70 as if they started at 7—we know that to be a fact—but you can get plenty good at stuff. And that includes social skills.

But you have to be committed to doing the work. What a lot of guys want is like, “Okay, great. It’s good advice, Professor. You know, I’m gonna go out and get some. Help me get some friends like you.” It’s going to take time. It took your wife years and years and years and years to build up her friend group. It’s going to take you some time as well. But you actually have to start putting in the work.

And that has to do with actually making yourself available and vulnerable to other people. That means actually hanging out with other people and saying—and taking the time. A lot of guys will be like, “I don’t want to go have dinner with some guy.” Well, you’ve got to go have dinner with some guy. And furthermore, you actually have to ask that other guy questions about his kids and be interested in that other person.

That sounds so obvious, but these are skills that a lot of men have lost—or never really cultivated over the course of their lives. And so you can go through these basic social skills, and they’re sort of mystifying to a lot of guys. But once they do it—I’ve seen case after case, because I’ve been coaching people on this now for a couple of years, since this research has started to get some prominence—and I’ve seen amazing progress from people who are older than me.