The mate question

At seven months, I scrolled my recent texts and counted. In the previous fortnight, I'd messaged three friends. One was a logistical reply about a wedding I wasn't going to. One was a one-word laugh emoji. One was a man I'd known for fifteen years asking how I was, which I'd left on read for two weeks.

Pre-baby, I had a group chat with five mates that ran daily. Pre-baby, I caught up with two or three of them every fortnight. By month seven, the group chat was a graveyard, and my closest friend had given up texting me.

I hadn't decided to drift. I'd just stopped showing up. Same outcome.

This module is about friendships at six to twelve months in. Who's still around. Who's quietly drifted. Which of them you can pull back. And the new tribe most fathers don't realise they need.

The four kinds of friend at six months in

When you survey the wreckage at the half-year mark, your friends sort into four buckets. Knowing which bucket each one is in tells you what to do.

1. Mates with kids the same age. They get it. They text at 5am because they're also up. They forgive the cancelled coffee because they cancelled three on you. They are now, whether you planned it or not, your most active friendship category.

2. Mates with older kids. They've been through it. They are kind in a specific way: they don't try to relate to the present, they remember it. They will tell you which bits get easier and which bits don't. Worth keeping close. They've already done the marathon.

3. Mates without kids. Some are still around. Some have quietly disengaged because you stopped being available, because their partner didn't connect with yours, or because the gap in current life-shape is now too wide to bridge with a Saturday lunch. This is the most painful bucket, because some of these friendships were the centre of your twenties.

4. Mates whose partners didn't connect with yours. Couple-friendship has its own physics. If the women didn't gel, the friendship pre-baby ran on you and him at a pub. Post-baby, you're not at the pub. The friendship has lost its venue. It can survive, but it requires you to seek him out one-on-one, not as a couple.

Who's actually drifted, and why

The honest accounting at month seven looks like this:

• The childless mates whose partners didn't connect with yours: gone, or going. Most of these don't come back without active work.
• The mates who had kids three or four years before you: present. They've been waiting for you to enter the chat.
• The mates who had a baby at exactly the same time: aggressively present. They're the most reliable friendships of this decade.
• The "mates" who were colleagues, neighbours, gym-acquaintances: gone, with no fanfare. Not friends, in the end. That's clarifying, not tragic.

The friendships you lose at six months are mostly the friendships that were already running on convenience. Convenience is gone. The friendships that survive are the ones at least one of you was willing to do work on.

How to pull a few back

Pick three. No more.

The instinct is to send a guilty round-robin to twenty people apologising for being a ghost. Don't. The round-robin signals you're aware but not committed; it generates a polite reply and then nothing.

Pick three men. The criteria:

• One you genuinely want in your life at fifty.
• One who's also a parent and is in a similar enough season that the friendship doesn't require a babysitter.
• One who is a single thread to a part of you (sport, work, hobby) that the new life has squeezed out.

Then, for each of them, the same first move:

• A specific text. Not "we should catch up." A real day, a real time, a real plan. "Sunday morning, 8am, walk along the river, hour and a half, kid in the carrier. Yes or no." A clear ask is harder to flake on than an open one.
• If they say no, propose a backup. If they flake, propose another. Two attempts. After that, you've done your bit; the ball is in their court.

The thing nobody tells you about adult male friendships in your thirties and forties: somebody has to be the one who keeps proposing. For the next decade, that's you. If you wait to be invited, you'll be sitting on the same couch, alone with your phone, in 2030.

The new-dads-with-same-age-kids tribe

This is the friendship category that catches men by surprise. You walk into a baby class. You sit at the back. You make a wisecrack about being the only dad in the room. Another dad at the back makes a wisecrack back. Six months later, you're walking your kids in a park together every other Sunday and you've told him things you haven't told the men you grew up with.

It happens because the shared current experience is denser than ten years of shared history. He knows what your Tuesday actually looks like. He doesn't need a ten-minute preamble to understand why you're tired. The friendship runs on present-tense compression, and it can become genuinely deep, surprisingly fast.

Where these tribes form:

• Baby classes, swim classes, music classes. Sit near other dads. Speak to one of them.
• The local park, weekday mornings. Same dads at the same playground in the same fortnight. Say hello.
• Daycare drop-off. The other dad doing drop-off has the same calendar pressure you do. Get his number for school-pickup swap purposes; the friendship grows from there.
• Antenatal-class WhatsApp groups, six months on. The half that didn't fall silent is mostly men, mostly grateful.

The cliche is that men don't make friends easily. The truth, in this season, is that men make friends easily when there's a structural reason to be in the same room repeatedly. Baby class is that room. Use it.

What to do with the partner-driven friendships

If she has a circle of new-mum friends and you're being pulled into hangouts with their partners, treat it generously. Some of those men are going to be your friends. Some are not. You won't know which is which for months.

The rule: show up to the group thing twice. By the third invite, you'll know if there's a man in there worth a one-on-one beer. If there is, ask. If there isn't, keep showing up at half the cadence she does, and don't pretend otherwise.

What you should not do

• Don't binge-message everyone after a glass of wine. The 11pm "we should catch up properly!!" texts are noise to the recipient and don't lead anywhere.
• Don't perform friendship online. A like on his post is not a friendship; he sees it as the absence of a real conversation.
• Don't take the silence personally from the mates who disappeared. Most of them aren't angry. They just stopped having a reason to text, and didn't replace it.
• Don't pretend you have time you don't have. Two real hours a fortnight beats a vague monthly promise.

The thing nobody told you

You will lose half your friendships in the first year of fatherhood. The half that goes was always going. The half that stays will see you in a way the previous decade never required them to. And alongside that loss, a new tribe will form, faster than you'd think, in spaces (parks, classes, daycare gates) you didn't know were friendship venues until you were standing in them.

Pick three. Propose specifics. Sit near the other dads.

Further watching

• Why a growing number of American men say they are in a 'friendship recession' (PBS NewsHour)
• 1 in 3 Men Have ZERO Friends (Here's Why)