My dad did not have many friends. I could count them on one hand. He was not a social man in the traditional sense. But he moved. He went places. The hardware store. The mall. His favorite, by far, was the airport. He would sit and watch planes take off, watch people say hello and goodbye to each other. That was his version of being around people.

Then COVID shut it all down.

No more hardware stores. No more malls. No more airports. Just the house, and the TV, and my mother.

Something in him changed. He got angrier. He watched more television than I had ever seen him watch. Not long after, he had a stroke. The stroke led to dementia, then he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The slide from there was fast. He died before my mother (who is still alive), just short of 85.

His father lived to 90. His grandfather made it to 95, and his grandfather’s wife to 99. But it was not just that he died younger than the men before him. It was how those last years went.

I keep coming back to the math. Two generations of men in his own family made it well past 90. He did not, and the way he did not haunts me more than the number itself. I keep asking the same question: How much of that gap, in years and in quality, was COVID, and the isolation it forced on a man whose entire social life was built on simply being out in the world?

The Male-Female Life Expectancy Gap

I used to think men just die younger than women. It felt like gravity. A fact of life nobody questions.

A recent policy analysis from the American Institute for Boys and Men looked at the male-female life expectancy gap across wealthy countries and found something men rarely hear about themselves: the size of the gap swings wildly, from as little as 2.5 years to as much as 12.7 years, depending on the country. In most places, it has been shrinking for decades.

If this were pure biology, the gap would look the same everywhere. It doesn’t. Lithuania cut its own gap by tightening road safety laws. Nothing about male chromosomes changed. The roads got safer, and fewer men died on them. That’s the part that I found interesting. If a change in traffic enforcement can add years back to men’s lives, then “men just die younger” is not a fact of life. It’s a description of conditions we have decided to accept.

What’s Actually Killing Men Early

The above analysis points to three causes doing most of the damage to men’s life expectancy: road traffic deaths, drug use disorders, and suicide. Road traffic is not a loneliness story. Men drive more miles, take more risks behind the wheel, and die in crashes at higher rates than women. That’s exposure and behavior, not isolation.

Suicide and substance use are a different story. The research on both points toward isolation as a contributing factor, alongside things like economic instability and job loss. Men who lose their social ties, their sense of purpose, their reasons to leave the house are men at higher risk on both counts.

My dad never got near either of those categories. But watching him lose the version of “going places” that had quietly held his life together made those statistics feel less abstract to me.

The Actual Research on Connection and Lifespan

The longest-running study of adult life ever conducted has been asking a version of my question for 85 years. The Harvard Study of Adult Development started in 1938, tracking 268 Harvard undergrads, one of them a young JFK, alongside 456 boys from some of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods. Researchers followed these men for the rest of their lives. Many are now followed through their children and grandchildren too. The current director of the study, psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, put it bluntly: loneliness kills. He says it’s as powerful as smoking or alcoholism.

Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s research backs this up from a different angle. Her meta-analysis of over 300,000 people, across 148 studies, found that social isolation carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking. Not a small elevated risk. Comparable to smoking.

What My Dad Lost Wasn’t Really ‘Places’

The hardware store, the mall, the airport, none of those were really about hardware, shopping, or planes. They were about being around people without having to explain himself. When COVID took the places away, it didn’t just take his errands. It took the low-effort, structured version of being around others that he had built his whole social life on, without ever calling it that. We don’t talk about “maintaining our social infrastructure.” We just go to the hardware store.

Loneliness Essential Reads

That’s the trap. Men’s friendship and connection often run through places and routines, not through effort we can see or name. When the places disappear, the connection disappears with them, and nobody, including the man himself, notices until the damage is done.

This Isn’t a ‘Man Up’ Problem

None of this means men need to try harder, feel more, or open up more. My dad didn’t need therapy to fix his loneliness after COVID hit. He needed the hardware store to reopen, or something like it. He needed a reason to be around people that didn’t require an invitation, a phone call, or an explanation. That’s what building male friendship on purpose actually looks like. Not deeper conversations. Structure. A regular place. A standing reason to show up.

If you’re looking for that kind of structure, it doesn’t have to be complicated. I write about simple ways to build it in The Male Friendship Experience–things like a standing breakfast with the same guys every week, or showing up to the same gym mats. The point isn’t the activity. It’s the “no need to explain yourself” part.