Making Friends in Fatherhood

How hiding from another dad at a baby group helped me better understand the social pressures that modern fathers are under

Before I jump into my fears about making new adult friends, let me start with a short story - I’m in the park on a Sunday afternoon with my daughter. I scroll through my phone for a bit whilst she makes her away up to go down the slide again. When I look up, she’s stood talking to another girl the same age as her. They exchange some words, my daughter strokes the other girl’s hair, then they go down the slide together and start walking around the rest of the playground holding hands and chatting away, like they’ve known each other their whole lives.

What a lovely, heartwarming moment. Bless their little hearts, I think. I turn to say something to the girl’s mum.

The records scratches. Shit - it’s another dad.

I stop dead in my tracks. A thousand thoughts flood my senses at once. I’ve always told myself I want to make more friends who are dads, but now the opportunity has come to engage in harmless smalltalk, and I’m clamming up. I wrestle with what to say, what foot to put forward, all the possible outcomes and conversations that could be sparked by my next choice of words.

But, as time and time again has happened, I freeze. I search for something, anything to say, but I reach inside my mind to the same place I always go; the stock phrase dribbles out of my mouth.

“Alright?”

He gives a perfunctory response, and that’s that. We watch our kids possibly start a blossoming friendship in miserable, dreary silence, until one of us looks at our phone and decides we want to leave.

The only way this playground could be scarier is if another dad slowly emerged out of the mis

Sound familiar?

One thing about me is that I’ve always had trouble making connections with other males. As much as I love my dad, he wasn’t around much when I was younger - or at least I don’t have much memory of it. He was busy with work a lot of the time, and whilst I’m grateful for the upbringing and stability that his hard work paid for, what it left behind was a lack of a consistent male role model for me growing up. No bitterness or resentment; just how it is.

Whilst I have made male friends through my childhood, teens, university and beyond, they became harder for me to sustain and new ones harder to establish as the years went on. I thought it was just my circumstances.

Then I became a dad, and entered that world. I heard about other fathers’ experiences of awkwardness around other dads, difficulty making new connections with other dads and general loneliness, and I realised that maybe what I was feeling wasn’t just down to my own personal situation.

Some of the headline figures in that article tell the story better than I could. Eight million men in the UK have felt loneliness at some point in their lives; 32% of men don’t have what they’d call a best friend (I’m one of them). More worryingly, another report found that loneliness is worse for our health and wellbeing than obesity.

To me, it’s clear that there’s more dads than just me out there who have the same feelings as I do; maybe we have supportive partners and families around us, but we still feel lonely from time to time. Hell, especially if you became a dad in or just before the pandemic - you didn’t even get the chance.

We crave connections in our lives. We want to share our experiences with someone else going through the same thing. We want dad friends.

So why do we find it so hard to make them? Well, this is how I came to my own personal answer to that question.

The first month after having my first, obviously I barely left the house. The only times I did were entirely unnecessary excursions to introduce the baby to family (they should have been coming to us, in tow with trays of lasagna - but that’s for another day), so combine that with no sleep and a full-fledged existential crisis, it’s safe to say that when I first emerged back into the world and returned to the office, I was in no fit state for regular adult human interactions with people I already knew, let alone strangers.

But I was getting to a point already where I felt like I needed to unload; like I needed someone to listen and reflect back to me everything I had to say on the daily hardback that is early fatherhood. As useful as it was talking things over with my wife, she’s literally in the same room with me throughout the entire ordeal, so there’s not really anything novel we’re gleaning from each other at that point. And talking to my dad about early fatherhood was about as useful as if I’d started talking to a potted houseplant. Either he didn’t remember or he wasn’t there.

So naturally, I had no choice but to hope for a connection from outside the heavily-insulated bubble that newborn life had encased me in. I just needed an opportunity.

Fortunately, one presented itself quite quickly. I’d decided to compress my hours into a four day working week, meaning I now had Fridays off. With that extra free time, I took the chance to go along to a baby group with my wife and baby daughter on Friday mornings. Great, I thought. This could be the chance to actually talk to another dad going through the same thing.

Of course, the first few weeks I go along, I’m the only bloke there. Of fucking course, my inner critic said. Real men don’t take days off in the week, they’re grafting on a building site. Not like you, you skiving little pen pusher. So I had that to contend with, as well as the underlying social anxiety that being the only male in the room (aside from the babies) gave me; like the other mums thought I was some kind of nonce. A ridiculous thought looking back, but when I’m anxious, stressed and tired, I tend to think mad shit like that.

Eventually though, another dad did show up, looking as beat up, dishevelled and awkward to be there as me. Brilliant - what better common bond could there be between two people?

But as the session went on, I realised I couldn’t even bare to look at him, much less go over and strike up a conversation. I even made sure when it came to going over to a soft play area half-way through the class, I corralled my little family into the furthest corner of the mat, as far away from the other dad as possible. I even positioned us behind some of the bigger inflatable toys that were there so I didn’t have to run the risk of accidentally making eye-contact.

I drove back from that class defeated, but for the life of me I couldn’t understand why I’d felt so resistant - fearful, even - to even the easiest bit of small talk with this bloke. At the time, I put it down to my innate shyness, and got on with it.

But looking back, it wasn’t just that. At that time, and on other occasions since then, whenever I entertained the idea of trying to make conversation with another dad, or thinking about what it’d be like to have a new dad friend, I felt ridiculous. When I talked about it to my wife, she’d be supportive and encourage me to venture out of my comfort zone, but even just saying the phrase ‘dad friend’ kept calling back into my memory that scene from The Inbetweeners.

Whilst that’s just a scene in a TV show, for many British men around my age, it encapsulates an awful lot of the kind of dynamics and pressures teenage boys were subject to in their social circles. You have to act a certain way and never deviate from that prescribed notion of ‘normal’ - watch and play football, be obsessed with girls and beer, always take the piss out of your mates and never show weakness ever. Robert Webb describes the same thing and his experiences with it in his brilliant book, How Not To Be A Boy.

At that age, we don’t question where that pressure comes from, or who started it. For the most part, we do the easiest thing there is to do - conform. We adapt to get through our formative years, which are far harder than the rest of society tends to recognise.

The key word in that last sentence was ‘formative’ - in our teens, our brains are literally still forming. We get thrown into these situations where we have to act a certain way - mostly outside of our authentic selves - and our brains form around those inauthentic notions of what it is to be accepted. We are literally teaching ourselves not to be ourselves.

My experience of this happening to me brings me back to now - wanting to reach out and make friends but feeling stupid for wanting to. Why? Because to make new connections with people, it takes showing authenticity and vulnerability. Very few people can fake a friendship - it takes the real you to do it properly.

Think about it - when’s the easiest time in your life to make friends? When you’re a kid, right? Like my daughter in the park. Before all these social pressures and pre-conceived ideas of what you should be and how you should act are forced upon you. All you have at that age is your authentic self. Like-minded kids gravitate to you, and there you have it - friends, maybe even for life. It didn’t take any effort, because there was no resisting force acting against you.

But as we go through those formative years, and we take on the communal baggage of society, it gets exponentially harder. It did for me, and I don’t doubt for a moment it does for other dads.

You might be lucky enough to have male friends from your youth who still stuck in the same area as you, and have had kids at the same time as you - and that’s great. But I think those dads are in the minority. I think most - and even maybe some of those other ones too - might just want a new dad friend, but feel like they’re not allowed to want to.

Working to break down these mental blocks and presenting ourselves openly to new people in pursuit of new friendships is really hard, particularly when we’ve been set in certain behaviours for so long. And I’m not here to say “I’ve done it and you can too!”, because I haven’t yet. It’s helped to recognise why I’ve felt this way about making friends, sure, but I’ve still got some way to go. I still second guess every interaction with another dad.

All I want to say is that if you feel the same kind of way I did (and still do) - like you can’t make new friends in adulthood and fatherhood because it’s lame to want new friends, or you’re too worried about opening yourself up to possible rejection - I get it. Those thoughts are real, and they aren’t our fault. We did what we had to do at a turbulent time in our lives to get through it, and now it’s harder to re-adapt to a different world.

I’m not saying you have to go and start pouring out your life story to the next dad you see stood at the swings. What I’m saying is that it’s alright for us to want to seek out other dads; to want to connect with someone going through the same anxieties, frustrations, fears and all-around clusterfuck of emotions as you. Our inner teenager may be horrified and worried that it’ll open us up to all kinds of abuse and ridicule. They might be scared that any feelings we offer up will get thrown back in our faces, like they did when we were younger.

The prospect of rejection is daunting. I’ve lived constantly in fear of it for over twenty years, and still do from time to time. But by knowing myself a little bit better, I can reframe it, if it does happen. If some dad at the playground doesn’t want to say hello back or whatever, I know it’s not to do with me anymore. Maybe they’re worried about opening up to a new person; maybe they just want the weird dad at the park to piss off and stop talking to them. Either way, it’s more about them than me, and that’s fine.

It takes a while to get that notion through to the inner teenage boy. I still have those discussions every day. The tide is turning, but he still wins out a fair amount. But each time, the message to him is the same: It’s OK - there’s no beatings or ridicule waiting for us if we show our true selves anymore.

In fact, when we’re up to it, doing so might just change our lives for the better.

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Have you felt the same way about making dad friends? Are you feeling like you want to reach out, but can’t quite get there? I’d love to hear about your experiences.

Maybe you recognise the same feelings as I’ve had when it come to making new dad friends. Or maybe you’ve thought about your own reasons, if you’ve encountered the same struggles. Either way, hopefully by realising what’s behind your hesitance, it’ll make whatever step is next easier to take. And whilst it’s preferable to make these connections in real life, in the flesh, it can’t hurt to reach out to someone here. It’s a good a start as any.