The day itself arrived gradually and then suddenly. Now I just had to wait for the inevitable midlife “crisis”. I had reached a certain milestone in my life: from now on, any more than a few drinks would produce a two-day hangover, while any longer than an hour’s exercise could cause a stroke. Or that at least was what the naysayers would have had me believe.
It was time to grow up, settle down into domesticity and clamber aboard the train that would eventually deposit me into old age. Perhaps it’s no wonder that many men experience a crisis between 40 and 60. We’re told to expect it. Family and friends are on high alert for the signs. A new haircut, a shirt that’s too loud — indicators that trouble is brewing.
A KGB manual from the Eighties even spelt it out: “The 40-45 age range represents the most significant age-related crisis, often referred to as the ‘midlife crisis’.” In identifying types that were potentially ripe for recruitment, the Soviets had homed in on a universal archetype: the male navigating the midlife doldrums. “The dissatisfaction experienced at this stage can be summed up in the questions one asks oneself: ‘Why? What is all this for?’ ’’
The big day itself was anticlimactic. I didn’t buy a sports car (if only) or run off with a woman half my age. Instead, I went out for a quiet meal with my partner. I had the salmon and she had the steak. If I was afflicted with a bout of self-questioning that night, it was about whether to order dessert.
Though I had not been transformed by this supposed milestone, the same could hardly be said for the world around me. Post-Covid and post-40 were more or less the same thing for me. I turned 40 in 2022, year one of the “new normal”. To emerge from that time was bittersweet. A new world had been born and I didn’t like it: I found myself hankering after the before times. Old habits and routines had perished. Social skills had atrophied. Friends who had seemingly dropped off the face of the earth in 2020 didn’t all re-emerge once the masks came off. Others seemed chained to the glowing screens that had sustained them during the pandemic.
The crisis is often invisible until it isn’t
According to the Belonging Forum, a non-profit organisation dedicated to combating social isolation, men aged 55 to 64 are the most likely to report having no close friends. Men are significantly more likely than women to say they have no one outside their family to turn to in a crisis. It doesn’t help that many male friendships revolve around specific activities or are mediated through a romantic partner. Men often seem reluctant to get together unless there is a focal point, typically involving alcohol or sport. Forty-seven per cent of men say they tend to spend time with friends at bars or pubs, compared with 37 per cent of women. For men in midlife, when work, marriage and fatherhood often narrow social circles rather than expand them, the loss of these focal points can be keenly felt.
One pub a day disappeared on average in England and Wales in 2025. Meanwhile, participation in some grassroots sports has ebbed in recent years. Take cricket — once a staple of village and town life for many men. Growing up in Somerset, I used to play club cricket (albeit badly). Our local team had a 1st, 2nd and 3rd XI; for juniors there were under-11s, under-13s and under-15s. You could progress through the ranks and play for as long as you liked.
Today it’s a different story. The junior sides have long since folded for a lack of volunteers. And the seniors are lucky to scrape together a 2nd XI. Research shows that in England the number of people playing the game at least twice a month in the summer fell from 364,600 in 2016 to 292,200 by 2019. Now, one could attribute this to things other than our increasing social isolation. But it’s hard to escape the sense that civic participation is withering on the vine. For men in their forties and fifties, these are precisely the kinds of low-stakes arenas in which connection once happened effortlessly.
Perhaps worst of all, much of this isolation is chalked up as “progress”, which has become synonymous with convenience and isolation: food at the click of a button, home entertainment on demand, life lived through the mediating filter of a 6in screen.
This quiet erosion is not simply anecdotal. Across the western world, middle-aged men have seen rising deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug misuse — the so-called “deaths of despair”. “A lot of men in midlife look fine on paper. They have jobs, families, responsibilities. But underneath that, there is often a growing sense of isolation,” says Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. “We have built a culture that expects men to stay steady and self-reliant, even as their social world quietly shrinks.” In other words, the crisis is often invisible until it isn’t. The male malaise, Reeves argues, frequently strikes in middle age.
The benefits of walking and talking
“A lot of guys sign up for stuff but they don’t show up,” says Joe Horton, who runs a men’s hiking group in the Ashdown Forest, East Sussex. “I think sometimes that plays into their self-image of being a failure and not following through and being flaky.” The men’s hiking group heads out once a month for what Joe describes as “two hours of walking and talking”. There are two cardinal rules on the hike. The first is that what happens on the walk stays on the walk. The second is don’t be a dick. “I don’t call it a safe space. I call it a free space. Guys can talk about whatever they want to talk about … No subject is off limits.” Horton says that close connections form when men “trust each other and feel that what they’re saying isn’t going to be weaponised or used against them”.
Horton, 46, began his journey into the men’s movement ten years ago, shortly after the death of his father. “I could see in my own life that social isolation could creep in really easily,” he tells me. As well as bereavement, divorce can be another unwelcome midlife fixture that is similarly linked to anxiety and depression. Besides the separation itself, there are often social repercussions: an entire network of friendships can disappear almost overnight.
“The people you talk to, the people you go for dinner with or have around your house, or go for drinks with at Christmas and new year, they’re suddenly all switched off,” says Mike Brooker, 48 and a mortgage broker from East Grinstead. Brooker describes a “very dark time” following the breakdown of his first marriage. His friendship circle had been made up mostly of husbands of his wife’s friends. At this stage of life, when marriages end and children grow up, the stakes are not abstract. In Britain, suicide is one of the leading causes of death among men in their forties — a quiet epidemic that rarely intrudes into polite conversation. “I’m not in the least bit surprised,” he tells me. Brooker has been part of the hiking group for a year now and cites it as the reason he’s “still here”.
Will Handley, 50, discovered the group while going through a difficult period in his life. In 2018, during a family holiday in Greece, Will and his wife noticed excessive bruising on their young daughter’s body — more than could have been caused by an accident or fall. The family subsequently fell through “a series of trap doors”, as Handley puts it, culminating in a diagnosis of leukaemia with one of the lowest survival rates for all cancers. Their daughter died on New Year’s Day, 2020.
“We were quite comfortable in London and then our world fell apart,” Handley tells me. Up to that point he had been in charge of a successful tech start-up. “I went from running a company to the co-founders giving me indefinite compassionate leave.” Four months after their bereavement, he and his wife had another daughter. The family decided to leave London, relocating to the village of Forest Row in East Sussex. Their friendship group had already become smaller by that time due to the strains of coping with their loss. “With friends with kids of a similar age it was like, well, I’m probably never going to have that easy friendship with you again because it’s just too triggering.”
Handley never returned to his old business: he lost his appetite for marketing and is retraining to be a financial adviser. Following the move, his wife encouraged him to look into joining a men’s group. He was sceptical at first. “The idea of going to a group was quite exposing, having to tell the story. Even now it feels a little daunting, even though I’ve been going to it for three years.”
When they aren’t hiking, the men act as a support group for each other. They have a WhatsApp chat where they share tips on mental health and organise other outings. “It’s just a world of difference from my WhatsApp group with my original mates,” Handley says. “It’s a bunch of like-minded dads who go for a hike once a month and chat about anything as part of your mental health.”
The hike is one way of rebuilding connection. There are others, not all of which involve talking. At 41, I started to play football again. I’d recently been to Brazil with my partner (she’s from Sao Paulo) and had caught the bug after kicking a ball around with her dad and his friends. I enjoyed it so much that I realised I didn’t want to leave it there, so back in London I found a local team online that was short of players. It had been ten years since I last played. Was I nervous ahead of the first game? Hell, yes. Do I regret joining up? Not at all. Two and a half years later, I’m still playing twice a week. I have to take care of myself a bit more these days: stretching after games, eating enough protein, avoiding the muscle imbalances that can come from a sedentary desk job — but getting back into the game has been one of the best things I’ve done.
In my case, the pandemic was the moment when colour began to drain out of my social life. But it’s different for everyone. Brooker describes 1996 as “probably the single greatest summer” of his life. “I saw England play Scotland at the old Wembley in Euro 96, I went to Ibiza for the first time and I saw Oasis twice that year.” Twenty years later, he was taking antidepressants. “I’m sitting at home, not doing anything, not going anywhere, and everybody else is doing exactly the same thing. And nobody asks why.”
He remarried in 2018 and it was his wife who encouraged him to find more time for himself. “I came off antidepressants about seven or eight months ago and I don’t think I’ve ever been in a better place,” he says.
Men need greater material support
“I think a lot of guys have a loose life plan: get married, settle down, have kids and live happily ever after,” Horton says. But then what? It’s the “no man’s land” that comes after, as he describes it, where a lot of men come unstuck. Or things don’t follow the happily-ever-after script.
Structure isn’t the whole story, though. There is a cultural aspect to isolation too. In my case, moving back to London (I spent Covid holed up in Somerset shielding my grandmother) temporarily made things worse. I love the anonymity of the city, but it gets lonely. Even talking to another person on public transport feels like a breach of social etiquette.
In some ways things are better today than they were in the past. Men are arguably less reluctant to talk about their mental health. Stoicism is no longer valued as highly as it once was. Yet men remain markedly less likely than women to seek professional help for mental health problems, even though they account for the majority of suicide deaths.
Getty ImagesIn recent years the rhetoric has shifted dramatically. Footballers wear warm-up tops urging men to speak; workplaces host mental-health awareness weeks; #WorldMentalHealthDay trends reliably each October. But encouraging men to open up means little if it isn’t backed by resources. In 2022, after suffering badly following the death of a close relative, I sought counselling through the NHS. I took seriously the hashtags and the celebrity-fronted campaigns. But I had to wait months before I was given the option of a group therapy session — conducted over Zoom, of course. In other words, sloganeering is not a sufficient replacement for material support.
Middle age invariably brings questions of mortality to the fore. After all, we are not the only ones who are getting older. When grief arrives, it does not always hit you at once. Sean Alexander is 53 and from Holyhead, north Wales. His mother died shortly before Christmas in 2022. “I sort of carried on for about a year, running on fumes, and then basically I couldn’t any more. And my marriage broke up about the same time.”
Alexander has been unemployed for several years. The main reason, he believes, is because he didn’t allow himself time to deal with the loss. Nobody warns you that any of this is coming: that bereavements will rock your world or that friends will fade away in search of their own happily ever after. And so we shrug our shoulders and settle in for another night with a box set and convince ourselves that this is just how it is. Perhaps the real surprise is how it all pans out with so little drama.
There is no crash. No spectacle. Just steady attrition; a gradual unspooling of a life that once felt solid. A sports team folds. Another pub closes. Invitations quietly expire. The places that once brought men together — the Friday pint, the Sunday league, the school gate, the committee room above the pub, the allotment, the church hall, the branch meeting, the snooker hall, the cricket pavilion — fall away over many years. We are too busy, too tired. The modern entertainments waiting for us at home are too enticing.
We call it a “midlife crisis”, as if the fault lies with the individual. More often it is the result of the quiet dismantling of the everyday structures that once held people together. What looks like a personal crisis is often something simpler: the habits and routines that brought people together have given way like rotten floorboards. If there is a reckoning, it is not so much with age as with the fact that social life runs on inertia. In the second half of life, connection rarely falls into one’s lap. It requires effort — and the unfashionable habit of turning up.
