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In his mid-30s, Sammi Gale feared losing his best friend Billy. So he suggested something radical: seeing a professional to save their relationship. Could ‘doing the work’ be the solution to the crisis of male loneliness?
Billy’s one of those men who can safely bury a light in the wall. In every flat I’ve lived in over the past ten years, he has told me which long number is the right one to read on my gas meter. He has a Connell chain and a girlie laugh and sandy-blond stubble true to a golden retrieverish spirit. He can point to the spot in Shoreditch where Shakespeare was performed, now an office block, which he remembers from a Wikipedia spiral, and he pinch-zooms on Google Maps with a finesse unlike anyone else I know.
We met nearly ten years ago outside a pub in Brighton, around the time I had just started hooking up with Emily. The nights she wasn’t at mine, she was crashing on Billy and Hollie’s sofa. They are now married, Emily and I have our own sofa, and the four of us share a WhatsApp group, “Al Fresco Boozing”, titled during the picnic days of the pandemic, when they were the first people we wanted to see.
Billy is one of my best friends. Yet so often, there is a pint or a pool table between us. If a conversation looks like it’s getting flinty, it’s usually deflected with a joke. I’ve tried confiding in him about relationship dilemmas, but his advice is a little sparse, or else dark and satirical, à la Stewart Lee. Once, when I told him my grandma had just died, there was a millisecond where he glanced down at the newspaper folded on the crossword page and seemed to consider picking it up.
As I’ve got older, I’ve begun to wonder if our friendship needs to grow up too. While I’m lucky enough to have no shortage of friends, they’re all 30s-ing around, getting married, having babies, and moving to Haywards Heath. The increasing commitments of life are making it harder for us to spend quality time together, and I reckon doing so in the manner we did in our 20s – namely, necking beers until we sang Robbie Williams’ “Angels” a capella at 3am – could get grey and old. As a result of these diminishing returns, many of my friendships from growing up have simply fizzled out. I don’t want that to happen with Billy – he is too special – but if we’re going the long haul then I need to be able to talk about deep stuff with him.