Is male friendship in trouble? Actor Andrew McCarthy went on a road trip to find out

saint andrew the apostle mary mccarthy says his boy wasn't face of the earth intend when he asked, "You don't have any friends, do you?"

"He was just telling me a funny story about one of his friends. And then he finished the story and he looked up and said that," the author and actor told Matt Galloway on The Current.

McCarthy, who is best known for his roles in the iconic 1980s' "Brat Pack" movies, describes himself as a fairly introverted person who is content with his own company. But he says his wife, Dolores Rice, had pointed out in the past that "at a certain point, introversion and sort of solitude can cross over the line into isolation."

"We can make all sorts of excuses that we're busy, we're working. We have family that's demanding and we just need some time for ourselves," he said.

McCarthy, 63, says that while he'd noticed less joy and less laughter in his day-to-day life, he "figured that's kind of the grind of life as one moves on in a certain way."

But it took his son's question to confront him with the reality that he had let his most important friendships wither. That sent him on a quest — and ultimately a road trip — to reconnect with old friends and interview scores of strangers about friendship.

McCarthy details that experience in his latest memoir, Who Needs Friends: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America.

Here is part of his conversation with Galloway.

In this book, you admit that you had gotten bad at friendship, and I just wonder what that means. Sometimes friendship can seem like it takes care of itself, but it it doesn't.

Well, I think it does if you're in proximity often and in habit. And I became in a habit of not cultivating and nurturing my friendships. Just to back up for a second, when I left home at 17 and moved to New York, I had this core group of friends that were sort of my chosen family, as we say now. Over time and marriages and jobs and life, they had just sort of scattered across the country. I hadn't seen any of them in years and years and some in decades.

And so, you know, when this whole thing came up, I said, "I need to go see these people." And I didn't take it any more seriously than that.

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And so you decide to go and see your friends, and you get out on this road trip ...

I wasn't planning to make a road trip. I was just planning to fly down to each, one at a time over the next X amount of months and just sort of reconnect. So I called them up and said, "I want to come see you." And they were like, "Love to, love to. I'm too busy right now."

One of them is Seve, who is kind of like your surrogate brother. Tell us a little bit about him.

Seve lives down in Baltimore, four hours away. And I hadn't seen him in years, and there's no excuse for that. He'd developed very bad back problems and had to have operations that didn't work. He'd become a bit of a shut-in, and [before] he was a wildly extroverted guy. So when I was planning to come down and see him, he cancelled on me twice and once at the last minute. I thought he sounded really bad on the phone, so it just worried me. And I did think, "Do I want the next time I see my friend to be at his funeral?" I got in the car the next night. I just drove and knocked on his door.

He didn't want to let you in. You force your way in ... And say, "I'm staying here, I'm going to help you through this." What was it like to see him again?

We didn't catch up so much as we just picked up. It just began again. It was awkward in a sense at first, because I walked into his apartment, and it was chock-a-block with delivery boxes everywhere. And I realized he was buying things in the middle of the night, like, random little tiny things that were sort of acts of optimism. "These are things I'm going to need when I get my life back."

There's a stat that you quote from a University of Kansas study that says it takes 200 hours to make a good friend. There's making friends, and then there's keeping a friendship alive. What did you learn about what it takes to keep a friendship going?

The one thing I did with this whole trip — 10,000 miles across 22 states — was show up, and I did nothing else. My friends would all go, "You drove all this way to come see me?" I was like, "Yeah, you've been really important in my life, and I just needed to tell you that." They were then, in turn, able to sort of acknowledge that and say their version of the same to me.

Aristotle wrote a lot about friendship, and he said the most perfect type of friendships are [between] people that recognize the value of the friendship in each other and are able to acknowledge it to each other, and that takes it to a deeper kind of level..

If men are not good at being friends and building a friendship circle, how do you go about addressing this?

I'm not sure that we're not good. But all good things are sort of challenging. If you've gotten out of the habit, if a muscle has atrophied, you have to go back to the gym, and it's no fun at the beginning.

I continue now to have active friendships with these men. It's been a couple of years now and I've seen several of them multiple times. I've been calling and texting with them. They're actively again in my life, which is such a nice thing. It just required a little sort of wake-up call that I got from my wife and son, and then me actually being willing to do something about it.

Do you think you're a better friend now than you were?

Yeah, sure. And you know, and selfishly so. My life is better.

Journalist

Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Produced by Sam Juric.

Add some “good” to your morning and evening.

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