Matt Dinan, on “Friendship as Soulcraft”:

Maybe men struggle with living meaningful lives precisely because they believe themselves complete without friendship. Friendship gives us a needed break from our own autonomy, from the need to figure everything out for ourselves. Friends refract the world back to us, taking what we thought we knew and making it new and different, but still capable of being understood. In this way, friendship is about alterity, about openness in the place of assertion. Friendlessness is often adduced as one of the symptoms of the “problem” with men, but such alienation is not a symptom of the lack of flourishing—it is, rather, its cause.