Adult life trajectories are changing.
Do men and women seek connection in the same way?
The most accurate answer would be: it depends on the individual.
The more interesting answer is: not always.
Research suggests that men and women place remarkably similar value on close friendships: trust, respect, presence and reciprocity.
Yet differences begin to emerge when we look at how those relationships are formed, sustained or allowed to fade.
Many women talk about their relationships. They nurture them, keep them alive and create opportunities to meet. They are often also the first to recognise when something is missing.
Many men form bonds while doing something else: working, playing a sport, travelling or sharing a project. Friendship develops laterally, without ever being declared as the purpose.
As long as work, partnership, established routines and familiar settings remain in place, this difference may be almost invisible.
Then life changes.
And what once happened naturally no longer does.
At that point, a seemingly simple question becomes far less straightforward:
if men and women share the same need for connection, why do they not participate in the same way when an opportunity arises to build new relationships?
The hidden fragility of adult networks
In recent years, the expression “male friendship recession” has entered the public conversation.
In the United States, the proportion of men reporting several close friends has declined, while the number saying they have none has increased. In the United Kingdom, a survey cited by The Guardian found that 22 per cent of men aged 55 and over never see their friends.
This does not necessarily describe men who have no social contact.
A person may have colleagues, acquaintances and professional contacts without having relationships capable of surviving beyond the setting in which they were formed.
When work changes, a shared activity ends or the balance of a relationship shifts, some bonds lose the structure that held them together.
For many women, a relationship is more likely to develop a continuity of its own. It may continue beyond the workplace, the gym, their children’s school or life as a couple.
For many men, the relationship may remain more closely tied to the activity they share. When that activity ends, the relationship itself is more likely to fade.
This is not a difference in emotional depth.
It is a different relational architecture.
The invisible direction of social life
Within couples, a significant part of social life is still organised by women.
They are often the ones who suggest a dinner, maintain contact and turn a casual acquaintance into an ongoing relationship. It is a discreet form of social direction, rarely acknowledged as such.
As long as the couple remains the centre of social life, both partners may appear to have access to the same network. In reality, one may be participating in relationships they did not help to create and may struggle to sustain with the same continuity when circumstances change.
Many women recognise this dynamic.
They know curious, intelligent men, capable of thoughtful conversation, who will gladly join an occasion someone else has organised but would be unlikely to initiate one themselves.
This does not make women better at relationships.
Women’s networks can also become closed, repetitive or sustained more by habit than by genuine affinity.
The point is not to decide who socialises better.
It is to understand why, when faced with the possibility of entering a new environment, people may engage in very different ways.
Socioemotional selectivity
As we grow older, our social networks tend to become smaller. Yet this is not always evidence of loss.
Research describes this process as “socioemotional selectivity”: when our perception of the future changes, we invest less in peripheral relationships and place greater value on those we consider meaningful.
We do not necessarily want to meet more people.
We want to meet people with whom our time feels worth sharing.
Yet this greater selectivity can make entering an unfamiliar environment more difficult. We become less willing to accept empty conversations, randomly assembled groups or situations in which chronological age is the only thing people have in common.
Being 55, 60 or 70 is not, in itself, a form of affinity.
What matters is curiosity, values, sensibility, accumulated experience and the way each person imagines the future.
Our cultural and professional journeys also shape what we seek in others.
Not because a degree guarantees greater human quality. Education, work, travel and the environments we have inhabited influence the language through which we interpret the world, the interests we cultivate and the depth of exchange we desire.
With time, we do not necessarily seek people who are identical to us.
But we become less willing to remain in places where we cannot recognise ourselves.
Adult life trajectories are changing
Society is profoundly changing the way we become adults, form relationships and grow older.
Life trajectories are no longer linear. Couples form, change or separate. Families take different shapes. More people are living alone—by choice, through circumstance or for increasingly long periods of their lives.
Living alone, once treated almost as an exception, now describes a growing part of society.
But living alone does not mean wanting to live without meaningful relationships.
It means that social life can no longer be imagined exclusively around partnership, family or work.
Different orientations, personal histories and emotional configurations have made the idea of a single adult model—one to which every life should conform—definitively obsolete.
More opportunities are not enough
A dinner among strangers does not automatically create a relationship. A journey may offer an extraordinary destination while leaving the distance between participants untouched. A crowded room can still produce a profound sense of disconnection.
The number of opportunities does not determine the quality of the experience.
Nor does bringing together people from the same age group necessarily create an environment in which they will recognise themselves.
Some people connect through conversation. Others begin with an interest, a project, a cultural experience or something to do together. In some cases, the relationship emerges only later, as a consequence of a shared experience.
If many people—and many men in particular—are less likely to join initiatives explicitly framed around socialising, asking them to adopt forms of participation that do not feel natural is unlikely to work.
The answer is to design propositions whose value is visible before the need for connection ever has to be declared.
An adult life stage still waiting to be designed
Longevity has not simply added more years to old age.
It has opened a new stage of adult life—one that society has not yet learned to recognise, let alone design for.
At 55 or 60, if health and circumstances are kind to us, we may still have another twenty or twenty-five years of good life ahead.
Not a biographical afterthought. Not residual time to be filled. But a season as consequential as those that came before it: still capable of choice, transformation and construction.
The point is not to fill a calendar.
It is to give form and direction to a horizon that did not exist, with the same breadth and possibilities, for the generations before us.
Yet while lives are becoming longer and trajectories less linear, our models of social life often continue to depend on partnership, family, work or relationships established many years ago.
AVA exists within this gap, born from the observation of human behaviour and the inadequacy of the answers currently available.
But the underlying question is larger.
It is not only about how long we will live.
It is about whether we can remain the authors of our own lives throughout all the time we have gained.
Sources and further reading
