Where Did All My Male Friendships Go?

Modern Love

The New York Times

Love, New York Times, Nytimes, Essay, Loss, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Redemption, Nyt

4.3 • 9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sam Graham-Felsen never imagined being lonely. Throughout his childhood and as a young man his life revolved around his friends. But when Sam got married and then had kids, going out with his friends almost felt like a luxury. After years of focusing on everything in his life except friendship, Sam began to realize he was missing something essential, and he decided to get his friends back. On this episode of “Modern Love,” Mr. Graham-Felsen describes how he went from being a boy with a wealth of deep friendships to finding himself feeling lonely as an adult, and what he did to bring friendship back into his life. Read his essay “Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?” in The New York Times Magazine. Here’s how to submit a Modern Love essay to The New York Times. Here’s how to submit a Tiny Love Story.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey, everyone, it's Anna. If you're a fan of our show, I'm going to take a wild guess and assume you're also a fan of other New York Times podcasts. So I want to tell you about the new listening experience in the New York Times app. I got to say, it's great. I love that I can swipe through highlight clips from different podcasts, which makes it so easy to find somebody to start listening to. And it has more than just podcasts. It's also got narrated
0:25.2	articles from the Times that you can listen to, which I find to be very helpful for finally
0:29.9	getting to those long articles I've been meaning to read. And even though, of course, we love
0:35.0	audio over here, there's so much more to the app than just listening.
0:38.7	Like how you can follow the Modern Love column, so you never miss an unforgettable essay or tiny love story.
0:45.1	So go to the App Store, get the New York Times app, and tap Listen at the bottom of the screen to start exploring.
0:52.9	All right, here's today's episode.
0:56.6	Love now and...
0:58.1	Did you fall in love?
0:58.8	Love was stronger than anything.
1:02.1	For the love.
1:02.8	Love.
1:03.0	And I love you more than anything.
1:06.3	There's to love.
1:07.0	Love.
1:10.6	From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin.
1:12.9	This is Modern Love.
1:14.4	This week, I'm talking to the writer Sam Graham Felsen.
1:17.4	He just wrote a piece for the New York Times magazine called,
1:20.4	Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?
1:23.4	It wasn't like one day I woke up and was like, oh my God, I'm lonely.
1:28.5	But it was kind of like that.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The New York Times, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The New York Times and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.