As the conversation around what it means to be a man increasingly turns to loneliness, vulnerability, relationships, and the disappearance of close male friendships, four men who have remained remarkably close for more than 40 years offer something unusual: a living example of what enduring male friendship can actually look like.
In The Wilderness of Friendship: Forty Years of Hospitality, Vulnerability, and Wonder (Cascade Books; July 24, 2026), Bill Friskics-Warren, Bill Harkins, Paul Shupe, and Bob Victorin-Vangerud tell the story of a friendship that began at Vanderbilt Divinity School in the 1980s and has endured through marriage, fatherhood, demanding careers, illness, loss, aging, and decades of annual wilderness gatherings.
Their experience raises a timely question: If relationships are essential to a meaningful life, why do so many men allow their closest friendships to disappear, and what does it take to keep them?
For these four men, friendship didn't endure by accident. It required making time for one another, showing up when it wasn't convenient, risking vulnerability, listening without judgment, staying curious about one another's lives, and allowing their relationships to change as they changed. Their story also challenges the idea that vulnerability and masculinity are somehow at odds. Over four decades, they have found that being willing to ask for help, talk about fear and loss, and remain emotionally present for one another has made them not only better friends, but better husbands, fathers, mentors, and members of their communities.
I had a chance to learn more in this author interview.
Why is it so common for men's friendships to fade over the years?
We know from our own experience how easily this can happen. When we first became friends at Vanderbilt Divinity School in the 1980s, friendship was woven naturally into our daily lives. Then came marriages, children, careers, moves, responsibilities, and all the demands of adulthood. There were years when we lived across the country from one another and had only occasional contact. Life gets very full, and friendship can become something we assume will simply take care of itself.
There is also something particular about the way many men have been taught to approach relationships. We are often encouraged to be self-sufficient, to hide weakness, and to avoid making ourselves vulnerable. But if we are unwilling to let other people see our fears, disappointments, uncertainties, and limitations, it becomes very difficult to develop deep friendships. The irony is that protecting ourselves from vulnerability can ultimately leave us more isolated.
Why is it important for men to continue to make and keep friends?
Because we need one another. That sounds simple, but it has taken us much of our lives to understand how profound that truth is.
Friendship gives men a place where they do not always have to perform, fix something, be successful, or have the answer. At its best, friendship gives us people who will listen, challenge us, laugh with us, sit beside us when life becomes painful, and remind us who we are when we have lost our bearings.
Over the years, the four of us have accompanied one another through parenthood, the deaths of parents, children leaving and returning home, the arrival of grandchildren, retirement, vocational changes, illness, and our growing awareness of our own mortality. Those relationships have not merely made life more enjoyable. They have helped us become more fully ourselves. As we say in the book, we needed one another, along with our spouses and children, to sustain and nurture us on the journey.
How can men continue to strengthen relationships through different phases of life?
First, make the friendship a priority. There were years when our friendship became more distant, but eventually we made a conscious decision to come back together. What began with a wilderness trip eventually became annual gatherings in places such as Montana, North Carolina, Nashville, Maine, and Colorado. Those gatherings gave us something increasingly rare in adult life: uninterrupted time together.
But maintaining a friendship is about more than scheduling a trip. It is about creating a kind of hospitality for one another. For us, that has meant welcoming each other not only into our homes but into our questions, fears, hopes, changing ideas, and struggles with parenting, vocation, aging, and family. Sometimes that happens around a fire or a dinner table; sometimes it happens through an email or Zoom.
Perhaps most importantly, friendship has required us to become more vulnerable with one another. We have learned to listen without immediately offering advice, to challenge one another when necessary, and to allow ourselves to be known. Our earliest gatherings gradually became spaces where we could eat, talk, listen, question one another, and risk saying things that men are often taught to keep to themselves.
What can younger men learn from older men who have maintained a long-lasting friendship?
Maybe the first lesson is that a forty-year friendship is not something you create all at once. You build it through thousands of small acts of attention: showing up, making the call, taking the trip, listening, asking another question, forgiving, laughing together, and being willing to say what is really happening in your life.
The second lesson is not to mistake independence for strength. One of the most important things we have learned is that vulnerability does not diminish friendship; it deepens it. When we stop trying to impress one another and become willing to reveal our limitations, we give our friends the opportunity to know and accept who we actually are.
And finally, remain curious about one another. None of us is the same person he was when we met in our twenties. A lasting friendship has to leave room for people to change their minds, reconsider old assumptions, become husbands and fathers, change careers, experience loss, grow older, and continue becoming. We have never considered ourselves experts on friendship. If anything, our forty years together have taught us to keep asking questions and to approach one another with curiosity, love, and respect.
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