A book club on men's mental health
And what I learnt about connection.
I was invited to attend an all-male book club this week, which had kindly selected my book as its feature of the month to read and discuss.
For context, it’s a club involving my dad’s mates, so there was a link there as to why they’d chosen it.
But it was still something I was really grateful to be a part of, and it was nice to see the club in action.
This is a group of men in their late 60s who get together once a month to discuss the latest agreed book. The sessions always happen in the pub, so they did confess that often the club ends up being about 20% on the book, 80% on just a general catchup over a pint, but that doesn’t really matter.
The club was born out of another activity they do together: walking football.
The majority of the group, my dad included, have been friends since primary school - about 50 years!
Listening to them talk, and the ease and regularity with which they get together, left me with a feeling of wondering how we’ve managed to move so far away from that in this day and age.
It feels like we really have to fight for connection these days. We’re constantly up against multiple WhatsApp threads, algorithms which seem to have our worst interests at heart, an endless supply of “sorry it’s taken me a while to come back to you” messages.
Granted, the majority of the group I was with are retired, so that obviously helps. They have kids, but they’re well over 18, many of them out of the family home. But even years ago, long before retirement, they still organised an annual lads trip somewhere in the UK. I just felt the ease with which they made sure seeing each other was baked into their everyday routine.
It was also nice for me that they’d chosen my book for the group, but I wondered how it would land. This was a generation of men who aren’t the target market for the book, and are the generation where this conversation around men’s mental health simply never existed.
I felt some of that resistance as we discussed the book. Not in a hyper critical way, but in a way that highlighted how different my message is to the one they were brought up with. But they listened, they asked good questions, and they offered their own perspective.
One of the men commented on how they do regularly see each other, but probably aren’t a group that has ever been very good at discussing the deeper stuff. There was a level of self-reflection and awareness there that made me think they would be okay talking about this stuff, but perhaps the rules of their generation had stopped them from ever doing it.
While I obviously believe it’s important that this deeper level of connection is baked into our friendship groups, I could also sense how much they filled up each other’s cups simply through their regular meetups, different activities and questionable dad jokes.
Yes, we need to make changes to how we talk about male mental health and emotions. But half the battle can also start with just getting something in the diary.
These men, with their annual holidays, their weekly walking football sessions, and their monthly book club, reminded me that connection shouldn’t need to feel as hard as the 2020s have somehow made it.
George x