A Pint With Friends

The loss of Third Places and friendships in middle age.

One of the regular pleasures I’ve come to enjoy in the past several years of marriage and parenthood is our movie nights. Going to the movies as parents is a Herculean task, and once you take into account the inflated prices, babysitters, and substandard offerings, is not worth the effort, the last movie I caught in theaters was Bladerunner 2049. But, we do own a large television with outstanding picture quality and a quality sound system, along with the ability to stream in high definition any movie I feel like watching makes up for the loss of the traditional movie outing. I look forward to putting our daughter to bed, opening a bottle of wine, and hopping on our couch for a movie in our comfortable living room.

Several weeks ago the movie of the night was Martin McDonaghs The Banshees of Inisherin. A beautiful movie starring Colin Farrell and Brandon Gleeson as friends living on a remote Irish island during the early 20th century. The plot on the surface is simple, farmer Padriac Suilleabhain (Farrell) and fiddle player Colm Doherty (Gleeson) spend their days sharing pints and conversation at the local pub, but one day, without giving a reason, Colm tells Padriac that he no longer wants to be friends and doesn’t want to speak with him. Of course, this doesn’t sit well with Padriac and his reaction triggers events that are catastrophic for several other islanders including the local policeman who is a pederast, his village idiot son, and Padriacs sister Siobhan.

The cinematography is beautiful with gorgeous shots of the Irish coastline, Inisherin being a fictional place, the movie was filmed on the Irish Inishmore and Achill Islands. The whole movie has a heartbreakingly cozy feel. Padriac walks the coastline on the way to the pub, sitting with friends, and drinking pints of beer while Colm plays the fiddle. I can imagine myself spending my life on Inisherin, tending animals, and wasting my days reading books and tossing back pints with friends. Paradise.

But the above is a digression, when I sat down tonight I did not intend to write a movie review. What I wanted to talk about was friendship. Watching Banshees of Inisherin, a movie about a friendship falling apart, made me think about my friendships, and by that I mean my complete lack of.

I’m a husband, father, comfortably middle class, stable if not content in my career, homeowner, debt free, by most reasonable standards successful, quickly approaching forty, without a single friend.

The disastrous dissolution of Padriac and Colm's friendship deeply affected me because I never realized or couldn’t admit to myself how much I miss the close friendships of my youth. Friendships dissolved due to the pressures of careers, distance, marriage, parenthood, and even political and philosophical differences.

It’s not a comforting fact, but it seems that my situation is not unique. I’m not alone in my predicament. A significant portion of Americans in their 30s report that they feel lonely and alienated, that they don’t have close friends and have difficulty making them. Our world has become one of hypercapitalist alienation and deracination. Our lives, for the most part, are spent between work and consumption. We have the ability to instantaneously communicate with anyone in the world yet we are more separated and alone than at any other time in history.

The cause of our community collapse is complex and multi-faceted. From the failure of religious and civic institutions, poor community planning, the rise of the dual-income home, predominance of divorce, and economic failures that force us to move away from our close relatives and childhood relations. All of these factors and many others play a role in our cultural disintegration. But one thing I keep thinking about, and it played a predominant role in the Banshees of Inisherin, is the pub.

The pub, the coffee shop, Oldenburgs Third Place.

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The Sociologist Ray Oldenburg identified three key places that are prominent in our lives. The First Place is our home, where we dwell, raise our family, rest, and enjoy the private life. The Second Place is work, regimented and professional. The Third Place and the one that is critical to a healthy civic society is the pub, the coffee shop, the bookstore, the barbershop, and the friendly diner. A place where you go to relax in public with old friends and meet new strangers.

The Third place, according to Jeffres et al. (2009), is that it "offers stress relief from the everyday demands of both home and work. It provides the feeling of inclusiveness and belonging associated with participating in a group’s social activities, without the rigidity of policy or exclusiveness of club or organization membership"

The Third Place used to have prominent status in our culture, the Beer Gardens of Germany, Cafes of Paris and London where artists and revolutionaries gathered, and the halls and lodges where the American colonists plotted the Revolution. Even our entertainment is filled with Third Places like the eponymous bar in Cheers and The Central Perk from Friends. Places where men and women gathered to converse with friends and strangers alike. Places that were the hubs of community and culture.

Somewhere, somehow, due to many separate factors, all the above has been systematically taken away from us. The small coffee shops and bookstores have been destroyed by corporate monoliths and selfish landlords. Pub and bar culture ruined by suburban sprawl, high prices, and changes in drinking and socializing habits. Churches have become sterile, more akin to pop music concerts in Apple stores than places fostering community.

It’s no wonder that without these Third Places, our ability to connect and make friends has diminished. It’s no wonder that for most of us, our friends are behind the digital screen.

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I look back on my life and so much of it was defined by my time spent in Third Places. My late teens and most of my twenties were spent as a regular at several local coffee shops. The first place, and to this day, a formative location in my life was Mother Mudds in Long Beach. Mudds was a small coffee shop located across from a park on Carson street, several blocks from Long Beach Community College. It was a small place, with several tables, patronized by locals from the neighborhood. I would spend my days at Mudds, drinking coffee after coffee, chain-smoking, reading, and engaging in conversation with everyone and anyone. Mudds was home to a regular cast of characters, and unique individuals that I became close friends with. Interesting characters like the Medieval History fanatic who at the time was deep into reptilian conspiracy theories long before Alex Jones, now an Ivy League graduate, a Dutch sailboat captain, a family of Irish immigrants with great taste in music, one of the best Irish fiddle players who wasn’t Irish and to this day still plays in my favorite Irish band, a kid obsessed with supping up cars who later became a police officer, several occult magicians, at least one actual vampire, a missionary turned cab driver whos guidance and conversations were foundational to me. So many people. I would spend so much time there, sometimes waking up, heading over, and spending the entire day, well past closing time hanging out with everyone.

Later, when Mudds closed down due to an unfriendly business climate, raising rent, and loss of business due to Starbucks oversaturating the market, most of us moved downtown to Portfolios Coffee on 4th street. Portfolios, which recently closed down due to idiotic landlords, was the central hub of our life downtown. A spacious coffee shop where one could spend time outside, smoking, doing crossword puzzles, and having conversations with friends and strangers alike. I would spend my afternoons reading and smoking outside that place and when the sun set it was a rallying point where we all met before going out drinking in the neighborhood only to return the next morning for hangover coffee and conversation about the stupid crap that we got ourselves in during our bar hopping adventures.

There were other places, the great local bars in San Clemente I walked to when I live in a Hobbit Hole-like studio close to the beach. Lestat's in San Diego and the great, now gone due to COVID stupidity, bars in University Heights. The American hangouts and local izakayas in Japan. So many places, most of them gone.

Looking back, so many of my friendships came out of Third Places, where I could go, read, relax, and be around like-minded people in a neutral place. Somewhere, close to where I lived, where I knew that if I dropped in, bought a cup of coffee, and sat down I was bound to run into a friend or a stranger who would engage me in conversation. I can’t count the number of times good friendships were sparked by someone bumming a cigarette or asking for a light.

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Anyways, years later here I am, content but friendless. My work schedule is demanding and when I get home I spend it with my wife and daughter. I love spending time with them and every day I thank God that I am so fortunate to have such an amazing family. My interests are solitary. I read. I write. My penchant for 19th-century Russian writers and the need to brood in the dark is not conducive to a healthy social life. The truth is, even if I had the time to go and make friends there isn’t anywhere to go. There are several coffee shops around here, but sadly they close in the early afternoon. The bars are far, and as a parent, I can’t spend my weekends inebriated hoping to catch a cab home or crashing on people's couches like I used to.

I think as a culture, and as a community, we have a severe lack of places where adults can meet and interact. I know I’m not alone in feeling like this. I don’t have a solution, and maybe, the reason I’m writing this is that I hope to start a discussion and get some ideas on what to do. Maybe we can turn back the tide of deracination and atomization. The first step is realizing we have a problem, and I’m convinced that we do have one, a significant one.