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" It happens to the best, and most popular, of us (not that I&amp;#039;m either): After getting married and settling down, we men wake up one morning and discover that our once-mighty forest of guy friends has been slashed and burned, and all that remains are a couple of grizzled oaks and a few endangered saplings. I was out drinking with one such sapling named Rob recently, and he put it this way: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m 32. I&amp;#039;ve got a wife and three kids. And I&amp;#039;ve got two friends I see with any regularity. One of them is my brother, and the other one I&amp;#039;ve known since I was 5, so the only reason I still see them is because I&amp;#039;m pretty much stuck with them.&amp;quot; Rob and I had a great time, but have I hung out with him since? No.  One reason for male friend slippage is simple: Guys just aren&amp;#039;t as good at staying in touch as women are. My wife, Karel, has friends she sees only every three years, because of geography, but she&amp;#039;s in constant contact with them. In my case, if we&amp;#039;re close and you leave Philadelphia, you&amp;#039;re pretty much dead to me. You know how I feel about the phone; if you really wanted to keep in touch, you wouldn&amp;#039;t have moved farther away than Camden. Another issue is that guys in different life phases just can&amp;#039;t relate to one another. One minute you&amp;#039;re Bluto from Animal House, the next you&amp;#039;re Mr. Belding from Saved By the Bell and you can&amp;#039;t tolerate your old band of Blutos. As Mike, a married father of four, told me, &amp;quot;I still get calls every now and then from old friends who think I&amp;#039;m gonna come out in the middle of the night and go tagging [writing graffiti]. I&amp;#039;m like, &amp;#039;Are you kidding?&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Personally, I have neither the time nor the patience I once did for the poor impulse control and general shadiness of guys I used to spend a lot of time with. I&amp;#039;m acutely aware of my residual adolescent issues (gluttony, lethargy, self-sabotage, and a general inability to work with others), but now that I have a family to think about, I can&amp;#039;t afford to worry about anyone else&amp;#039;s.  Also, I now depend on my wife and my sister for any emotional heavy lifting. Women are so much better at that stuff than men. They get to the heart of the matter in a quarter of the time, without any joking, belching, or other emotional subterfuge. Which is not to say I&amp;#039;m lacking in Y-chromosomal camaraderie; it&amp;#039;s just a different landscape. Once you no longer want or need a pack to party with every night, here&amp;#039;s who&amp;#039;s left: 1. The holdout. Almost all guys have this one \u2014 a best and oldest friend, the grizzled oak I mentioned earlier. Mine is named Caleb, and I&amp;#039;ve known him since we were 12. He was with us when Karel went into labor with our son, Noah, and he hung in at the hospital through all 56 harrowing hours. I can talk to him about anything, anytime. But he recently moved to Holland, so I don&amp;#039;t. (Though he is the only person in the world I will Skype with.)  2. Old-school Facebook friends. These are guys you used to be close to but aren&amp;#039;t anymore. Reunited by Facebook, you occasionally banter about football or Libya, but it&amp;#039;s sorta awkward because in a past life, you&amp;#039;ve seen one another throw up and cry. 3. Facebook friends 2.0. These are casual acquaintances, but thanks to the magic of Facebook, you&amp;#039;ve discovered how witty they are. They don&amp;#039;t bring history or baggage, so you can imagine going out for a beer and having fun. But you don&amp;#039;t have any history so it&amp;#039;s weird to ask.  4. Friends-in-law, a.k.a. husbands of your wife&amp;#039;s friends. This dynamic is almost always pretty forced. Our wives might connect over their love for Etsy or large appliances, but I can only feign interest in golf for so long, and the guy next to me in the sweater vest drinking Rumple Minze feels the same way about my oral history of gangster rap and Marvel Comics. 5. Dad friends. I like these guys. I&amp;#039;ve met them through my children. They&amp;#039;re a low-maintenance and diverse group: cops, pastors, personal trainers, teachers. They aren&amp;#039;t looking to hug and talk about feelings; they just want a night away from the wife and kids as badly as I do. One drawback: Even though we want a night away from the kids, our conversations tend to drift that way, which suddenly makes us feel like mom friends, and that&amp;#039;s creepy. 6. Stay-at-home-dad friends. This is a small, special breed of dad friends I&amp;#039;ve bonded with because my writing career allows me to be the primary caregiver of our two little gremlins. Sadly, I&amp;#039;ve met a lot more in the last two years, but the economy&amp;#039;s loss is my gain: Stay-at-home-dad friends are awesome! They just don&amp;#039;t give a f---. This subset has a lot of pent-up frustration and energy. The last time we went out, we ended up at a BBQ joint in the middle of a blizzard. By 2 a.m., we were greasy with brisket, swigging homemade wine from a plastic milk jug, and snowboarding on actual snowboards down the streets of my Philadelphia neighborhood. Stay-at-home-dad friends keep it a little too real for me to hang out with them often, which is why there was snow on the ground the last time I did.  These aforementioned dudes might not be a pretty bunch, but they serve their purpose. Now if you&amp;#039;ll excuse me, I have to make a snide comment about Qaddafi to a Facebook friend whom I&amp;#039;ve seen cry and throw up at the same time. Yeah, we&amp;#039;re that close. Redbook columnist Aaron Traister lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two kids. Read his blog at redbookmag.com/aaron. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/love-sex/relationships/advice/a11947/guy-friends/?link=rel&dom=yah_life&src=syn&con=blog_redbook&mag=rbk>