I Had No Idea Fatherhood Would Be So Lonely

This essay is based on an interview with the editors of The Doe.

My wife and I have a consistent habit of deciding to do something on a certain schedule, and then jumping to do it earlier. We did that with marriage, with buying our house, and we did it with having our kid earlier, too.

We were both 25 when my wife found out she was pregnant. When the baby arrived, we were in the fray for about three months. The lack of sleep was tough, but everything else felt pretty decent. I was slowly growing closer to my son, which took a while. I didn’t think, “Oh my God, this is my everything” the moment I saw him. I really had to develop a relationship with him.

My son is nine months old now, and I’m starting to feel more and more separate from my friends. I had really close friends in college, and I lived in a house with four of them. After college we kept in touch; we were all around for each other’s first jobs and our first houses or apartments, and the parties that accompany those. Now I don't have time for evening parties, or really anything past 6 p.m. I have a 9-to-5 job, and I also run a small business that I opened two years ago, which I work at three evenings a week. We try to split parenthood duties evenly. During the evenings I work, she’s bearing the brunt of parenthood, so if I went out any other night, it would put even more burden on her.

The distance from my friends has happened gradually. It wasn't one incident—it was all these small things over time. You get invited to a housewarming party, a Halloween party, a Christmas party, a New Year's Eve party. They all start at 5 or 6 p.m. and my son goes down at 6:30 p.m. And I think, Well, I can't even come early and hang out because he's going to fall asleep in the car and get fussy and we're going to have a bad day the next day, so I guess I better just stay home and take care of him. It was one missed event after the next, after the next, after the next. All of a sudden, I'm in the group chat and they're having these inside jokes and I'm like, Man, I just don't know what they’re talking about. Those moments are the worst—the conversations I'm not able to be a part of because I don't relate, because I wasn’t there.

Whenever I get an invite that I have to turn down, there’s that fear of, “When are those invites going to stop coming? And then, “When are we just not friends anymore?” It's been nine months—can we last a year? Should we just stop now?

I don’t want to express that I have any faults, and losing friendships and needing community feels like a fault.

My wife hangs out with her friends maybe even less than I hang out with mine, but she does communicate with them more. She’ll call or text her friends. I don't call or text much with mine; we mostly hang in person. I think that verbal communication helps her because she needs more words of affirmation-type support, whereas I’m more about quality time.

I do have a couple of friends with kids. One of my college roommates, J, is a little poetic and has existential ideas about life. I thought he'd be one of the last to have kids, but he was the first of the group. He's actually got a third on the way. You’d think we would bond over our fatherhood, but he’s in school to be a doctor, and his wife is studying to be a nurse practitioner. They have way less time than even I do. Our get-togethers are few and far between. And when I do see him, he's extremely tired. I also have a friend from high school who just had a kid, but he lives about two hours away. I saw his son the week after he was born, and that was nice. But we're all young working professionals, and finding time in the evenings or weekends can be hard.

I don't have any new friends from dad groups or the playground. I live in a small town, a suburb of a larger city in the Midwest. There are only 18,000 people in my town and I live on a country road. We don't have many neighbors, and the ones we do have are older and their kids are older. We're not super-involved in our community—we kind of go to work and come home. We've visited a couple of churches and there does seem to be a lot of younger adults there with kids. I've also been introduced to some dads, but it's hard to follow up on those and I'm a fairly shy person to begin with. So to make those new friendships can take a lot of effort and feels very foreign to me. I have these ideas of where I could meet people and then I never execute them, like a running group or a woodworking group. I always have the idea, like, “Oh, I could do that on a Saturday.” But then I never do; something comes up.

I don’t really know why dads don’t connect with each other more. Maybe a reason would be our pride. I don’t want to express that I have any faults, and losing friendships and needing community feels like a fault. It's hard to expose yourself like that. Reaching out and saying “Hey, let’s be friends”—that’s being pretty vulnerable.

Before I had kids, people would tell me these things like, “Enjoy your sleep while you have it,” or “Enjoy your time while you have it.” As dumb as it sounds, I just didn't think about what that meant. It turns out babies don’t just wake up and go back to sleep, you have to rock them or feed them and then before you know it an hour goes by. All my time goes to chores and watching my son. If I’d known all that, maybe I would have put a little more thought to the gravity of having a kid. Not to say that I have any regrets, but I could have been a little more prepared mentally for that transition and understanding the effects it could have on my social life or my marriage or my relationship with my parents. So I would say, if you think you’ve thought about parenthood enough, think about it a little more.