Billy is one of those men who can easily bury a lamp in the wall. In every flat I’ve lived in over the past decade, he’s told me which long number is the right one on my gas meter. He wears a Connell’s necklace, has a girlish laugh and a sandy blonde stubble that’s the equivalent of a golden retriever’s ghost. He can point to the spot in Shoreditch where Shakespeare was performed, now an office building he remembers from a Wikipedia spiral, and he zooms with his fingers on Google Maps with a finesse I’ve never seen anyone else do.

We met outside a pub in Brighton nearly ten years ago, around the time I’d just started going out with Emily. On the nights she wasn’t with me, she’d sleep on Billy and Hollie’s sofa. They’re married now, Emily and I have our own sofa, and the four of us share a WhatsApp group called ‘Al Fresco Boozing’, which was set up during the picnic days of the pandemic when they were the first people we wanted to see.

Billy is one of my best friends. And yet so often a beer or a pool table comes between us. When a conversation gets too rocky, it’s usually averted with a joke. I’ve tried confiding in him about relationship problems, but his advice is a bit sparse or dark and satirical, à la Stewart Lee. Once, when I told him my grandmother had just died, he glanced at the folded newspaper with the crossword puzzle for a millisecond and seemed to consider whether to pick it up.

As I get older, I wonder if our friendship needs to grow up too. While I’m lucky to have no shortage of friends, they’re all in their 30s, getting married, having kids and moving to Haywards Heath. Life’s increasing commitments are making it harder for us to spend quality time together, and I think if we do that the way we did in our 20s – chugging beers until we were singing Robbie Williams’ Angels a cappella at 3am – it could get grey and old. As a result of these diminishing returns, many of my childhood friendships have simply fizzled out. I don’t want that to happen with Billy – he’s too special – but if we’re going to be together for the long term, I need to be able to talk to him about deep things.

There’s something else that worries me, and it has less to do with Billy’s mistakes than my own. I suffer through breakups like a free fall. The idea of ​​one day splitting up with Emily is a profoundly lonely notion. And there are ominous signs for men who suddenly find themselves single in middle age. It’s been cited as a major factor in the epidemics of loneliness and suicide that have skyrocketed in the male population over the past decade. Statistically, men simply don’t hold on to friendships the way women do, leaving them without a support network when life turns upside down. The shrinking number of heterosexual men without women is clearly evident in the divorcees on Queer Eyewhose stories often make me cry. Without wives or female confidants, it seems we are unable to dress ourselves, express emotion, or deal with rosacea – until we meet the Fab Five.

Emily recently sent me a sketch by @alyssalimp and @heyitsmeallibrown about women meeting for the first time. The joke is that after just three minutes they’re already talking about family history and self-esteem. Sometimes I see how quickly she bonds with strangers or how supportive she and Hollie are of each other and admit to feeling jealous. So I decided to suggest something radical – that Billy and I see a therapist together to explore the complexities of our friendship and see if we can strengthen it to protect us both for the future.

When I suggest this to Billy one evening, his answer is, to my surprise, cautiously positive and typically flippant. “It won’t be like The Sopranosright?” he asks. “I’m not going to find out that I actually hate my mom?”

Billy and I are sitting in two armchairs, We are standing in front of our therapist – Martin – and the window. Our three pairs of legs are all crossed at the ankle. The sky outside is bright blue, not even a chemtrail. On the coffee table next to me is a pack of tissues, also blue.

Martin is not the kind of therapist I would normally have chosen. Based on the WhatsApp profile picture of him doing yoga poses on a mountain top, I almost expect his advice to be Live laugh Love. But perhaps one should not judge a therapist by his tree position, because he has decades of experience in psychotherapy and leading men’s groups.

Billy hurls Martin past the slats of his white picket fence: Mom, Dad, two sisters. “I still have two grandparents on my mother’s side who danced the night away at my wedding last year. The worst death in my life was my family’s dog from childhood. I’ve worked at the same company since I was 16.”

“It sounds like you come from a very secure background,” Martin replies. Martin exudes a familiarity and ease that is typical of Alan Partridge, and I sense that this reassures Billy. “Everything points to solidity, stability and coherence.”

He turns to me. “You heard Billy talk about his very secure background. Was that something you had?”