Where's Your Head At?

A step towards helping more of us connect IRL

Illustration by Tony Johnson

Last year, I wrote about the Male Friendship Recession and the loneliness epidemic exacerbated by the pandemic. Community is essential, but becoming a parent can leave you bereft of your old life and the friends in it:

Fatherhood is the beginning of a beautiful new chapter in your life, but openings don’t exist without closings. Welcoming a baby into your world can kickstart a fundamental deconstruction of core aspects of your life—your sense of self, your shifting understanding of purpose, changes in dynamics of key relationships, an altogether alien structure and routine—which means saying goodbye to aspects of “the old days” you may have taken for granted: the spontaneity of a few drinks after work; a sudden decision to catch a movie with your partner, 30 minutes before the showing; an impromptu weekend away, city-breaking with old friends—folks you might have spent most of your adult life with, before having kids. Suddenly, it’s all different.

A recurring topic in the community is dads ostracised from old friend groups—mates who are a little bit earlier in the game of life, their backseat empty as they ride around in a convertible instead of a minivan. It’s easy to become a dad and spend those early years of fatherhood with your head down. It’s only when you surface for air you realise everyone’s doing something else. I’ve written before that we are the sum of the five dads we spend most of our time with. And many of us lack a decent, dependable dad crew in our hood.

The Game of Life. Look at the two of them, they have no idea what they’re letting themselves in for.

I’m sure many have had some shade of this experience: you take your baby to a local group, something that’s been advertised as being family-friendly—some baby sensory kinda-thing where you sit in a circle watching an intense lady captivate the attention of your child as you all come together to say hello to the sun. You walk in through the door with great intentions before the entire room pauses, Three Amigos style, as you slowly realise you’re one dad in a room of mums.

Part of the reason for starting The New Fatherhood was the realisation of how many great resources were available for mums, with dads left scrambling for scraps. Those spaces open to all parents—like the baby classes or the hundreds of local Facebook Groups—become codified as mum groups by default. When was the last time you arrived at a kid-friendly event and found a load of dads hanging out?

This narrative has been spinning around my head for the last few years. We’re all trying to shift the definition of fatherhood forward, and I’ve often wondered how TNF might do a better job of helping dads find other dads near them who are doing the same. As great as an online space like this can be, nothing beats being able to talk to real people in real life.

Huge props are due here to Adam and the London dads who have managed to meet semi-regularly over the last few years. They get together, swap fatherhood war stories, and chat about their highs and lows over a beer or two. I’ve been lucky to join them twice and will surely do so again sometime this year. These dads tell me how much easier it is to have deeper, more meaningful conversations with other dads who read this newsletter. It seems counterintuitive, but they are more able to open up with dads they kinda know than others who are closest to them. My hunch? If you’re reading this, you’re likely doing some work towards being a better version of the person you want to be—and the dad you want your kids to remember. And you’re more likely to connect with fellow travellers on this path. One London dad said, “A meaningful part of the conversations we have is around recent newsletters and conversations in the community … I like using TNF discussion points as a jumping-off point for our IRL meet-ups.”

So, let’s go out on a limb here and say a few of you might like to meet up. There’s a big issue holding things back—something I call Dad Density. There are two things required for anything to pick up in real life—a frictionless piece of technology to enable meetups to happen; and a critical mass of dads in a local area who want to do it. And it’s the second that has blocked me from figuring this out. Since so many of you have warmed to the idea of “unlocking the commons,” I’ve been thinking about how this platform might enable a support network for the widest possible number of dads worldwide.

But to do that, I need to know where in the world you are. The newsletter stats give me some of this information, of course. I know there are 16,000 of you spread across 145 countries and 50 states—big up to those eight dads in Alaska scraping frost off their cars and beards—but it’s nowhere near granular enough to plan something in real life.

So now I need your help.

We’re going to end this week with a little experiment. If you’re at all interested in the idea of meeting other TNF dads who live near you, click on this map to let us know where in the world you are. If you’re on mobile you’ll need to press the little navigation arrow to locate you and then the pink comment button. If you’re on a laptop, right click wherever on the map you live and click Comment.

Important note: Please share your first name, city and a non-exact location of where you live (so you don’t end up doxxing yourself). Here’s a good example:

If you’re comfortable sharing more, then that’s all good! This map won’t be public forever.

If this works I’ll use this data to create clusters of dads before sending another update later this month with details on how we can push things forward. My vision is hundreds of small TNF-affiliated groups: dads who can organise playdates, coffee mornings and nights out, share interesting parks and other fun places nearby, and recommend kid-friendly (and parent-friendly) events that are happening.

This might work. It might not. But I’m tired of waiting to perfect this before putting it out there. If this helps a handful of you connect with other like-minded dads, it will all be worth it. Let’s see.

---

Yes, I was referencing this. And I’ll now be listening to Basement Jaxx all evening. It is thanks to the generous support of 3% of you I can figure out things like this. If you’d like to join their ranks you know what to do.

Have a great weekend, see you next week.