About three years after our initial phone call, I reconnected with Todd, whom we met at the very beginning of this book. He told me that the last time we spoke, he was happy to be largely friendless. But very soon after our call, his life of lonely self-reliance began to crumble.

Todd was never starved for human contact, exactly. He was married with a son. In fact, romantic relationships were about the only kind that came easily to him. After a largely celibate high school experience, in college he found he could get girlfriends relatively easily. The girlfriends, then, were the source of his friendships: when he was dating someone, he would just hang out with her friends. Between relationships, there was “lots of alone time,” he said. He learned bartending and got into photography. But because of the lack of companionship in his life, he dealt with stress primarily by reaching out to women. Women who weren’t his wife.

When his job got frustrating, Todd had few people to turn to. If he had an especially bad day at work, he would text a female friend and go to a long lunch or early happy hour with her. His wife, meanwhile, became more like a roommate to him, and their marriage began to deaden. Mostly, Todd engaged in what people call “emotional cheating.” The unspoken deal was that he would provide emotional support for his female friends, and they would flirt with him and make him feel desirable. After these get-togethers, they would exchange racy pictures or sext each other. And he did have one actual affair.

“It was not actually solving any problems,” he told me. “It was pushing them into the future.”

When his wife found out about the affair, Todd thought she was going to kick him out. While they tried to mend the relationship, Todd realized something. His wife had lots of friends who were calling her every day to check on her. Meanwhile, he had literally no one. The women he had so relied upon to make himself feel better had ghosted when he needed them most.

Todd found himself in therapy, which drove home the point that he really needed to make platonic friends. Like Curt, he decided to change his personality so he could be happier in the world.

He opted to take a four-year-old’s approach, in which you stumble upon random life-forms and ask outright to be their friend. Except Todd was nearly forty. When a former colleague moved to his city from across the country, Todd invited him and his wife out for dinner. The man agreed, and on the winds of this success Todd decided to forge ahead with his new life of companionship.

The hardest part, Todd said, was “having any idea what the fuck to do with the person at all. I hadn’t gone out with people in a non-romantic way in my adult life.”