The daily schedule went something like this: wake up, wander 20 feet to the nearest café for coffee, spend an hour reliving the previous night’s adventures. From there, we’d find somewhere to have lunch; a process that largely involved following our noses until we stumbled across a restaurant capable of producing a decent croquette, before sitting for hours, drinking and talking absolute shite.
Eventually, someone would mysteriously pay the bill. Men seem unconcerned with who owes what, believing: “It’ll all balance out in the end.” A brief discussion would ensue about the evening’s plans before we returned to the hotel for what became known as the “poo reset”; we headed to the festival and staggered home sometime between 4am and 6.30am. Rinse and repeat.
Having now been on roughly a thousand hens and this one stag, I couldn’t help comparing the two, despite the unfair sample size.
Hen dos, particularly with large groups, come with a staggering amount of work. It’s not just booking a weekend away – it’s creating WhatsApp groups, maintaining spreadsheets, researching restaurants, organising games, coordinating outfits and (crucially) making sure nobody feels left out. Bridesmaids would make excellent UN negotiators.
And it’s not just hen dos. Seeing your friends in your forties can feel like a military operation. Once careers, partners, children, and “moving to the suburbs” enter the equation, you can forget about ever seeing that mate regularly. I’m in a WhatsApp group called “The Flakers”. We adore each other, but getting seven of us in the same room at the same time is impossible. What should be a simple, “fancy a drink?” becomes 300 WhatsApp messages trying to work out when and where. When did seeing your friends become admin?
Somewhere along the line, female friendship stopped being something we did – and started becoming something we managed.
Most of the men on the stag do were in their 40s, settled and with children. Perhaps the dynamic would’ve been different if they were 10 years younger and trying to impress one another. There was very little ego in the room, which is perhaps the highest compliment I can pay the groom. Somehow, he’d assembled a group of wildly different personalities who seemed genuinely happy to be together.
The first thing that struck me is that men are extraordinarily good at zooming in. Their attention stays on whatever is in front of them: conversation, beer, music. Women, by contrast, are often zooming out. We’re wondering whether everyone is having a good time, whether the restaurant knows we’re running late, if so and so is annoyed – and why. It’s one of the great strengths of female friendship. We care. But it comes at a cost: we spend so much time managing the experience that we forget to experience it.
Another moment that stuck with me was when I presented the group with a range of artists we could go and see at the festival. One tapped me gently on the shoulder and said: “Poppy, do not give these men options. Just tell them where we’re going and they will follow.”
I’ve been in this exact situation with a big group of girls, and what happens is this: someone’s seen the artist four times; someone else isn’t in the mood for techno. Someone wants lyrics, someone’s heard another set is better – and someone just wants to sit down. None of these are unreasonable, but they do require discussion and compromise. The men, by contrast, seemed perfectly happy to outsource the decision (dare I say… they were happy being “mothered”) and get on with having a good time.
I wouldn’t swap my female friendships for the world. We pick up the phone. We check in. We invest emotionally. But somewhere along the line, I wonder if we overcorrected. In striving for everyone to feel included, we’ve excelled at organising friendship. The plans become the main event, rather than the people.
There’s something both admirable and sad about men picking up exactly where they left off, even when they haven’t seen each other for ages. Male friendships can be forgiving and low-maintenance, but too many operate on an “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” policy. They can go years without speaking. Some struggle with vulnerability. Many rely on wives and girlfriends to maintain the social infrastructure around them.
Female friendship is often richer and more emotionally attentive. The downside is that women can sometimes over-manage friendship, while men can under-maintain it. Neither model is perfect. Both have something to teach the other.
What stayed with me from my first stag was the radical simplicity of it all – and how little men seemed to need from the experience in order to enjoy it.
I’m going to spend less time trying to create the perfect experience and more time trusting that being together is enough, because the healthiest friendships aren’t built on carefully curated experiences. They’re the ones where nothing much happens, and everyone has a brilliant time anyway.
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