What do you want to do for your birthday? It’s a simple question that, for many men, does not have an easy answer.
When asked recently over Slack about how they like to celebrate their birthdays, a group of six GQ editors quickly launched into an animated conversation about their anxieties over party planning.
“It’s tough to be like, ‘Fellas, come celebrate me,’” wrote GQ Sports director Sam Schube.
“I’ve definitely done the secret birthday party, where it’s just like, ‘Come over and watch a game.’ And then maybe someone realizes it’s my birthday,” style editor Yang-Yi Goh admitted.
“Yeah, I’ve suffered from background-character syndrome since puberty,” watch editor Cam Wolf posted in the chat. “I don’t think I’ve had a birthday hang with the boys since I was like 13, when I went to Baja Fresh and then bowling.”
Associate senior editor Frazier Tharpe volunteered that “I plan my own,” but appended an “LMAO”—seemingly an admission that a man inviting people to his own birthday party generally isn’t done.
It’s not just GQ editors who feel this way. “I feel like there’s something in the male, straight culture where making a big deal of your birthday is almost self-indulgent and even a bit cringe past your early 20s,” Sean, a 31-year-old from Brooklyn, tells GQ. “Asking friends to join me for a ‘birthday weekend’ would have made me feel weird, even though I’d probably have a great time.”
To women like me, this ambivalence is incomprehensible. Why not take the opportunity to spend time with friends? Why not seize joy in the rare moments it is offered to us? But on TikTok, Reddit, and among girlfriends in heterosexual relationships, it’s a truism: Men are often weird about their birthdays.
Like many of the more serious issues that men struggle with, one root may be the gender roles that many of them are raised with. “I think there is a lot of socialization that we go through, consciously or not, that we shouldn't be burdensome and that we will provide for others but try not to take,” 28-year-old Liam Dee, who lives in the UK, says.
Sean’s father and grandfather never “took effort to plan their birthday from what I remember, and most didn’t have a party unless it was some celebration of a decade,” he says. “In all of those instances, it was planned by their wives.”
For the women talking online about men’s fear of birthdays, this is a common complaint: That the initiative to throw them parties—and the planning that it necessitates—falls on the wives and girlfriends. “He has always insisted that he hates birthdays and thinks it’s embarrassing to make a big deal out of your birthday,” Teresa, a 24-year-old from Oregon, says of her boyfriend. For his most recent birthday, she threw him a party for the first time in five years. “He still insists it was his best birthday ever,” she says. “Which is so sad because he does want to be celebrated and clearly appreciated the effort—he just pretends to not want the attention.”
For Dee, who celebrated a recent birthday in Brooklyn, it was his close female friend who convinced him to bike over to a brewery and book a space. “She rationalized it as just having people get together to have fun, it just so happens to be your birthday, which I liked,” he says. “I felt celebrated, but not overwhelmed, and I was so glad to see friends of mine making friends with each other.”
It’s not necessarily about putting the work onto one’s wife or girlfriend—it’s about the fear of asking to be honored. “I need someone to launder my invitation through” is how Schube explains it.
Tharpe celebrates his birthday with one of his closest friends, and still, “for like three years straight, one of our homegirls who was just insanely plugged into all random facets of New York social life basically organized it for us,” he says. “I took over after she moved to LA, and admittedly felt weird about doing it myself.”
I know from experience that some men will ask their girlfriend to not under any circumstances plan a party—and on the eve of that birthday, say, “I should do something. Can we do something?” When this last-minute get-together disappoints—because friends are out of town or busy, and there are no tables left at his favorite restaurant—the fear of the birthday is only reinforced.
Meanwhile, as each birthday ticks by and friends party less in general, some men become fathers, and the passing into one’s late 30s and 40s commences, giving oneself a party becomes an even more fraught proposition. GQ’s senior culture editor Alex Pappademas, a 40-something dad, says, “If you’re over 40 and not being borderline pathological about not being the center of attention you’re a weirdo. My last birthday hang involving non-family members was 2019, unless you count me and 18,000 Deadheads this past year.” Gender expectations come into play here, too, as Wolf points out: “I feel like media often depicts older men throwing birthday parties for themselves as sad or pathetic. I’m thinking mostly of Kendall Roy’s 40th [on Succession].”
Still, none of the men I spoke to regretted giving in to birthday fever—although like Goh, some avoid billing the get-together as a birthday party. “I do ask friends to spend time together on my birthday—just under the guise of hanging out,” says Joel, a 30-year-old from Wisconsin. “If we just get a lunch or a dinner together, that would be great.”
Dee is fine with calling it what it is, but suggests that you start small: “By making it casual and low-commitment, the burden for yourself and others to attend is virtually nonexistent.”
“I always throw my own birthday party,” says GQ deputy site editor Christopher Cohen. “I just send an email: ‘I am grilling in the park’ or ‘Come get BYOB Chinese food with me.’”
Which doesn’t mean everyone feels great about minimizing their birthdays. “The idea of inviting people over and just hoping that the topic of your birthday comes up is so depressing to me,” says Wolf. “It is embarrassing to ask the fellas to come celebrate you, but it shouldn’t be. This prison that we’ve constructed for ourselves makes me want to just go and throw myself a massive birthday party.”