How to Be Better on Video Calls: A Man’s Guide to Staying Connected

The numbers on male friendship are rough. Back in 1990, more than half of American men (55%) said they had six or more close friends; today that figure sits at just 27%, while the share reporting zero close friends has climbed from 3% to 15% over the same period (Survey Center on American Life). The friend circles are not the only ones that are changing. As more and more people venture into the dating scene, they are doing so with a smaller network of people to support them, making meaningful conversations, emotional openness, and meaningful connections all that much more valuable. 

As always, the reason for the lack of field time is pointed to the usual suspects: jobs, family obligations, and the dwindling effect of the weekly pick-up game. Underneath all of them sits the same mechanic: when seeing your friends in person stops being convenient, most men let the friendship coast on memes and a birthday text. Video calls are the obvious fix, and most men are bad at them in a very specific way: they treat every call like a work meeting. Camera reluctantly on, tone flat, wrap it up in eight minutes because the “agenda” ran out. That’s a fixable skill problem, not a personality trait. Everything below can be sorted in an afternoon.

Get the Boring Stuff Right First

Nobody deepens a friendship because of great lighting. But for many college students, bad audio and a nostril-angle camera quietly make every call feel like a chore for the person on the other end, and calls that feel like chores stop getting answered. Three things cover 90% of it:

• Light in front of you, never behind. A window facing you or a cheap desk lamp beats any filter.
• Camera at eye level. Stack the laptop on books if you have to. The from-below angle flatters exactly no one.
• Wired headphones or decent earbuds. Echoey laptop audio makes every sentence 15% more annoying, and the other person will never consciously figure out why.

Five minutes of setup, once. Then close the self-view window so you’re not watching yourself talk for half the call.

Treat It Like a Hang, Not a Meeting

A call with an old friend dies the moment it turns into a status report. Job’s fine, kids are fine, car’s fine, “anyway, good catching up.” Twenty minutes, nothing exchanged, both of you vaguely deflated. The fix is having somewhere to take the conversation once the updates run dry. Ask what he’d do with a surprise Tuesday off. Ask about the last thing he watched twice. When the conversation earns it, a few philosophical questions will get you further than another round of work talk; depth is exactly what the birthday-text version of a friendship never delivers, and it’s what makes a call worth scheduling again. 

For group calls, go the other direction: structure helps. A round of useless trivia or a dumb ranked debate (“best fast food fries, wrong answers punished”) gives four guys on a screen something to push against. Group video calls without a game devolve into two people talking and two people checking their phones. One warning: prepared material is scaffolding, not a script. If your friend says something interesting and you bulldoze past it to your next planned question, he’ll feel it.

Get Your Reps In

Being relaxed on camera is a skill, and like most skills, it’s mostly repetition. If your only on-camera hours are standups and client calls, your video register is corporate, guarded face, flat delivery, meeting posture. That carries over when you call your oldest friend, and it reads as distance even when none exists. The fix is unglamorous: more live conversation, on camera, with actual humans. 

Regular video chat with people you choose to talk to, picked because you share an interest, a language you’re learning, or just curiosity, trains the exact muscles that matter: holding eye contact with a lens, reading reactions through a screen, riding out a lag-induced pause without panicking. A few casual calls a week, and the format stops feeling like a performance and starts feeling like a room you know. Comedians do open mics before the special for the same reason. Low-stakes reps are where the comfort comes from.

Keep It Short on Purpose

Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab worked out why video calls drain people faster than in-person conversation: sustained close-up eye contact, watching yourself in real time, and staying pinned in frame all add cognitive load that a normal conversation doesn’t carry (Stanford News). That fatigue hits the other person just as hard, however well the call is going. So cap it. Twenty to thirty minutes, then out, long enough for something real, short enough that both of you would happily do it again next month. “I’ve got to run, but this was good. 

“Same time in a few weeks?” is a stronger ending than letting the call dissolve into “so… yeah.” A standing short call beats a rare epic one; frequency is what keeps a friendship warm, and staying connected with friends matters far more than the length of any single conversation. The same habit often strengthens romantic relationships, where regular check-ins and small moments of connection build trust and closeness more effectively than occasional grand gestures. 

The Point of the Call

Big actions will not cure the friendship recession. It turns around by making the option of doing less effortful (a half-hour on camera with people you already like) easy enough that you actually try it. Consistency and interest are more important than anything else, and this usually fosters better dating relationships. 

You can do this just once: pick up something to discuss, make your presence known, and when you’re done, both sides are still looking forward to the next conversation as a way to pass the time. Most men allow a friendship to remain in place and then ask, “Where’s everybody?” The most basic video call, once a month, is a pretty low-cost form of maintenance. Make the best of the head start.