I’ve worked a new word into my everyday vocabulary this year: “bro.”

I know, I know — constantly throwing around the word “bro” can give off a particularly toxic male energy. But in the past few months, I’ve found myself throwing “bro” around in conversations more because, well, I’ve been trying to find ways to “bro out” more.

I’ve never had that hard of a time surrounding myself with male friends. When I was four, I’d “write” plays — say random words and task my mom with turning them into a script — for my friends to perform in. In high school, I was determined to ensure I would have other guy friends. I’d seen my dad go through life without really making friends when he lived in my hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, and other adult men I know limiting their friends to their partners’ social circle.

So I decided to learn everything I could about the National Football League and Major League Baseball, having played a total of one hour of organized sports in my life and having watched such events for even less time. Somehow, I stumbled into winning my high school fantasy football league two years in a row as a result and still talk to most of my high school friends almost entirely about football. Since I got to GW, partly via watching sports and partly not, I’ve made a lot of close bonds with guy friends I really hope will last my entire life.

But I, as anyone who has ever spoken to me would attest, am not super bro-y. I’m scrawny and don’t really know anything about cars. My mom’s fiancé says every man needs to either be into fishing or golfing. I can’t tell you the last time I did either.

As graduation nears, the looming loneliness of not constantly being in college with possible new friends at every corner, has been weighing on me. I’m, for better or for worse, a political science major, meaning I have many, many times read Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” for class. The classic 2000 book covers how Americans just don’t spend time out together anymore — they go bowling alone, rather than with others. That phenomenon has only gotten worse in recent years, with the COVID-19 pandemic and the general rise of the internet driving more people online and away from each other.

As our editorial board noted earlier this semester, that increasing loneliness has been especially bad among men: “Social media romanticizes isolation, especially among the particularly loneliness-afflicted young men whose Instagram feeds are a nonstop slot machine of reels crafted by disciplined lone wolf alpha bros. This perpetuated solitude harms youth mental health and promotes an oft-virulent brand of masculinity that’s seeped its way into our relationships and politics.”

I didn’t want to graduate and fall victim to those same trends, drifting away from my guy friends and becoming another statistic in the male loneliness epidemic. So this semester, I’ve been creating regular reasons to spend time with my male friends so we can all embrace the bromance.

My project started back in January, when my two best friends from studying abroad and I decided we wanted to start a book club to stay in touch. To pick out our first book, I Googled “book club books for men” and settled on Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove.” The novel is a sweeping Western full of its own bromances, between the two lead ranchers, two kindly Irishmen and a whole giant outfit of other cowboys.

Every week, we hop on FaceTime to talk about the next 50 pages of the book and compare our weeks to those of the book characters’ — if a week is going well, it’s a Jake Spoon week, named after an effortlessly cool, mustachioed cowboy. If things aren’t going great, well, that’s a Dish Boggart week — the man whose love Jake Spoon stole away. The experience has brought us all closer, and it’s honestly just been really nice to have an excuse to call my friends every week.

I’ve tried to expand my bromances elsewhere, too. I’ve been reaching out to friends I haven’t seen in years to go see spy movies and action flicks together most Sundays. I have Wednesday morning study dates with one friend and Wednesday evening walks with another to talk through all the problems of our lives. I get together with another group every Saturday to watch some sort of sporting event, including my first time ever watching a professional fight, a spectacle that I remain totally befuddled, if also fascinated by.

All those experiences are different from what I thought a classic bro-down would require — the walks, the movies, the book clubs, even watching the fights are all just excuses to hang out with some people I really like spending time around, without any of the toxic manliness I might’ve feared from the word “bro.” My schedule now revolves around weekly traditions with my male friends, and I don’t have any of the worries about losing touch that I did a few months ago because those one-off hangouts are becoming rituals. I could write more, but it’s a bro movie night tonight, and I can’t miss that.

Nick Perkins, a senior majoring in political science, is the culture editor.