THAT'S MEN:HUSBANDS GOING off on a Saturday to coach a local football team, to play golf or to have a drink with the lads may engender a certain amount of resentment in their wives.
If it's any consolation to the ladies, their men are probably improving their mental and physical health at the same time - assuming that the "drink" with the lads doesn't involve getting plastered.
Indeed, the women would be well advised to take up these, or similar, activities themselves.
And it's not just spouses who need to take notice of the value of involvement and socialising. We live in times in which it is easier and easier for people to retreat into themselves. But there is increasing evidence that this is bad for us.
The most recent research pointing in this direction concerns involvement in the community. It was conducted with almost 1,000 adults in the US and it found that people who felt involved in their community and who participated in it were significantly healthier than others.
I think that matters a lot especially in the era of the gated apartment to which people come home in the evenings to little or no involvement with neighbours who also live behind electronically-controlled gates.
Indeed, it's very easy for apartment dwellers to feel disconnected not only from other apartment dwellers but also from the community in which their block of apartments is set.
You drive home in the evening and the gates close behind you as though you were living in a colony on a hostile planet. You may emerge on a weekend morning to buy a paper and that's the extent of your involvement with your local community.
There's also a psychological problem here. In the "money for everything" era, involvement in a community through such activities as volunteering can seem rather silly.
Why would you give up your valuable time to sit on the management committee for your apartment block, the residents' committee for your street, to coach the kids' football team or to help a local group clean up a river or canal?
One answer to the question is that such activity is good for your health. And it's not all about doing good works. I'm sure golfers everywhere pounced on reports of a Swedish study which showed that good golfers can increase their life expectancy by five years.
This effect applies best to golfers with a low handicap - the ones who work hardest at their golf.
The researchers who studied data from 300,000 golfers suggested that the sheer amount of walking involved in golf was the game's major contribution to health.
But I would expect also that the social aspects of golf played a major role.
The researchers, by the way, found that golfers benefited regardless of the social class they came from. The greatest effect was for golfers involved in blue-collar activity.
But maybe you don't want to play golf. Golf brings benefits to physical health but one of the keys to good mental health is socialising.
Do you want to improve your cognitive abilities, ie the performance of your brain?
You could always sit at home playing one of those electronic games which promises to sharpen you up. But there's a better way. Socialising with actual people not only improves your thinking - it also appears to reduce your chances of developing dementia in old age.
This research has come from the US, Sweden and elsewhere over a number of years. So getting involved and staying involved with friends and acquaintances boosts your thinking skills and your mental health.
This is why it is such a pity that getting involved with people can be so difficult nowadays. The person whose friends have all got married or who loses his or her job - and the contact with colleagues - can feel quite isolated. So many of our social networks today are outside the neighbourhood in which we live. If we lose those networks we are left high and dry.
Therefore, building up our local connections and boosting our social involvement is an effort that is worth time, effort and even money. And as a health measure it has the advantage that it is also fun.
pomorain@irish-times.ie
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor. That's Men, the best of the That's Men columns from The Irish Times is published by Veritas.