The Challenges of Male Friendships

There are, of course, exceptions: buddies who know all about intimacy and cosiness, camaraderie and connection. But let’s state the darker and more general truth plainly: friendship is difficult for men. For every man who can claim a decent male friend, there must be at least eight who – in the honesty of their deep minds – know they have none that truly merit the term. 

The problem – though it strikes at an individual level – is anchored in larger societal forces. Men are lonely not through any specific deficiency on their part but because of an inherent conflict between what is required of being a man on the one hand and what is involved in being a friend on the other.

The bedrock of true friendship is – unfortunately – mutual vulnerability. We may, naturally, foster a friendship by discussing how many goals Manchester United scored in the year of the last World Cup or how hypersonic aeroplane engines work or the average return of an S&P 500 stock. There can be a certain interest in thinking together about the classical influence within Picasso’s late period, or the idea of justice in Plato’s The Laws or the influence of Plotinus on early Renaissance thought.

But genuine friendship, the sort that nourishes and sustains, that argues against despair and helps with the eeriness of the early hours, has to begin somewhere else. It starts the moment that one person says to another: ‘I’m going out of mind’; ‘I hate my partner’s guts’; ‘I’m terrified’. Or: ‘Help me’. It starts when a man can admit: ‘I’m in love with a colleague’; ‘I can’t get it up any more’. Or: ‘the anxiety never stops’. There won’t be a friendship that properly counts until we can reveal ourselves to be as weak as we are, until we can confess that we have been lying to preserve face and that the truth is far ghastlier and sadder, far more tender and more bathetic than we’ve yet been able to let on.

Regrettably for men, since the earliest days, across civilisations, it has been self-evident that to be a man involves something else entirely: being unflinching and solid, unperturbed and straightforward, buoyant and resourceful. It’s about not minding that we’ve been left or sacked, humiliated or bullied. It’s about never losing an erection and knowing how to rule an empire without taking to bed and pining for mother. It’s ultimately about never, ever being that most dreaded and abhorrent of things: a crybaby.

The best way to break the loneliness must be to admit with humour and grace that it exists and that one may be more than fed up that it does so. Of course men often don’t know how to be close. Of course they might be substantially friendless. It should be no surprise if they’ve never had an honest conversation with another member of their gender. Little in their histories allows for such an eventuality. 

If we were tempted to make a practical change, we might design some packs of conversation cards and give them out to men take with them to the bar and the pub, the shooting range and the golf club. On them would be printed a range of questions of a kind that men might long to ask one another and seldom can: 

— When did you last cry?

— What would you want to tell me if you knew I wouldn’t judge you?

— When do you feel most anxious?

— What makes you despair?

— What do you want to be forgiven for?

— What does the small boy inside you feel?

Most would agree that such cards were – naturally – idiotic and unnecessary. But how useful they might be if they provided even a small opportunity for a few men to let down their guard and reveal a more complex reality.

The histories of art and literature are all the proof one might require that men are capable of the greatest empathy and tenderness. The tragedy is that men are so seldom able to direct these emotions towards one another, that they must spend their lives barricaded in themselves, in dread of becoming, in the eyes of their fellow men, a child or a woman, that they must waste so much time and be so brave in defending an illusion that they never asked to be a part of.