Could we stop telling men they have no friends?
Male friendship as a human asset
I always think it’s a bad idea to have too many ideas about what other groups of people are like. I mean thinking that because someone is in a group certain things will always be true about them. Sure, there might be trends to remark in a given grouping but, even in the event that those trends are overwhelming, the exceptions will always be so multiple that any generalization appears contested beyond reason. I remember once having a conversation with a German in German about how awful it was that English native speakers didn’t learn foreign languages, at which point I gingerly pointed out that I was living proof this wasn’t always true, upon which she responded, ‘Yes, but you are the absolute exception.’ To which I wanted to reply that the world appears to be made up of exceptions. All of us are breaking some observed pattern or other.
I say this in the context of having been told repeatedly of late and having read more times than I care to remember that men don’t have any friends. Apparently, women, and it is often women, tell us, men generally lack close friendships and those we do have are founded on toxic hazing rituals and emotional incontinence. Ironically, this account of the emotional state of men – which seems to attribute to the modern man the EQ of a suburban advertising executive resident in Wichita Kansas in circa 1955 – seems to have actually regressed of late. The cliche of the metrosexual man, in touch with his emotions, a dab hand in the kitchen, his pert and moisturized buns wrapped in a sarong, at least gave the softer variety of modern man something to work with.
There is, of course, good evidence to back this point up; research shows American men have fewer numbers of close friends than in previous eras and that the number is in decline, and there are more men reporting themselves as having no close friends at all. Yet surely this is also part of a general framework of digital atomization, of people struggling to connect in offline spaces or even find where they are. Yet even here there seems vast human evidence of the contrary; on every walk in my local park this summer, I saw huge crowds of young boys and girls playing football, doing exactly what I’d spent most school nights of my own childhood doing.
Clearly, it’s not a clinching argument to say that my anecdotal experience of friendship bears little in common with this, but it is an element of my life I find difficult not to mention in this discussion. Focusing on my friendships with other men, I’m pleasingly anchored by multiple close friendships with at least four men who have provided constant companionship and amusement for years, with even the most recent of these friendships dating back nearly a decade now.
Contrary to rumour, these friendships are also emotionally open and honest, tho I would say the core of them is not the expression of emotion but the processing of it, the placing of things in their right place or working out what can be reasonably done to change the situation.
That wouldn't necessarily be apparent to observers, mind, and those listening in might find the friendships largely incomprehensible or in-jokey to the point of obliqueness; many of my friendships have a sort of ritual in-joke which must be observed as a part of protocol, in much the same way as Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis used to sign off letters to each other with a gratuitous use of the word ‘Bum’.
Indeed, the quality of these friendships has been remarked upon by outsiders. One time I was sitting in Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem – arguably Nottingham’s best pub, with the Sir John Borlase Warren, in my view, its only serious competitor – chatting to a dear friend and a middle-aged lady came up to us both and said, ‘It’s so lovely just to hear you two talk.’ I’m surprised she got much from it; our conversations were often an embroidered mixture of musical appreciation, obscure in-jokes and trivia about theatre history. And also advice on attracting and (this less successfully) retaining women; this is the kind of shape of many a male friendship, culture and girls.
I think male friendship has been one of the most purely positive aspects of my life, so excuse me if I get a touch defensive about its qualities. They say you don’t want anything from your friends, which isn’t true; I want to hang out with them.