Talking with men
Have we been getting male friendships all wrong?
Everyone knows the Paul Rudd movie, so we don’t even need to mention it by name. It forms part of the late Apatow Canon, back when he could take any insight, spin it into a two hour feature and you’d be quoting its inane non-sequiturs to your friends for the next 5 years. The film in question sees an average man, apparently bereft of the ability to make any lasting friends that have a penis, finally succeed by stumbling into a strange, prog-rock fuelled bromance with Jason Segel.
We are made to believe that Paul Rudd, perfectly amiable and innocuous, is some sort of weird social deviant for not having a solid group of male friends. His love interest, Rashida Jones, spends the majority of the film oscillating between overtly pitying him and being exasperated at his seeming inability to connect with other dudes. Perhaps because it’s a bit too existential for an Apatow joint, the film fails to explore the pathology behind this problem. We never find out why Rudd’s character cannot form lasting male relationships. We just accept that it is a thing that he is unable to do, like some people can’t ride a bike, cook soufflé or sing in tune.
On paper, the premise of this film is my life. My female friends have always far outnumbered men and until very recently, I remained convinced that aside from those forced to prop me up while I failed at every known school sport, I would likely not make a single male friend as an adult. It helps that I have two brothers, I’d often joke to my colleagues, because that sorts out the inevitable groomsmen problem pretty easily.
Growing up, my understanding of the male bond was entwined with packs; guys drinking together, playing rugby together, getting wasted at festivals together, marauding through Eastern Europe together, playing FIFA ’98 together.
Through Rudd, Apatow presents a similar view in the film; essentially, if you can’t bro down, you can’t get down. These groups were large and seemingly unstructured from the outside but their memberships were hard-earned and decades in the making. It was not something you could break into even with serious effort and Lord knows between the music industry, two universities and three workplaces before I hit 25, I really tried.
Since moving to London, I’ve found myself in a number of very intense, one-to-one conversations with men. I’ve had long lunches, weekend dinners, walks in parks, visits to galleries, coffees that last three hours and late night pastas that outlast Cinderella. It’s been quite a surreal experience.
Outside of a prostate exam, there’s not a lot of things left in this world that can make grown, white straight men uncomfortable. But sit us across the table from each another, sans alcohol, in broad daylight and see how long it takes for someone to squirm. I remember a recent Marina Abramovic exhibition in Sydney’s Walsh Bay, which forced strangers to stare at one another without distractions for a few minutes. It felt like hours. And having now repeated the same experiment — albeit unwittingly — with new and old friends, I’ve realised that we men don’t really look at each other. At least not in a way that indicates that we’re searching for answers, or understanding what we’re hearing.
Pointedly, none of these recent interactions have occurred in group settings. It’s made me realise that perhaps I haven’t been getting male friendships wrong, it’s that I’ve actually been operating in the wrong format. The concept of two men hanging out alone remains fully loaded, even in 2018. A new acquaintance of mine, excited to find someone else who liked going to the theatre, recently booked us tickets to an upcoming show. He then spent an entire fortnight copping it from his mates for going on a ‘man date’, a shade away from insinuating he was a closeted homosexual. Of course, they weren’t actually being serious. But the implication wasn’t exactly buried, either.
We are in the midst of a Man Revival in popular consciousness. In Western society, we are fighting toxic masculinity on one front, while trying to quell a catastrophic youth male suicide rate on the other. It is not crazy to think these things are related. Men are being told to zip and unzip it, to open up and close out certain feelings. On the attack and under attack. For the most part, they’re simply being urged to talk; about It, whatever the It may be. But this requires a certain level of normalisation. Especially when it comes to talking to other men, honestly, outside of the herd mentality that many of us have been actively building for ourselves since discovering Ninja Turtles at age 4.
I’ve found that men can be good listeners and talkers. That there are levels of engagement that seem preposterously unlikely until you suck all the other noise and oxygen and opinions out of the room. That you can have a heartfelt conversation with a man who either makes dick jokes at least 50% of the time and that you can do it while walking together through a park on a gorgeous Wednesday afternoon, a move he would most certainly class as suspicious were he looking at it externally. Or write long letters to a friend back home, where both of you can talk about feelings of isolation, struggles to really feel successful, reservations around finding true love. I’ve realised that you can actually hug your male friends and tell them that you love them, or that you’ll miss them when they leave. That this is a feeling that need not be saved only for women, whom we often mistakenly render as ‘softer’ in our collective imagination.
I’m not disavowing the conventional male group by any stretch. It’s something I’m very jealous of, to the point where I’ve made a habit of forcing my scarce group of old mates to play a weekly tennis match, just so I can experience that fleeting moment of being in a pack. But I’ve also come to realise that it’s not the only way to interface with men and perhaps there is -for lack of a better metaphor- an entire generation of Paul Rudds out there, desperate to connect but unable to work within the existing configuration.
It shouldn’t take until we’re in the therapist’s chair for us to feel like we can talk honestly or spend time with another man, regardless of sexual preference. The greatest gift of living in another country is to remove oneself from context. And the greatest gift I’ve received this year is the strong, robust friendships of other men that I don’t have to share with anyone else if I don’t want to.
We’ll go to the movies, we’ll drink another coffee, we’ll talk about our partners, bitch about work, marvel over new records, discuss plans for future travel. There will be nothing strange about it. And when we get to the point where we go our different ways, we’ll do that stupid hug men do, where they have to smack each other on the back like someone’s have a coughing fit.
And maybe, just maybe, I’ll say it, because I mean it:
