The challenge of getting men to be friends
Bongi D D M Radipati | Wednesday November 6, 2024 12:44
In his book, “Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships,” Geoffrey L. Greif writes that the significant difference between male friendships and their female counterparts is that men have shoulder-to-shoulder relationships while women have face-to-face relationships. To him, this means that men prefer to share an activity (e.g. a sport, a hobby, socializing, or training) with their male friends as it is not necessary to reveal themselves and their feelings or to connect without inhibitions, in that context. Differently, writes Greif, women prefer to share real intimacy (in other words, they share themselves and their vulnerability) with their female friends. They also tend to have deep, meaningful and long lasting female friendships, sometimes even able to keep friends from childhood up to their own children’s school years. To me, a non expert in these matters, this is a difference between the requirements and expectations needed for relationships within the sexes. It is also a difference between the gradients - a difference that makes it seem reflexively hard for men to initiate, form and nurture male friendships easily than it is for women and for their friendships.
Friendship among men weaves an enduring dilemma. It has both brilliance and misery, glory and squalor, and magnificence and pity. Witness how men can have strong non contact bonds with other men who aren't related to them by blood, or work or neighborliness but who have been supportive of them or have imbued their lives with meaning. But, they can still allow that bond to turn cold or to slip by or to become inert or stale. This is so although male friendships will ordinarily bring to men, boisterous fervor, some some activity, social connectivity, and ultimately even expand those men’s possibilities in life. But men may balk at the trade off for all of that since for friendships to form, they require the keeping of an open mind about where and how those relationships may come. Thereafter, they will require men’s active effort to develop and maintain those relationships. Research shows that unlike women everywhere, everywhere men typically find it hard to make their male friendships succeed or to keep friends for keeps sake. This doesn't make male friendships artificial or contrived. But it does make them hard for (female and professional) bystanders to wrap their heads around it. It is not a male thing for nothing!
Recently, a long-time fellow cyclist sent us, his teammates, a WhatsApp message informing us that he has been diagnosed with a rare form of stomach cancer. For over 30 years, we have cycled together initially as graduate students and thereafter as an all males cycling team. Facing numbness and disbelieving shock about the randomness of illness over a mate who has had a health bias for practically all his adult life, every team member conveyed an unshakeable friendship and support to our cancer stricken team member. This friendship and support among us has been and continues to be as strong on sad days as on happy ones. As he undergoes medical procedures and treatment, for the first time in the history of our team, we train and compete without him. The pity that we feel for him and his family now is melding with the adjustments that we must make to address his absence from the team. Although none of us has said it, we fervently hope that the idiom, out of sight, out of mind, does not apply to us. Of course every team member knows that adult life has its own bureaucracy which tends to push friendship aside. Typically, careers, ambitions, marriages, fatherhood and social responsibilities easily prompt men to deal with the arrangements of the deck of cards that life has dealt them. In the process, male friendship can be sacrificed on the altar of convenience or expediency, sometimes for good.
While Greif notes that male friendship is most important to youthful men and seriously old men, in effect men between the ages of 20 and 60, I think that it is when male life shifts from those ages to midlife that we, as men, need our friends the most. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the puzzling insufficiency of men in making friends, we must recognize the singularity of male middle age. This is the time when we, who are in that age bracket, have no choice but to contend with failing (or soon-to-fail) health. This is also the time when we have to acknowledge that our lives are certainly coming to an end as did those of our parents previously. This is also the time when our children (doing what comes naturally) now have their own lives clearly independent of ours. Good, stable and reliable male friends will be with us, sharing with us the load of mortality and advancing seniority and the assurance that one must have had an effect on one's friends. These friends will also help us recall the fascination of life. They will also reinforce the silent confidence of our maturity. Importantly, through our friends, we are likely to see the interweaving time frames of their lives and ours. Implicit in all of this is a challenge to men to engage in a quiet but determined pursuit of male friendships. More directly, as men, we ought to form friendships as complete relationships rather than fragmentary or open fraternity ones. Those relationships should be instances of the heart and soul with their ulterior moral gesture integrated with openness rather than mere acquaintanceship. Finally, those friendships should be as clear and simple as a theater of bonding capable of being understood by anybody with some common sense.
*Radipati is a regular Mmegi contributor