My thoughts about friendship take me back 40 + years, all the way to my own childhood.
I first learned about friendship from books, I believe. And the first models of friendship were not about friendship among humans, boys and men that is. Rather, they were about friendships between a man or boy and an animal.
I remember in particular a book I read in fourth grade about a native American boy and his horse. He had caught the horse from a herd of wild horses, brought it home himself, won its trust and begun to ride it. For him the highest accomplishment in all of it was that he never used any of the rougher methods his peers and elders were suggesting to use. All he did is get the horse used to his scent, touch, and slowly to accepting weight on his back. When the time had come to get on the horses back, the horse did not buck, but accepted him and followed all commands right away. The book spans about 40 years and so I followed them through several separations, adventures and almost missed opportunities. Their mutual loyalty, I remember this clearly, even then moved me to tears.
Around that time I made my first real friend. His name was Victor. Victor became my friend because his friend up to that point, Klaus-Peter Kroeger, had been hit and killed by a car when he ran across the busy street in front of his parents’ house. He and Victor had been on their way to school and Victor witnessed the whole thing. Victor was the third of four children born to a Spanish mother and a German father. He had two older brothers and a younger sister. He was what now we would call a latch-key child. With both parents working, his brothers had to take care of him and his younger sister. They did so with much resistance and the result of it was that Victor had very little supervision. But, as his name so aptly suggests, Victor was a winner.
Up to my friendship with him I had been at the bottom of the class totem pole. Bullied, kicked and teased mercilessly. Victor stood next to me and cheered me on (the only one who did) when for the first and only time I refused to be bullied by a boy nick-named Caterpillar (or the bull-dozer). Ordinarily I wouldn’t have stood a chance. But my rage and Victor’s cheers (and instructions on how to use my fists) gave me superhuman powers. Caterpillar lay on the ground quickly, bleeding from his nose and mouth, crying noisily. The teachers had to pull me off of him. I was punished with a detention. Victor, not having to go home anytime soon, stayed with me. To this day I remember him saying again and again, “gut gemacht, Martin” (you did good, Martin).
Physically Victor would not let anyone mess around with him. Even then I understood that this was a result of having two older brothers who were not always gentle with him. Academically, however, Victor needed my cheering and some instructions (especially in English which we had started in third grade and math). While we never thought of it as an exchange, Victor’s academic confidence grew as my physical confidence did.
My strongest wish for my relationship with Victor was for us to be brothers. We shared this wish I believe. We both had read the adventures of Winnetou, a noble Apache chief, who meets and becomes most intimate friends with a German engineer by the name of Karl. Karl turns out to be immensely strong. He saves Winnetou’s life once before Winnetou even knows that Karl is a friend and not an enemy. Soon, Karl’s strength is legendary and he becomes known by the name of Old Shatterhand, the hand that shatters. Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, or Charlie as Winnetou calls him affectionately, become blood-brothers. They each cut their arms with a knife and then press the wounds against each other while committing themselves to absolute loyalty to and love for the other.
This is what I wanted Victor and me to do. We never did. We were too afraid to cut our arms. When we entered fifth grade he went to the school his brothers were already attending, I went to a school closer to my parents’ home. I had lost my first friend and started into a three year Odyssee until my next friendship finally began. During this time my grades dropped significantly, I became known as a troublemaker, I stopped washing myself regularly, and I tried very hard to get the attention of girls (a very unfortunate mix, by the way). I was in grade seven, still without a friend, that I came closest to having sex, closer than I did for the rest of my adolescence. The loss of my friend, in other words, combined with the change of schools had turned me into somewhat of a lose gun. All of this turned around when, finally, at the end of seventh grade, I became friends with first two then three other boys from my class. You’ll hear more about that later on.
Men’s Loneliness
Many men are alone. No, this doesn’t mean that they are really by themselves. They might even have crowds gathered around them. But they are alone because they don’t have a friend. Once they have reached their career goal, or simply, once they have begun to work, have started a family and are on some kind of path towards retirement, men seem to fall out of friendships with other men. It is stunning to see for how many young men significant friendships with other men are still common until the end of college. While college males lament the fact that many of their so-called friends end up being nothing more than drinking buddies, they also admit to having one or two perhaps a handful of real friends, young men around their own age whom they trust and with whom they have significant ties. However, come graduate school, the first job or marriage, these friendships end. Frequently, they end quite abruptly with those friends serving, one last time, as best-men and witnesses at the man’s wedding.
Often such men can also name about as many close male friends they had from early childhood on, through grade school, junior high and high-school. We are looking, in other words, at life-long experience with friends and friendships that , quite suddenly, comes to stop in many men’s mid-twenties.
It would be easy, too easy, to talk about this lack of significant male friendships in males 25 and older from the many perspectives of male vulnerability we have discussed in the last eight months. If we did that, we would say that males are too vulnerable, too competitive, too homo-phobic, too focused on getting love from women, too immersed in their work, too tough with themselves to make meaningful connections with other men. Perhaps in small ways this is true. But the real problem with this line of argumentation is that it would, once again, blame men for something, this time their very own loneliness. It would be saying that “before you can make real friends you need to change. You’re not going to get anywhere, if you stay the way you are.”
If we go about it that way, we are likely to judge men by a standard that is not their own. We would be saying things like "if you want to have friends you need to show your feelings" or if you want to have friends you should practice how to have a conversation." Whose standard standards these are I don’t know. Some might think it’s a female standard. But I hesitate to say that, because so many men actually use this standard to talk about themselves. It also wold be blaming women for something men should be in charge (afte all, every act of blaming is an act of externalizing internal pain and projecting it on someone else). Suffice it to say that it is a self-blaming, self-denigrating and humiliating standard. One that continually drives home the message that men are insufficient human beings. We are not. It is time, I believe that we stop the vicious cycle of morbid self-criticism and replace it with an honest and open understanding of our limits combined with an equally honest understanding of our capabilities. Male friendships are an example of that.
Men’s Expectations Regarding Friendship
The more I think about it, I am inclined to think that it is not so much vulnerability but high expectations, standards you might say, that are at the root of male loneliness and disconnectedness from other males. What are those standards?
A summary of conversations I have had the privilege to have with a 73 old client might give us a first glimpse of those standards. My client, let’s call him Elmer, came to me after he had been diagnosed with bladder cancer, had had surgery and had fallen into a deep depression. He had the following to say about friends and friendships:
I don’t have real friends anymore. The one and only real friend I had died about
30 years ago in a plane-crash. We both had our license for small planes, you
know. But when he crashed I couldn’t fly any longer. I still miss him a lot. He
was the only one I told about all my issues with women. Then, wham, he was gone.
I do have a lot of buddies now. You know, men I talk to, here and there. Men I’m
friendly with. There is Kurt the car-dealer at the Chevy place, Oskar the banker
who does all my finances and keeps watch over my properties. There is my
hair-dresser. Most of them are actually younger than me, by about fifteen to
twenty years. I don’t know why really. I guess I don’t like hanging out with old
geezers my age. All they talk about is their bad knees and how they’re going to
die soon. That’s not me, not even now, even though I have had cancer.Elmer, without knowing it, brings in certain standards about male relationships which, I believe, are quite universally true. They are true not only for 73 year old men, but already touch the lives of young boys and adolescents.
Standard #1: Friends now should be like friends then. Men grieve the loss of old friends.
I have found that most men grieve the loss of old friends. Many of them did not go through the trauma of losing a friend in a plane-crash like Elmer. In fact, most of them said their friends were probably still alive, somewhere, in the US. Some even knew where these friends lived. But they grieved their loss nevertheless. In their grieve over the lost friend, their standards for new friendships rose to new levels. A new friend should really have all the characteristics of the lost friend. These men’s grieve, in other words, became an obstacle to forming new friendships. But, and this is most interesting, it also became an obstacle to renewing a friendship with an old friend. It almost seems that the pain of nostalgia over old friendships, the melancholy of lost friendships, is part of the male profile. The older a man gets the more he seems to be saying “I refuse to make friends, unless they’re like my old friend.
I came to understand this quite acutely through observing and questioning my own actions around old friends. Some time in the last 12 years I had begun to surf the internet looking for pictures or hints of news about old/former friends. I would just type names of people into a search engine and see, if I could find any information about them. In doing it, I began to be aware of how utterly disconnected I had become from my past, from my friends, from the places that, in so many ways, molded me.My initial curiosity turned into heart-ache upon that realization. While my life had always seemed continuous, and logical--detours not withstanding--it became clear to me now that the continuityI thought I had wasn’t so much in my life than that it was given by the fact that time simply kept moving on. Many things had been quite discontinuous in my life. One major discontinuity lay in my loss of a few friends. They hadn’t died, I had just . . . well, not forgotten about them, but pushed them to the side.
I realized, too, that a certain sadness about this had always been with me. A song from my favorite German song-writer Reinhard Mey had, in particular, touched me. In this song he describes how, while slowly getting drunk on cheap red wine he thinks of all his friends. He wonders what they’re up to now, where they might be. He resolves that, though he can’t see them and be with them now, “in a gesture, in a word, they all continue to live within me.”
"In a gesture, in a word they all still live within me." I had never thought of this line as anything else but axiomatic, dogmatic truth. And this truth hurt. It hurt because no matter how present the gesture or word of the particular person, this presence, nevertheless, bespeaks powerfully their absence from my life now. I realized, in other words, that I was grieving the loss of my friends almost as if they had died. And without knowing what I was doing I used the internet to make my old friends present again.
It took courage to go beyond the mere internet search. My friend Lucas, a boy from Holland with whom I had spent a mere four weeks (two in his house in the Netherlands and two in my house in Germany) responded to my e-mail only once. My friends Stephan and Andreas didn’t respond. My friend Calle, short for Carl, did answer. Five years ago we started writing to each other in earnest again. We both had started families and every time I visited Germany I would also make it a point to see him. We continue to write and see each other. I last saw him in June of this year. This weekend he wrote to me that his job had ended. He is in a lot of pain, worried. I feel fortunate to have known him for 36 years and to understand what this loss means to him.
Standard #2: Old friends often are friends with whom a man went through some kind of adventure.
This seems to be an extremely important part of male friendships. Their significance is often accompanied by something the friends went through together, something unusual or extraordinary they experienced together. I have heard men talk about difficult shared mountain-climbing experiences, about out-racing a police-car, about pushing themselves to a limit (sometimes that limit is several nights of studying together without sleeping, sometimes that limit is getting totally drunk together and waking up the next morning without knowing how they got there). Not all men choose all of these, but many males, in my experience, will want to push their limits, together with another man or a group of men, in order to affirm their relationship with their friends.
With Calle, to use him as a good example, this adventure was the rock-band in which we played together. I taught him his first chords on the guitar. We played for about five years before the end of school pulled us apart. He and I, together, dug a deep trench in his parents’ garden which they needed to put in a new fence. In return they gave him the money to buy his first amplifier. This was our adventure, playing music. Expressing everything we felt as teens, all our Sturm and Drang, through music.
Standard #3: Friends should be willing to talk about women/partners.
This is an extremely sensitive issue for most men, because many of the men I have talked to about this issue seem to agree on this one fact: they often feel powerless and overwhelmed with what their partners want and expect from them. Ergo, a real friend is a man who understands women from his own experience. Men who get along with their partners and who might even criticize other men for voicing their frustration about their partners are never going to meet this standard. A real friend understands that living in a relationship is one of the most difficult things a man can undertake.
Calle would spend part of the summer in Italy on a kind of exchange visit. This is where he fell in love for the first time. Her name was Anna. I in turn got to talk about my unrequited love for Corinna. We spent uncounted hours talking about these girls, candles lit, listening to music that would indulge our romantic longings.Perhaps this is contrary to what the quote from my father is expressing. He seems to think that the friendship is better--purer--perhaps, if wives can be left of the conversations. Perhaps this is an age-related insight, one that is not yet accessible for me. For me, when so much is happening in my relationship, good and bad, I want to be able to talk about it to my friend. Not doing it would, at this point in my life, seem like a denial of who I am and what's happening to me.
Standard #4: Friends should not engage in any kind of morbid conversation with each other.
What do you mean, I asked Elmer. Are you saying you wouldn’t and haven’t talked to any of these guys about how scared shitless you were when you got the diagnosis?
Well, no, Elmer said, I didn’t say it in those words. I just said that it hurt like hell and that I was about to shoot myself rather than having more of it. That was enough, he said. Oskar knew exactly what I was talking about. No need to say more and drag it out.
So, I asked, is this what you would have told your friend who died in the plane-crash had he been alive?
Probably, Elmer said. I might have added what a bastard he is for probably living longer than me. He laughs with a coarse smoker’s laugh. But now I’m the bastard who is still alive, he says and laughs even more (with tears glistening in the corners of his eyes).
Calle and I did not have any reason to talk about death. But it came up indirectly as the issue of age in our parents. When he and I met in seventh grade his parents were 54 and 60. My parents were 34 and 36. I knew then that Calle lived with a sense of limitation that I could hardly understand. His parents simply weren’t as vivacious and outgoing, and therefore not as inspiring to him, as mine were at times. When we first started writing again, his father had passed and his mother was ailing.
Friendship Only Once
Elmer’s words and reflections can help us see that men often view friendship as a once in a life occurrence. If they’re lucky their friends will live a long time and the friendship will somehow continue. Many men do not make friends again, once their old friends have died or moved away. I am reminded of Sean, a 25 year old graduate student, who was still struggling with anger and grieve about a move initiated by his parents when he was 14. He had lost all of his friends in this move and “decided” never to make friends again. Losing a friend can be a traumatic experience for a man, not only if the friend dies violently, but simply because he feels torn away from a few people he had really connected with. Sean dealt with his grieve in quasi-masochistic ways and by attaching himself desperately to a woman who could not understand why he was so clingy.
To make up for the loss men are more likely to choose loneliness, or superficial buddydom, or an intense, sometimes hurtful, relationship with a woman. And even boys often fall into these patterns, acting like old, uprooted trees that cannot really grow again.
How Do Boys and Men Learn about Friendships with Other Men?
How are boys and men discouraged from forming friendships with other men?
A man’s ability to connect with other men is highly dependent on the kinds of connections he had both with his father and his brothers, but also with his mother and sisters. Father absence is a social malady of remarkable dimensions in many ways. But it certainly has one of its most profound consequences in men’s inability to connect with other men. The absent father, the secondary parent, the dead father… all of these share, from the perspective of the son, the disappointing insight “men’s presence cannot be trusted, for men always end up leaving. So why connect with them?”
The story of Oedipus, which we heard about already at our last meeting, gives ample evidence not only of a son who is, unbeknownst to him, drawn to his mother. It also is the story of a son who was, first and foremost, abandoned by his father. His father’s inability to connect with him, his corresponding jealousy of a son who would, some day out do him in almost everything, drove him to abandon his son. Paternal jealousy of a son is not seldom the lever that pries apart the protective parental frame-work around a son.
Brothers play an equally vital role in the way boys and men are able to connect with other males. Roger, a long-term client, grew up with a sadistic older brother who liked to tease and trip him up whenever and wherever he could. Roger is 56, a successful university professor, but has never had a male friend. Similarly, Sam, a 34 year old business men with lots of contacts with men in his professional life, grew up with two older brothers who abused him, but to whom he could not stop looking up. Sam admires many men, even those who try to hurt him, but he has not been able to engage in a significant friendship with another man.
The role of mothers in a man’s developing ability to make friends is equally significant. Mothers can easily delay or stop this process by communicating to their sons that they should spend more time with them rather than their father by discouraging their sons to participate in any kind of activity that looks at all risky. By emphasizing that it is first and foremost the task of the boy to please her, i.e., the woman, rather than himself, i.e., that is the man.
Mothers who in subtle ways send messages to their sons about their father’s incompetence and unreliability are not rare. I am not talking about active ways of putting down their husbands. Rather, I am talking about the small, almost unnoticeable ways in which mothers function as gate-keepers who constantly, by virtue of their gate-keeping, send the message that it’s simply better for the son to be with mom than with dad. This kind of gate-keeping takes place in two parent families as well as single parent (i.e., mother only) families. However, it can be especially strong in the latter.
Jeremy, a fourteen year old client, came to see me, because he had hit his mother several times. It turned out that he could not safely tell his mother that he wanted to spend time with his father. His mother and father were divorced and the father lived three hours south of Champaign. Every time he mentioned it, she would get mad at him and ask him, if he didn’t love her anymore. To make matters even worse she also continually identified every of her son’s misbehaviors as “things that remind me of your dad.” His mother also acts with extreme agitation to Jeremy’s wish to spend time with his friends.
Jeremy complies with her wishes, on the surface. He gets angry because “she doesn’t have any time for me.” As it turns out, despite her wish for Jeremy not spend time with his father and his friends, she—being a single mother of four—in reality doesn’t have any time to spend with Jeremy. Jeremy is essentially alone, alienated from his father and male friends and abandoned by his mother.
There are, and this might be hard to believe, plenty of mothers who feel convinced that too much contact with other males will spoil her son’s ability to really understand and please a woman. This is certainly one of the exaggerated outcomes of 40 years of feminism that started based on the premise that men spending time with other men will turn into predatory enemies of women. Therefore, so goes the argument, it is advisable to limit the contact a boy has with other boys and substitute for it more female oriented times.
B. How are boys and men encouraged to form friendships with other males?
It is clear from the above that first and foremost we need to reconsider how far we have gone to disallow relationships between boys and men. Relationships between males, I argue, are not in the first place discouraged because of how we, as a society, process our own latent homophobic tendencies. I also don’t believe for a second that boys and men are spending less time with each other because they are so vulnerable and competitive that being with other males can only trigger more vulnerability in them. In other words, I don’t believe that the fact that males are quite unlikely to form relationship with other males should be considered a kind of escape. Men aren’t escaping from friendships. Rather, I believe that as a society we have grown increasingly intolerant of boys and men, especially when they come in groups. We are afraid of them. Their energy, their risk-taking behaviors, their all or nothing approach to life is suspect and doesn’t fit in with the tight and regulated schedules we seem to want to live by more and more. We respond to boys by pulling them away from each other, by isolating them, by shortening their recess time and by criticizing them harshly when, once again, in tandem with a friend or a group of friends they have gotten out of bounds. Once they have grown into adult men we expect them to be professionally successful, to have a career, start a family, rather than hanging with their friends. In other words, we continue to isolate them from each other.
So, encouraging boys and men to have friendships with each other means that we begin to talk about those friendships again as meaningful and valuable, to the males themselves and to us as a culture. Encouraging them in this way means that we understand that friendships between males often look quite different from friendships between females. They might be rougher, they might be competitive, they might not be about emotional expression via deep conversation, rather they might be about expressing emotions via actions. For boys they might result in something getting broken, they might even result in incidents of behaviors that one would have to label criminal.
This last point might make some of you feel slightly queasy. Is Martin saying, you might wonder, if we should allow boys to engage in criminal behaviors? No, I’m not saying that at all. What I am saying is that when boys form friendships with each other they do so in ways that push limits. They should definitely be held accountable when it’s necessary to do so. But the worst strategy to choose would be to pull them away from their friends.
Encouraging boys and men to form friendships can also happen by simply assuming that male-male friendships, at any age, are developmentally necessary. It could mean that we will encourage a young boy to call a friend and hang out with him, it could mean that we question our male partners, if they work much (or do much of something else) but don’t seem to stay in touch with their friends.
Why Men Need Friendships With Other Men
Men need to have close male friends because:
it improves their positive outlook on life
it gives them energy to deal with life stresses
it makes them better partners/spouses
it makes them better parents
it helps them grow far into old age
lonely men are less reliable
it gives them a sense of belonging different from their family
it gives them a chance to hang with people who really understand them
their male ways of emotional expressiveness are mirrored
close male friends will understand a man’s need for solitude and adventure
without such friendship we lose our ability to love others
Friends are not acquaintances. Friends are men who understand your deeper struggles, your fears and joys. Friends are also people who join you in your adventures, who will walk with you to the altar when you get married (and will do so again, if you need to get married again). Friends know the fine-line between vulnerability and courage that all men walk constantly. Friends will not push you off your line.
