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The Importance Of Male Friendships

“A man’s friendships may be one of his most valuable—and underutilized—resources for helping him experience and learn how to be close to others.”

Robert Garfield

Prior to the pandemic I ran a men’s group for over two years. In this group setting I witnessed the power of men coming together and sharing their deep pain and regrets to other men. It amazed me how open and responsive men could be towards each other. What also struck me was how men talked with ease, while also explaining that they didn’t talk about these issues anywhere else. Rarely did these men share their vulnerable issues with their significant others. These men, and I believe, many men in our culture, are desperate for a place to let out their emotional struggles. I believe male friendship can be one of the most important elements of men’s lives. Yet it is also a time when so many men are feeling extremely isolated. Why is friendship hard for men? What needs to happen to cultivate friendship? Here are my thoughts.

Why Do Men Need Each Other?

“It is of vital importance that a man access the mature masculine archetypes through other men as well as within himself. Male bonding is a familiar idea in our culture. It is a nearly universal behavioral pattern found in the vast majority of cultures in all historical epochs.” (Moore and Douglas, 1992)

If there is one thing that I found surprising when I was running my men’s group was the willingness of men to listen to the leadership of other men. Men would talk about their professional and personal lives, providing intimate details of their failings. The other men in the group would listen with care. Afterwards the man that was receiving the care would often feel much better at having been witnessed in the masculine energy of the group. Other men would often empathize and meet the vulnerability with a clear, “you are not the only one.”

The thing that surprised me was how men would then call each other out to be better. This is not something I encouraged…it just happened. It was as if men wanted to be challenged by the group to become better in their lives.

After over a decade of listening to men struggle in their relationships with other people I have wondered why it is so much easier for men to take feedback from men who they barely know than from their intimate partners.

What I have come to conclude is that when men take feedback from women they often feel the shame of feeling like a failure. This leads men to shut down rather than step up.

When men come together in friendship they provide a space to be themselves and to playfully explore their current difficulties without the shame that shows up in relationships with women. This provides so many opportunities for men to grow and evolve. This is why men need each other.

Why Is It Hard For Men To Create Friendships?

The struggle men have to expose themselves in friendship settings is one of the painful elements of our culture. For many men expressing vulnerability in relationships is something that is taken away from them by cultural norms very early in life.

In her book Deep Secrets: Boy’s Friendships And The Crisis Of Connection, author Niobe Way has done research on how boys pull away from the intimacy of their early friendships in order to meet the expectations of the culture around them. When boys initially talk about their friends they describe them in impassioned intimate ways. It goes against any idea of boys being highly competitive and emotionally stoic.

According to Dr. Way, who has studied boy’s friendships extensively, early adolescent boys must reduce their interest in their close friends in order to fit in. This leads to a slow hollowing of the adolescent boy’s emotional range and capacity to develop intimacy in all relationships.

“In our twenty-first-century American culture, in which vulnerable emotions and same-sex intimacy are perceived as girlish and gay’, heterosexual boys are described as uninterested in having intimate male friendships, and the stereotype that boys are “only interested in one thing” is perpetuated.” (Way, 2013)

This is what happens to young boys on their way to manhood.

Their hearts are crushed as they must limit their desire for closeness with their friends. This enculturation leads boys to repress and ignore their inner world and avoid emotional intimacy. According to Dr. Way, this process starts in early adolescence (ages 14 to 15) and is fully formed by the end of adolescence in the mid-20s. By this age boys are behaving like many of the cultural stereotypes associated with acceptable male behavior.

It is only in modern era America and in countries that are heavily influenced by American culture that boys’ emotional and social skills and their intimate same-sex friendships are ignored or dismissed as female…or gay. (Way, 2013)

With this as the developmental backdrop for boys it is not hard to understand why many men find friendships to be less than supportive. Men have grown up in a world where relationships with other males is often one of competitiveness and superficial activity. Heterosexual men who desire more depth in their relationships often turn to female partnerships. As a result, many heterosexual relationships are strained by the men needing all of their emotional sustenance from their partners.

Men put too many of their (shall we say) ‘emotional eggs’ in a woman’s basket ―Daniel Ellenberg, Ph.D.

But this isn’t the answer to the problem. I believe that men truly need each other to grow and thrive. Men need to find each other in a new way through friendships that allows for greater levels of emotional intimacy.

The Challenge For Male Friendship

In understanding how boys develop we see the challenges men have in fostering the closeness they want in, not just male friendships, but in relationships in general. This is the crisis of connection that many men feel in their lives.

Men with partners and children struggle to understand how to engage with the people they love in an emotionally intimate way. This leads to shame and emotional isolation for many men who put much of their focus on the things they are good at which usually involves their professional life.

For a lot of men today, friendship is a kind of afterthought, subordinated to other life priorities. Spending time with a friend is something you might do after you complete your job duties, spend some quality time with your wife and kids, squeeze in a few regular visits to the gym, and enjoy a little time to chill with yourself. (Garfield, 2015)

Men often don’t see friendship as a critical piece of their lives. Growing up with a deficit of emotional intimacy seems normal and how men are supposed to be. This is the deep level of pain that men carry into all their relationships. A longing for deeper connection and a self-imposed cultural lid on that desire.

I believe that men want more depth in their friendships but they fear asking for this. They can’t show more vulnerability because it will expose them as weak and unmanly. I see this all around me as I walk by other men or have clumsy interactions with men in social settings. It is safer to act like you don’t give a shit rather than really engage someone you think may offer you connection. And yet…I also sense the loneliness that comes with refusing to foster any form of affinity with someone they feel an interest in.

How To Cultivate Friendships

One of the challenges that men struggle in forming more friendships is the ability to nourish relationships in general. I’m going to be honest and say that women are just better at this than men are for lots of reasons. Our first experience with friendship is meeting someone on the playground and noticing they like to play kickball like us. After a few games they are our best friends. If it was still this easy you probably wouldn’t be reading this.

What does it mean to nourish a relationship?

First, it means making the relationship a priority. This means seeing this person on a regular basis. It doesn’t mean waiting for the other person to call or reach out. Yet it does mean letting go of your pride and leading the relationship by calling when they don’t. It also means being patient and not giving up if things don’t go right at first. Keep encouraging more connection with a new friend (or long-term friend you’ve fallen out of touch with) until it starts to become more habitual.

The second part of this is showing emotional vulnerability in the relationship. I can recall, in the men’s group I ran, I shared something vulnerable. One of the men, who was attending his second group, pointed out that my willingness to share freely allowed him to feel safe to share his struggles. There is no guarantee that you will be met with acceptance and care when you share something vulnerable. However, I will guess that if there is no sharing of this type of heartfelt connection the friendship will eventually fizzle out. It’s worth the risk.

“We can’t really be known unless we’re willing to be open. That means not that we disclose ourselves all at once, but that we don’t try to mask who we are, whether with toughness, masculinity or success. We want the real deal! Your friends want to know you, not anyone you’re pretending to be.” (Evensen, 2019)

The third area that needs to be worked on is dealing with conflict. This means that when there is a break in the relationship because one friend hurts another friend it needs to be dealt with in a reasonable time frame. I have had friends approach me about a break in our relationship that happened years before. They had just now mustered up the courage to tell me they cared about me enough to talk to me about it. On one hand I appreciate that they finally did…but years later? Come on…talk about things that didn’t go right. Maybe your friend flaked on an event that you needed him to show up for. Say “that isn’t okay…I needed you there.” A friend says some cruel things about your partner. Say, “hey man, I respect your point of view…but that feels too harsh and I need you to talk about my partner in a more respectful way.” By not doing this you run the risk of all of these breaks in the relationship starting to erode the good will.

If you are feeling isolated in your life these three points aren’t going to magically allow you to have more supportive friendships in your life. It is a starting point to think about how you show up in your relationships right now. Consider why you don’t reach out to a friend of 10 plus years? What are you not giving or getting from the relationship? How would you like it to change? Are there other men in your life that may offer you something with more emotional depth?

How This Shows Up In My Life.

I can relate to the painful loss of closeness I felt with friends at an early age. I recall the fear of being called a wimp, sissy or fag because of my desire to be close to the brothers I called friends. This wasn’t conscious in the way that I thought it through and planned to be less affectionate or connected to my male friends. It was this slow closing off of my tenderness towards them.

Over the years I have consciously shifted to get this back with my close friends. I’m truly blessed to have a wonderful group of men in my life that are willing to open up with me and be emotionally intimate.

There have been a number of times where I have discovered friends that are struggling (often in relationships with women) and can only give me a superficial indication of what is happening. When I ask questions and create safety for them to tell me how they are feeling, our bond deepens in significant ways.

In my professional life I meet men of various backgrounds who struggle to open up emotionally. The primary reason they often cite is they are afraid to be shamed for being weak. Over several sessions they begin to show themselves in ways that they have not been able to ever show another man. This is a realization that men are not less emotional or more stoic than women. It is the reality that men are forced into this cultural trap that pushes emotion to the farthest place of awareness for many men.

It is this emotional intimacy that men must begin to call back from their pre-adolescence period, so they can find themselves and become whole again. Men must do this together in community and friendship so that we can all start to believe in a new form of male bonding that allows us to show our tender hearts to each other.