I love you, man! (Thoughts on the restricted nature of straight men’s friendships.)

The other day as I picked up my daughter from daycare I heard a young boy (who was probably around four years old) calling out to another young boy across the parking lot.

“HAVE A NICE WEEKEND!” he yelled. “I LOVE YOU!”

The other boy stopped dead in his tracks, turned around, and loudly called back:

“I LOVE YOU, TOO!”

I found their exchange utterly charming.

But at the same time it got me to thinking: just how long will it be before these two young boys reach a point where it is no longer socially acceptable for them to loudly profess their love for one another? By early adolescence most guys stop expressing deep affection for each other. Most straight male teenagers don’t want to be thought of as gay, and most gay teens know it is often not safe to be so overt about their affections.

Loving another man somehow makes you gay? Not long ago I heard a radio interview with a sociology professor who was researching male-male friendships. When he told the research participants that he wanted to talk with them about their same-sex friendships, the young hetero guys overwhelmingly felt the need to immediately inform him: “I’m not gay.” The professor remarked about how surprising this pattern of behavior was, and about how absurd it was. Ask a straight guy about his male friends, and he will likely feel obliged to automatically exert his hetero-ness. He feels an urgent need to enforce the boundaries of heterosexual masculinity.

Ask a straight woman about her close female friendships, and it is highly unlikely that she is going bother wasting any breath asserting that she is not a lesbian.

So just how do we hetero guys “connect”? Many women connect very deeply with other women. But how do we straight guys do it? Here is a little secret about men that I would like to share: playing basketball is not a form of intimacy. Going fishing is not a form of intimacy. Watching the game on television is not a form of intimacy. Many of these activities in which men engage with their friends are great fun, but they do not require (and sometimes even discourage) emotional connection.

Take fishing, for instance. You can’t talk because it might scare the fish. What a great way to spend time together and yet not risk intimacy!

Sometimes the activities slow, the fish stop biting, the game ends, and intimacy begins to emerge even so. But we ever-resourceful straight guys have come up with ways to manage our emotional connections while ensuring that the relationship remains sufficiently hetero. We just add the obligatory word man to the end of any verbal expression of affection. So “I love you” becomes “I love you, man. This little tag-on word serves the same function as the tap-tap-tap on the back that we straight men so often give each other when we hug. Saying “I love you, man” and tapping your buddy on the back convey fondness – but not too much fondness. The affection is kept superficial. The physicality remains tightly controlled.

O.K., so we straight guys can be kind of uptight about this whole “I’m not gay” thing. Is that really a problem?

Yes. It is a problem.

First and foremost, the strong homophobia of so many straight men leads us to treat gay men and boys very badly. The most horrible examples of this are hate crimes and the murder of young gay men like Matthew Shepard. And then there are the tragic suicides of gay youth, the result of the totally unnecessary suffering that so many young gay men experience at the hands of bullies. And even those young gay men who are not driven to suicide still often experiencing terrible bullying at the hands of their straight male peers.

And this homophobia harms us straight guys as well. It interferes with our ability to connect with each other, to love each other. Research suggests that until about age 14, male-male friendships are very emotionally intimate, and that boys get an immense amount of emotional support from their male friends. During high school, however, the closeness of these relationships often disappears as young boys are socialized into becoming men. As I think back to those years, I recall how I had extremely close male friends with whom I could share anything and everything… my fears, my hopes, my dreams. And I think about how, as high school continued, those intimate conversations gradually disappeared, increasingly replaced by superficial joking and acceptably masculine (and generally homophobic) behaviors. As males go through these developmental changes, many of us lose our social support network and our emotional connectedness with other men.

And it is not just men who pay a price for this disappearance of male intimacy. As many young men develop, women become the only people with whom we discuss our emotional lives – to the degree that we manage to hold on to an emotional life at all! If we do talk about our fears, our vulnerabilities, our insecurities, our passions, or our dreams, it is typically only to a woman that we whisper these things. We ask her to be our sole confidante, our emotional nurturer, our therapist, our only soft shoulder to cry on. And this can place a huge burden on a woman. Many women have best girlfriends with whom they can talk, discuss, vent, cry. Us hetero guys typically lack this same level of support, and we ask just one woman to fill the role of an entire social network.

Letters written between men during the 18th and 19th centuries often contained powerful expressions of deep love and affection. So we men are (or were) capable of such declarations. But most of us no longer do it.

There has to be a better way. There has to be a way that men can connect that transcends our society’s homophobia. That reduces the burden we place on women. That allows us heterosexual men to experience a mutual recognition with – and a deep love for – each other.

What? Springsteen again? In a previous post I wrote that I was a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen. (Please bear with me!) One of the things I so love about his work is that he is a dreamer and a romantic who somehow managed to keep those parts of himself alive even as he became a man. He is a poet as much as a singer. And one area that he often explores is the topic of deep friendships between men.

His song “This Hard Land” is a good example of this. He sings about how life is very difficult, but he holds out hope that perhaps your male friends can help get you through:

Hey Frank won't ya pack your bags and meet me tonight down at Liberty Hall

Just one kiss from you my brother and we'll ride until we fall

We’ll sleep in the fields, we'll sleep by the rivers, and in the morning we'll make a plan

Well if you can't make it, stay hard, stay hungry, stay alive if you can

And meet me in a dream of this hard land.

 

His song “Blood Brothers” follows a similar theme:

Now the hardness of this world slowly grinds your dreams away
Makin' a fool's joke out of the promises we make…
But the stars are burnin' bright like some mystery uncovered
I'll keep movin' through the dark with you in my heart
My blood brother

And it isn’t just in his music that Springsteen explores these themes. His relationships with the male members of his band are another area where this sense of connection was pursued. The band’s recently deceased saxophone player Clarence Clemons (with whom Springsteen would often share a kiss on the lips as part of their stage act) once said of his intense relationship with the Springsteen:

"It's the most passion that you have without sex. It's love. It's two men — two strong, very virile men — finding that space in life where they can let go enough of their masculinity to feel the passion of love and respect and trust."

(Clemons had real problems. In a recent blog post about Clemons’ death I alerted readers to the fact that I thought that it was important to note amidst all of the praise that Clemons was receiving that he had also brutally assaulted at least one ex-girlfriend. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Springsteen’s eulogy of Clemmons was quite balanced about Clemons’ greatly troubled life. It did not mention his violence specifically, but it did allude to the fact that Clemons did not treat his family members well. The eulogy can be found here: http://www.brucespringsteen.net/news/index.html)

But in this case, I actually think that Clemons got it right. Only when he and Springsteen were able to let go of their masculine posturing could they open their hearts and allow themselves to truly feel the love they had for each other.

I love you, men. Until early adolescence most boys deeply love their male friends. It is tragic that we have to let that piece go. But maybe, just maybe, we can get society to a place where boys don’t have to surrender that part of their lives. And maybe we men can reach a place where we can say to each other “I love you” – and not have to add that stupid “man” at the end. And maybe, just maybe, we can find a way to hug each other without the silly pat-pat-pat. Can we not just hold each other and allow ourselves to feel the power and the strength of the love that we have for each other? And maybe when we rediscover these things with each other, then we can then stop persecuting our gay brothers, and stop over-burdening our female partners with our own emotional needs. We have everything to gain. And nothing to lose.