Male friendships and male circles

Sometime in college I realized that my male friendships were probably the most important social relationships in my life, that girls were easy to make friends with but that male friends meant more. I was confused about this for two reasons. First, because girls are pretty (so for a long time it seemed more desirable to be around them as much as I could). 2nd, because I had always had male friends growing up and I took them for granted.

What I didn’t realize was that it’s easy to have a large circle of friends in your gender when you grow up with them. When you leave, though, it becomes more difficult. I’ve only really been able to build one other great circle of guy friends since leaving home (though I am a part of good, if more loose, circle now).

Why is it so hard to make friends with other guys and so easy to make friends with girls? I think it has something to do with the fact that guys are supposed to approach girls and something to do with the fact that men are guarded and something to do with the fact that most guys are already in circles. And circles tend to be closed.

I’ve run across a few great commentaries on friendships, recently, particularly male ones. First, my favorite piece of writing on comics in the last several months is this one, by Rachelle Goguen, “I ♥ superhero friendships.”

She writes, among other things, the following:

Romances are fine. They’re fun, they’re sexy. They certainly add drama, but they’re also fleeting. Friendships are where it’s at. As a female, I’ve always been envious of male camaraderie in general. This might also explain my love of professional sports. The bond between male friends is absolutely fascinating to me. They will punch each other in the face and then get a beer. No love on Earth is as pure as that (not that they would ever call it that). To me it’s every bit as intangible as the ability to fly or shoot lasers out of my eyes.

Ms. Goguen is already a famous comic book blogger around Internet land, but this piece showed up on geek-paradise-site Newsarama and earned her heaps of new praise. I read this piece and was so excited by it that I had to leave her comments on Newsarama and on her own site. It really is some of the most fun writing I’ve come across and I agreed 100%.

Rachelle confesses to a certain envy of the camaraderie males enjoy. It’s true. When you find that place in a group, it’s pretty awesome. It’s so easy and fun and yet deeply and importantly supportive. It was great to hear a smart woman say she’d noticed it and respected it. Then, I found this comment by some numbskull named “Alex.”

Nice article, even if I personally find male cammeraderie frequently a bit too repressed for me (whatever it is you talk about, you are supposed to remain ‘manly’ which as a tee-total feminist who is indifferent to sport doesn’t really work.) Outside of fiction most of this stuff just ends up being a requirement of showing strength and going on about certain subjects. …

Wow. What a maroon. There’s nothing I love more than a person who obviously does everything they can to avoid certain populations making a comment about them. This woman obviously knows next to nothing about men’s lives. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s one of those women who live an almost exclusively female social life. Or she lives in some nightmare lefty hellhole where men exist but guys don’t.

Hers is the stereotypical view of men, and the superficial one. No, men do not touch and kiss and hug like girls do, but that’s not to say that they don’t have meaningful or even emotion filled friendships. That’s why I’ve also been interested to come across some other mediums that had a deep understanding of the good and the bad of male circles.

Last night, I watched the French movie Lila Says.

Now, I have about as much place commenting on what it’s like to be an Arab teenager in the surburbs of Paris as our friend Alex does calling male behavior repressed, but the beauty of this movie (you know, besides Vahina Giocante) is the way it underscores what I think must be univerals about the tendencies of male groups. This is a circle of boys who’ve been put-upon by life, and their pride can’t stand it.

Therefore, Lila Says captures the ugliness of men’s friendships. The nearly inextricable bonds of leader and followers, of expectations, limitations and the on-going contest between men and boys. There’s no question that that element is there. I think it is much of what turns women off.

Men can create certain expectations of each other that can lead to very, very bad behavior. Men can also feed each other on the sin of pride, so that they will do things they know is wrong, short sighted and counter productive just so they won’t be looked down upon by their comrades.

There’s no question that this danger is present in male relationships, but it goes hand in hand with much of what’s best about them.

Take the TV show, Rescue Me.

If you haven’t seen it (and I hadn’t until I watched Season 1 on DVD last week), it’s about a group of guys who work in a firehouse in New York City, and worked together on 9/11. Their firehouse lost four guys, including the best friend of Dennis Leary’s character. A big piece of the show is Leary’s character talking to his best friend, who’s dead and a ghost.

The show is fundamentally grounded in the understanding that these are both heroes and very real people. The power of what they did on 9/11, the writers seem to understand, they could only do because they were together and because their mutual expectations of each other drove them to do it despite the fear and the horror.

So the big drama is over and all that saving that can be done has been done and now they are just people again, no more noble and no less so than me or you. Yet they did great things, and they did them because they each expected each other to do them. Just as the spiral into ugliness can’t be stopped once a path to ugliness opens in Lila Says that they each expect the other to follow, so men in the battlefield or under crumbling towers expect each other to rise to stand.

The real beauty, though, of Rescue Me is in the way it captures more day-to-day gentleness between men. What looks rough and distant and difficult to the eyes of a person like Alex, above, is in fact a carefully coded and deeply supportive and understanding network of coaching and encouragement that men get and men thrive on.

There’s a great scene when Leary’s character finally calls his dad. You hear what the two of them are saying, but underneath it there’s a translation of what they are really saying to each and what they both understand it to mean. It’s funny, but it’s funny because it’s true.

Comic books do a great job of getting at the nature of these deep, male relationships. Superman and Batman remain the best. When the chips are absolutely and unbelievably down, good writers can capture the unbreakable faith that Bruce and Clark have in each other to come through when the other can’t. Last month’s issue of The Immortal Iron Fist did a great job of capturing this as well. Danny Rand is surrounded by the agents of HYDRA and his archenemy, all set to conquer him, but at the last moment Luke Cage: Power Man shows up to back him up.

Cage’s attitude is, of course I came. You needed me. If Love means “never having to say you’re sorry,” friendship might mean never having to say thank you. It goes without saying that you will be there for each other.

I guess on some level what I love about male circles is the way we don’t really say it but it still gets said. Just because some people can’t hear it doesn’t mean it hasn’t been spoken. Those folks are just missing out.