Men are from bars

STYLE, MAY 2001

I AM ASKED MANY annoying questions. We are all asked many annoying questions. Most questions, if you stop to think about them, are annoying, which is probably why so few people stop to think about them, either when asking or answering. There are many varieties of annoying question. “Is everything all right with your meal, folks?” is common enough, as is “He’s not in his office, would you like to hold?” The magazine columnist has his own cross to bear. He must endure “Why don’t you look as young in real life as you do in your photograph?” and “Why do the bubbles in a glass of champagne always go from the bottom up, even when the glass is upside down?” and “How tall is Clare O’Donoghue?”

There are some questions that simply cannot be resolved. For instance, I genuinely have no idea how many roads a man must walk down before you can call him a man, and I have even less idea why an entire generation of hippies should consider the wind to be a good place to look for the answer. These riddles arise in many guises. An annoying question I have been much asked over the years is: “What do you men talk about when you get together?” It happened again this morning.

Many women have tried to crack the mysteries of male bonding, but we have proved tougher than the DNA double helix; more wily than the human genome. The secret of male bonding has proved impenetrable to outside intelligence, simply because the secret of male bonding is precisely the same as the secret of men themselves: there is no secret. Women never quite believe this. “Nothing,” they say to themselves, “can be quite that inert. There must be something beneath the surface.”

Ladies, take it from me: men are simple. We are not Rubik’s cubes. We are more like hula hoops or pet rocks. When you ask, in that adorable way, “What are you thinking about?” and we reply, “Oh, nothing,” it’s not because we are too lazy or stupid to think up an endearing lie (“Um, I was just wondering whether I would experience the symptoms of a sympathetic pregnancy when one day you are with child, honey?”). Well, it is because we are too lazy or stupid to think up an endearing lie, but it’s also because we want to tell you the truth. There is, almost without fail, nothing going on inside.

I sometimes catch myself at odd moments of the day and realise that I have thought about nothing and had no discernible emotion for several hours – sometimes weeks – in a row. Does it make me feel null and void? Somehow incomplete? Hell, no. I generally pull out a footstool and try to squeeze in a couple more hours while the going’s good. I have lost track of the number of times successive partners have yelled at me: “Hunger does not count as an emotion!”

But this is not the whole truth. Of course we do, every so often, feel things, and that is when male bonding truly comes into its own. Here is a manly truth not often uttered: sometimes we do open our hearts to our mates in the bar and speak the dark fears and tender secrets of our fledgling souls, and we do so more easily than we would with our lady-folk. We do it there because we feel safer. Also because we’ve been drinking, but mainly because we feel safer.

Gather close, ladies, for what I am about to say is an important key to grasping the perverse simplicity of the male heart: the reason we feel safer talking to our mates is that we know that deep down they don’t care. They care for us, of course, but they aren’t going to think too long about our problems, and they’re not going to raise the subject when everyone’s sober. They won’t think it odd and hurtful when the matter is never raised again, and they certainly won’t expect it to be woven into the texture of everyday life and ongoing relationships. There are no consequences, and if there is anything in this world that appeals to the deepest part of a man, it is an act without consequences.

The male method of empathy when hearing a sad story is to top it with an even sadder story of your own. And that is as it should be. But such interchanges are blessed rare. For the most part, what men talk about when you’re not around is pretty much the same as what they talk about when you are, only with fewer words. Often we scarcely talk at all. It doesn’t really matter what we say; it’s just nice to know that no one’s really listening.