LET’S BEGIN WITH THE ULTIMATE in male friendship, shall we? That blessed holy grail of brotherhood: the bromance. A bromance is a very close, non-sexual relationship between two men, probably equivalent to a woman’s BFF (Best Friend Forever) in that it’s equal parts earnest and performative. It’s a psychosocial bond between two guys that matches a romantic relationship in almost every way except the sexual interaction. There’s physical affection, fierce loyalty, obvious closeness and a tendency to be seen everywhere together, like a two-for-one deal. It usually requires the participating bros to be shameless about their love for one another. The bromance is the most important relationship in each bro’s life and there’s often the implication that they compromise on female affection for this mightiest of man bonds. It is understood, by now, that the bromance is a safe space for men to be close — without any inference or rumour that they could be gay.
When I asked online for good stories of male friendship, a man called Keith got in touch to tell me his bromance with his mate Mike is the greatest bromance I would ever read or hear about, ever. ‘You will never find a better story than ours,’ he promised. Keith and Mike talked with me about their bromance over beers at the pub, which, by the way, they squeeze in at least once a week between work and looking after their kids. They live on the same street so it’s pretty easy to set up. (Side note: This is the ultimate friendship dream, isn’t it? Being grown adults with families and living on the same street so you’re always a short trot away from gossip, binge-watching Netflix together, shared dinners, a cheeky afternoon wine and getting the kids to play together. I frequently send advertisements for castles, mews houses and conjoined holiday homes to my friends as extremely unsubtle hints that I consider co-habitation of some sort to be in our future.)
It turns out Mike and Keith’s bromance is pretty normal (and beautiful, in its way). Their relationship revolves around being there for each other through rough times, drinking, playing sport, talking about sport, getting in trouble with their partners for spending too much time with each other and occasionally falling asleep on the beach in each other’s arms. But what I particularly like is the competitive enthusiasm with which they talk about their friendship. Because that’s what a self-identifying bromance is to me: brash, loving, and strangely competitive about intimacy. It’s as though by effusively calling their friendship a bromance — you can’t spell bromance without ‘romance’ — they pre-empt anyone calling them gay for being so close. It’s performative closeness to ward off any accusations of being too close — how can anyone else say they’re too close if they get in first and claim to be the closest two male friends have ever been? The intimacy is absolutely real, I’ve no doubt. Guys like this are close, real close. But I think the bromance moniker is intriguing because it somehow manages to imply both gentleness and hyper-masculinity. It seems to have become this lovely, useful label that enables male closeness between men who still want you to know they sleep with women. It’s an identity marker that men use to both soften and reinforce their archetypal manliness.
The term bromance was apparently coined by a skating magazine in the 1990s to describe dudes who skate together a lot. As with any good social trend, celebrities have embraced it: Brad Pitt and George Clooney are bromantic, and so are Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller, Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart. These celebrities work together, go out together and say complimentary things about one another in the press. Such high-profile alliances are endearing as well as commercially savvy, with both members of the famous bromance benefitting from an increase in his stock by virtue of his closeness to another famous dude. The Pitt–Clooney friendship has been going many years and it makes any movie they’re both in all the more bankable. The Ocean’s Eleven franchise is the perfect example because Pitt and Clooney’s real-life friendship makes their fictional one more appealing. When Damon and Affleck became famous after appearing together in Good Will Hunting, they emerged as Hollywood’s favourite pair of talented buddies. They played best mates in the movie they wrote together and their bromantic connection became the currency of their fame. They’ve since forged separate career paths, but the beginnings of their fame were very much rooted in that friendship (two stars are better than one). Wilson and Stiller’s collaboration in films like Zoolander, Starsky and Hutch, The Royal Tenenbaums, Meet the Fockers and Night at the Museum has made them an enormously successful double act. Their real-life friendship makes their professional working relationship all the more powerful because their combined comedic value is arguably higher than either could ever hope to achieve alone. We love to imagine actors are not really acting; that we’re witnessing their real relationships on screen under a very thin guise. Don’t even get me started on The Sirs, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart — they are so effusively lovely about one another on social media, in their matching bowler hats, that I just wish they were my honorary celebrity grandfathers. The pair appeared in Waiting for Godot and No Man’s Land together, as well as the X-Men movies. As seen on Twitter and Instagram, they travel together, drink beers down the pub, cook risotto for each other, celebrate gay pride with glitter, go jogging, regularly hold hands on the red carpet and have even kissed on stage. I’ve never seen Patrick Stewart in a film or play, but I like him enormously based purely on his friendship with Ian ‘Gandalf’ McKellen. They double their fandom by hanging out together and seem to truly celebrate each other’s successes. It’s a beautiful validation of love between two men.
We’ve even seen the bromance narrative creep into politics. Remember that time two best mates ran the free world together? President Barack Obama took his buddy Joe Biden into office as Vice President in 2009. They spent a decent chunk of the next eight years parading their bromance for the public — and it was rather beautifully captured on film by White House photographer Pete Souza. The official photographs we have from those years show us a few different incarnations of Obama: the romantic husband, the good father, the great American. But perhaps the most adored version is best-mate Obama, walking shoulder to shoulder with Joe Biden. We have photographs of the two men giggling over burgers and milkshakes, picking up ice-cream cones on the campaign trail, watching college basketball in Washington, embracing at the lectern, wearing matching ties and sprinting together towards the Oval Office on Important National Business. There are photographs of Obama and Biden whispering sweet official nothings to one another during important meetings, and you can’t help but yearn to know what they’re saying. Were they conferring on matters of national security, or working out what to order for lunch?
In 2016, the people of the Internet did the only thing they could do with their curiosity about the presidential bromance: they made Obama and Biden into a meme. That’s when people started annotating official photographs of the pair with imagined dialogue, usually making Biden out to be a sweet, devoted idiot to Obama’s straight man. The premise of the memes was that Biden wanted to interrupt one or another important presidential thing to order food, play pranks or take a joyride on Air Force One. When President Donald Trump was elected, the Obama-Biden bromance memes started to play on the sadness of them leaving office. The memes started imagining Biden was playing tricks on Trump before he left the White House: ordering 500 pizzas for the day of his arrival, taking all the batteries out of the remotes, gluing a drawer in the Oval Office shut with the label ‘secret Muslim agenda’ and leaving a fake birth certificate in the President’s desk for Trump to find. The captions were always put with photographs of Obama and Biden laughing, whispering, or sitting close together.
These memes were magnificent little jokes at a time when we needed them most. They were also a seriously interesting form of political expression. Now, a cynic may say Obama and Biden concocted their best friendship to soften their public image and make them more likeable. A cynic may say the release of chummy photographs from the White House was a deliberate effort to make us feel affection for one of the most powerful, potentially dangerous men in the world. A cynic may have a point, but believing in the bromance is so much more fun.
Obama and Biden often played into the bromance narrative themselves, either because they realised how powerful it was and how well it played, or because it’s completely, gloriously genuine. Perhaps the most infamous instance of bro love was a tweet from Biden to Obama on his birthday: ‘Happy 55th, Barack! A brother to me, a best friend forever’, with a picture of two intertwined friendship bracelets with their names on them. The photo is actually a still from a Buzzfeed video about voting; the joke here is all Biden’s. I’m very much down with both his sense of humour and his implication that he’d be cool wearing a bracelet given to him by another man.
Then there was that time Obama surprised Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom just days before the end of his presidency. Biden cried as Obama laid the medal around his neck; we all cried. Sure, it was the highest official recognition for work in the American public service, but it was also a tender public moment between two men. How often do we see men cry? How often do we see them cry at work? How often do we see them cry during a ceremony of national significance? Imagine, for a moment, watching that as a young man. If the Vice President of the United States of America can sob quietly as he accepts a Medal of Freedom from his best mate who happens to be President, then why can’t we all? It was a poignant moment — and exactly the kind of thing young boys need to see. Not just young boys, actually. We could all do with this gentle subversion of stereotypical male stoicism.
Obama left the Oval Office with a 60-point approval rating, making him the third most-popular president to do so (Bill Clinton and Ronald Regan were the top two). The ink may still be drying on the first draft of the official history covering his years in office, but part of his legacy will surely be his friendship with Biden. It’s one of the most memorable stories that emerged from Obama’s White House — not to mention, for my purposes here, a rather lovely endorsement of close male friendship. It is fascinating that this story of friendship between a president and his running mate should resonate so strongly. It is a delightful thought, that these two men truly admired one another, confided in one another, and enjoyed spending time together while they did two of the most sombre jobs in the world. We loved this story; we helped write this story. We, the people, took photographic evidence of the Obama–Biden friendship and wrote our own buddy comedy, set in the White House. If it was a movie or an HBO series, critics would describe it as House of Cards meets Dude, Where’s My Car? The credits would open with a close-up of one man doing the other’s tie while a Jay-Z remix of the American national anthem plays. It’d be a hit because people are sick for both politics and love stories between two heterosexual men. And what is a bromance, if not a type of love story?
Bromance even has its own genre in Hollywood. Judd Apatow started a wave of bromantic comedies with his films Knocked Up, Superbad, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Talladega Nights. He recruited Paul Rudd, Steve Carrell, Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen as his stars and rebranded the rom-com for men. Instead of making a heterosexual couple the focus of his films, Apatow put a pair of male buddies front and centre. There’s straight sex and love in these movies, but it’s totally sidelined by the bromance between dudes. There’s usually some element of male friends banding together to resist the realities of growing up, which (in Apatow’s imagining) involves marrying a hot woman and making babies. Apatow’s men are juvenile and boisterous, trying to avoid the inevitability of being tamed or tied down by monogamy. Apatow’s women are usually hyper-feminine stereotypes with very little depth or nuance, either because he can’t write female characters with the same comedic dexterity as male ones, or because they’re all beside the point. The point of the brom-com is to celebrate male friendship in all its apparently garish, filthy glory.
Possibly the greatest example of the brom-com is a 2009 film called I Love You, Man. It’s not actually one of Apatow’s, but I think it must have been heavily inspired by his spate of bromantic comedies. It stars Paul Rudd as Peter, a sweet-natured real estate agent who’s just asked his girlfriend Zooey (played by Rashida Jones) to marry him. She celebrates their engagement with her girlfriends, but Peter doesn’t actually have any friends with whom to celebrate. There’s a scene early in the film where Peter overhears Zooey and her girlfriends talking about how awkward it is that he doesn’t have friends of his own. And so Peter sets out to find himself a best man for the wedding. He goes on a few disastrous man-dates before he meets a guy called Sidney (played by Jason Segal) at an open-house inspection and they exchange numbers. They become genuine best mates, until — plot twist — the friendship starts to endanger Peter’s relationship with Zooey. The film seems to yell a dilemma into lounge rooms around the world: can a guy have a best mate and a girlfriend? Does the human male have the emotional capacity to maintain both bromance and romance? By the end of this movie, the answer seems to be yes, he can. But I wonder at the question having to be asked at all. Do men really have to choose between a woman and their bros? Are they not capable of having both?
The idea that male bonding can’t truly take place with female presence or approval is a recurrent theme in bromance films. Think of The Hangover movies, where a group of male friends go on a stag night, lose all control and end up living out every cliché of the debauched stag night adventure we’ve ever imagined. There’s a distinct message that men possess some great, infinite mischief and it’s only a matter of time before a woman comes along to quell it. In those movies, it’s like real life only exists when a wife or girlfriend is present. Without her, it’s just hedonism and brotherhood. Without her, it’s unfiltered masculinity. Without her, male friendship can really get down to business. Which is interesting because, more typically, men demonstrate their heterosexuality by pursuing a woman. Here, it’s all about male bonding as the ultimate display of manliness. This suggests heterosexual men could be shedding the insecurity that spending time with other men might make them seem gay (it goes without saying that there is nothing wrong with being gay — it is my great wish that we get to a place in society where it is no longer an insult or a fear to be called gay). That’s been a well-documented fear for some straight men, and certainly an inhibitor of close male friendship in Western societies (in some other cultures, it is more acceptable for men to show affection for one another). Male friendship, in predominant pop culture as in real life, seems to have come with a disclaimer: ‘nothing gay about it, though’.
Perhaps a gentler version of the bromance is the friendship between J.D. and Turk on the TV show Scrubs. J.D. and Turk met in college and then, as doctors in the same hospital, they become inseparable. They feel the sort of infatuation that’s usually reserved for love, and their friendship has every element of a romantic relationship but the sex. They share their dreams and feelings, spend quality time together, canoodle, high-five and even have a man-date every week called Steak Night. It’s one of the purest examples of guy love in pop culture, made even better by the rumour that the actors who play J.D. and Turk, Zach Braff and Donald Faison, are best friends off-screen too. In the show, Turk is married and J.D. is in and out of relationships with women, but the men are platonic life partners through it all. As shameless as they are about their love for each other, even they had to have a, ‘nah but we’re not gay’ disclaimer. They play around with that in season six, episode six, with a song called ‘Guy Love’. It’s about how J.D. and Turk are closer than a married couple, have matching bracelets and will stand by each other for the rest of their lives. But, predictably, the disclaimer: ‘but in a totally manly way’.
The thing about J.D. and Turk’s friendship is that it doesn’t actually threaten or diminish their manliness. It’s obvious they’re two straight guys engaging in some sweet, sweet guy love. It’s a beautiful thing, and I wonder if it’s meant to be aspirational for men watching Scrubs. Maybe this kind of platonic infatuation between two men, especially the performative element of it, is rare. Maybe it’s more common for men to have trouble disclosing their affection for other men. Maybe the J.D. and Turk bromance is a deliberately exaggerated TV relationship designed to highlight the lack of demonstrable intimacy between men. The tenderness is hyperbolic and endearing — so much so that this becomes the central relationship of the entire show. If J.D. is the main protagonist, the one we follow through the plot, then Turk is his main love interest. Sure, J.D. falls in love with women, but the one constant in his life is Turk. Their whole relationship seems to come with a wink and an affirmation: ‘hey, guys, it’s okay to be super tight with another guy, it won’t interfere with your sexuality — in fact, it could be the manliest thing you do’. Being cosy and loving with your best mate is probably a sign of comfort with your sexuality, anyway. That’s what J.D. and Turk are trying to convey: that friendship can be masculine and emotional candour can be a sign of strength.
That’s true, obviously, but it hasn’t stopped people from assuming other pairs of fictional best mates are gay. Think of some fictional best friends, and the way we’ve projected gay romantic fantasies onto them — either for fun or because we’re so confused by the sight of male friendship, we have to appropriate it into love. Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson exemplify this cultural habit of making gay men of good friends. In Sir Conan Doyle’s serials about the crime-solving duo, he has them sharing a flat together in Baker Street, London. It was perfectly common in Victorian times for men to live together for companionship and affordability, but, even then, audiences read more into the relationship. There’s been speculation ever since the original stories were published that Sherlock and Watson were more than flat mates, and that’s only intensified since Benedict Cumberbatch’s cheekbones got involved.
And that brings me to the cultural trend known as ‘shipping’. The term comes from the word ‘relationship’: to ‘ship’ is to wish that two characters in a fictional story were involved in a romantic relationship. Fans usually write fan-fiction or make art depicting their chosen pair in a romantic or sexual position, and often petition the creators of their chosen story to actually write the romance they want. You can technically ship anyone, whether they’re straight, gay or otherwise; it’s all a fantasy. People even ship Pokémon characters. The shipped couple is usually given a composite name of their two names — so John Watson and Sherlock Holmes become ‘JohnLock’. Right from the beginning of the BBC series Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock and Martin Freeman as Watson, fans ardently shipped JohnLock. When Sherlock faked his own death, they saw Watson in mourning as a grief-stricken lover, standing by the gravestone of his beloved. When Sherlock returned, never having died, they saw Watson’s anger as the reaction of a betrayed lover. Whatever Sherlock and Watson did, whatever gesture of friendship they shared, it was translated into the behaviour of love.
Then the finale of season four aired: the one with the hug. Watson is hallucinating conversations with his recently dead wife, Mary. Throughout the episode, Mary refers to Sherlock as ‘the man we both love’ and tells Watson to ‘get the hell on with it’. Fans who ship JohnLock treated both phrases as the ultimate proof that Sherlock and Watson are romantically interested in each other. They interpreted ‘the man we both love’ in the romantic sense and took Mary’s ‘get the hell on with it’ to mean getting the hell on with being together because life is short. People tweeted things like ‘JOHNLOCK CONFIRMED’ and ‘This is the best day of my life #johnlock’. (A friend of mine ‘lost the ability to breathe for several seconds’ and would like to point out that Watson’s and Sherlock’s rooms in the Baker Street flat are joined by a bathroom, so discreet access during a sleepover would not be a logistical problem.) Then, in the final scene, Watson is crying. Sherlock approaches him and, in a most uncharacteristic move, embraces him. It’s a tender hug, with Watson’s head on Sherlock’s chest as he comforts him. There’s a little light neck-stroking going on. Depending on your vantage point and perhaps your comfort level with male intimacy, it’s either an exquisitely sad moment between two dear friends, or an embrace between would-be lovers.
Rumour has it season four may have been the last for Sherlock, so we may never get closure on the possibility of romance between our favourite sociopathic detective and his mate, the doctor. There are reams of fan-fiction online for anyone wanting to fantasise about that relationship — and, as an aside, a truly magnificent number of people who are very angry when they visit the Sherlock Museum in London and discover Sherlock Holmes was not a real person who actually existed.
Sherlock and Watson are not the only fictional blokes to get shipped into a hypothetical gay romance. Recently it also happened to two of J.K. Rowling’s characters (it always happens to her characters, to be fair; a lot of people online ship Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, too). Rowling gave a playwright called Jack Thorne the rather extraordinary task of writing Harry Potter and his contemporaries into a script, which was developed into a West End play. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the eighth Harry Potter story, set 19 years after the Battle of Hogwarts. Harry, Hermione and Ron are middle-aged and the story revolves mainly around Harry’s middle child, Albus Severus Potter, and his unlikely best mate, Scorpius Malfoy (Draco Malfoy’s son). Quite apart from anything magical, the play is really an extremely moving depiction of adolescent friendship between two boys. Albus and Scorpius meet on the Hogwarts Express on their first trip to the wizarding school and, like teenagers do, they latch onto one another fiercely in one of those intense best friendships built on mutual insecurities. When the book version of the script was released in 2016, readers around the world started shipping Scorpius and Albus (their shipping name is Scorbus). Countless people who saw the play in London commented online that the story could just as easily be about two gay teenagers in love. Again, readers made homosexual subplots of their own, spinning romance out of friendship.
This propensity of ours to cast men as gay lovers says, to me, that we value romantic love above all other kinds. The most popular plotline in fiction is romance, and we will demand it even where it’s absent. Profound same-sex friendship doesn’t seem to have quite the same commercial appeal, which is perhaps why showrunners introduce an element of sexual ambiguity between their characters. The idea that Sherlock Holmes could be a repressed gay man adds another layer of drama to the stories. The notion that Harry Potter’s son may be secretly in love with Draco Malfoy’s is a superb plot twist for a Harry Potter fan. But the overwhelming fan reaction to both these male relationships suggests that we, as an audience, don’t have much time for platonic friendship. If the creators of a series won’t give us explicit sexual interaction between two beloved characters, we’ll make it up ourselves. It’s complicated: if we’re so keen on imagining gay love between men, why aren’t there more shows written about open gay relationships? Why is it that we are so hungry for the suggestion of flirtation, rather than the real thing? Could it be that we are still, as a society, conflicted about what modern masculinity looks like — so much so that we blur the lines of fictional characters’ sexuality?
We ‘ship’ real-life human beings, too. This propensity of ours extends to celebrities as well as fictional characters. My personal favourite contemporary example of real-life shipping is Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, former members of the boy band One Direction. Their shipping name is Larry Stylinson. Great swathes of the band’s young female fans fantasise about a secret gay romance between the boys. The sheer volume of Larry Stylinson erotica available online is astonishing. There are countless articles and Tumblr posts compiling ‘evidence’ of the boys’ alleged trysts, where fans interpret every gesture, every smile and every moment of fleeting eye contact as proof of their love. Boy bands are inherently homoerotic to begin with — when they sing the lyrics of their love songs together, it’s easy to imagine they are singing to and about each other. Their closeness as a troupe is a huge part of their appeal, and so they take every opportunity to demonstrate the intimacy between them. Friendship between the 1D boys was a huge and very important part of their marketing campaign, and what made them one of the most lucrative music acts of all time. Their banter on stage was often cheeky, borderline flirtatious (I would know; I’ve been to three of their concerts). Sometimes they’d egg each other on to get shirtless or dance solo, and each of these moments has been enthusiastically drawn into a great big gay narrative. Their matching, peppy aesthetic and mostly wholesome British vibe just makes the secret gay conspiracy theory all the more tantalising for fans. The idea is that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson have to hide their love because the world wouldn’t be ready for such a high-profile gay romance. And maybe that’s accurate; maybe the world at large isn’t ready. Teenage girls are progressive and adoring, and imagining their beloved boys in a secret romance is, strangely enough, a safe way for them to play with their own sexuality. They’d be ready for the romance — as it is, they’re practically salivating at the prospect that Harry and Louis could one day come out. In truth, it’s all a fantasy, there’s nothing to suggest Harry and Louis are romantically involved and, in fact, they have both had several well-documented female love interests. But their homoerotic shipping is further evidence that when we see a prominent male–male friendship, we just can’t resist projecting romance onto it, rather than confronting the very real camaraderie between mates.
We tend not to know what to make of intimacy between dudes in our own lives, too. But from what I have observed, real mateship absolutely exists between guys. I don’t mean to invoke any sort of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus rhetoric, but I find that men and women do friendship in some starkly different ways. The way male friendship operates is sometimes baffling to me; the insults, the bravado, the endless Family Guy quotes bandied about between them. Outside of the movies and celebrity, men usually do require a male-only environment to truly bond. Just as women need their wine bars, cafés and bedroom floors to chat and gossip and confide, men need their lounge rooms, basketball courts and pubs to co-exist in. Obviously, I’m generalising wildly for clarity here; there are plenty of women who play sport and plenty of men who like to catch up over coffee. I’m speaking in stereotypes so we can pick out the differences between male and female friendship more easily. The main difference, as I see it, is the format. Lady-folk share emotions, ideas and concerns to get close to one another; men-folk build loyalty by hanging out together, doing things. Female friendship is a lot more communicative; male friendship is more activities based. That tends to make female friendships more brittle, too. When they break, they break catastrophically and the fallout is like the end of a romantic relationship. Something that is built out of intimacy is easier to destroy than something founded on loyalty.
It’s loyalty that seems to define male friendship. Now, as you may know, I am a woman. There is no way I can truly get inside a male–male friendship, see its inner workings and report back on its secrets. If I want to understand male friendship, the only thing for it is to talk to men about theirs. I spoke to men in my own life and strangers online to try and work out how male friendship works. Pairs of best male friends told me how they’d met and why they became friends — mostly it was childhood, school or university, and more often than not based on proximity, chance or a shared hobby. They lived in the same suburb and caught the same bus to school, they were sat next to each other in the first year of high school, or they were both just mad for cricket. What seems to sustain a male friendship is more interesting to me. Where my friendships with women have always been about exchanging emotional intel and reiterating support for one another, these male friendships seem to be based on well-intended ridicule, physical activity and the act of doing something stupid or outlandish. When asked for his most significant friendship memory, one guy told me joyously about the time he and his mate dressed up in full tiger outfits to go to a football game, for no reason at all other than the solidarity between them, and for a laugh. My boyfriend recently went to the rugby with his two best mates and for some reason they imposed a compulsory dress code: wear the worst taste shirt you own, preferably with shorts of a clashing pattern. That explains the short-sleeved, pizza-print shirt in my boyfriend’s wardrobe (should it mysteriously go missing, it wasn’t me). A number of men I spoke to online listed among their formative friendship memories times when they had dressed up with a mate or played a prank on someone else with their best mate. Women do this, too — fancy dress is a powerful unifier and friendship is always buoyed by a sense of fun — but these occasions seemed to have particular emotional significance for the dudes who lived them. There was a lot of rugby, cricket, football, badminton, running, volleyball and basketball involved in these friendships too, either playing the sport together or watching it at the pub or at home. But it’s not all macho outings. These outings are their own form of mateship, obviously, but they don’t always have to be so macho.
Speaking to friends Neal and Sertan about their friendship moved me the most. There is an obvious and touching camaraderie between them that reminds me of some of my own favourite friendships. They met through being experimentally funny at university: Sertan was auditioning for the Arts Revue at the University of Sydney, which Neal was directing. They became mates and decided to perform improv together as a pair. If you’ve ever done or seen improvised comedy (Whose Line Is It Anyway? is a good telly example), you’ll know it’s basically high-pressure friendship on stage; it’s entirely based on trust, synchronicity and generosity. You cannot be funny together on stage if you’re selfish, untrusting or inflexible. Live comedy like the kind Sertan and Neal do is a beautiful, if slightly mad, place for a friendship to develop. The whole idea is that one person sends an idea out into the performance space — a line of dialogue, a gesture, a one-liner — and the other person has to pick it up and run with it, adding to it, developing it, making sense of chaos. Truly great improvised comedy is like a waltz between mates who know each other well enough to anticipate what the other person might say or do, and know how to fall in line with it. I’ve seen Neal and Sertan perform together and they do exactly that. Their innings of competitive improv are always slightly surreal, but always made possible by cooperation and mutual respect. This is why so many comedians — Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig — made such close friends in theatre groups. The feeling of danger that comes from improvisation helps people bond, not to mention the fact that entire friendships can survive on a shared sense of humour. Choosing your improv partner is choosing a friend; if you do it right, you’re able to speak without sound. Friendship is its own comedy double act (think of Ant and Dec in the UK or Hamish and Andy in Australia, whose entire careers depend on their bromances). What could be a more joyous friendship workout than making other people laugh simply by interacting in public?
Neal and Sertan have a beautiful friendship off stage too and it’s not all competitive hilarity. They might call each other ‘weirdo’ and ‘dick’ a lot throughout their chat with me — insults seem to be a very male expression of affection — but there’s clearly a profound love between them. Sertan says Neal helped him cure his stage fright by making him feel comfortable on stage, and I get the impression he’s done that in real life, too. Sertan was sexually abused as a child and when he told his parents, they didn’t react how he really needed them to. It was the first time he realised he couldn’t depend on his parents for every emotional need, and so he went to Neal. Neal was the next person he told about the abuse, and though Neal was obviously confronted and upset, he was able to react with compassion and respect. He understood the gravity of Sertan’s revelation and tactfully supported him, which enabled Sertan to talk about it more over the years and with other people in his life. Neal says that in comparison to Sertan, he’s lived an idyllic, sheltered life, but that whenever he’s needed him for a comparatively trivial matter, Sertan has always been there for him. It’s like these two have given each other vouchers for emotional support, which they are able to cash in for reassurance at any time. It’s a profoundly lovely thing to witness.
It has to be said, Neal and Sertan have the sort of companionship we might often unfairly ascribe mostly to women: they keep each other’s secrets, tell each other everything, and rely upon each other for emotional support and validation. It’s the sort of closeness I wish more men would admit to, or actively cultivate. There’s an ease and a comfort between the two men that anyone would be lucky to have in their lives. They consider one another family, and they have done for years. They speak every day and they’ve lived together for four years. As Sertan is quick to claim, they’re like Adama and Tigh from Battlestar Galactica or Bartlett and Leo from West Wing. Or, Neal adds, like House and Wilson from House. Which is to say, they’re tight.
So, I’ve seen real-life examples of male closeness, which proves to me that intimacy between two men is entirely possible. And yet, some experts claim members of the male population continue to suffer from an intimacy deficiency. Professor Niobe Way — a Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University — for example, says there is a ‘crisis of connection’ among boys and men. She has been talking to teenage boys about their lives and their feelings for nearly 30 years. Professor Way started out her professional life in the ’80s as a school counsellor. Boys would visit her office to talk about their very personal lives. One of the most recurrent themes in those sessions was friendship and, often, how much these boys wanted friendship — proper, meaningful, deep, sincere friendship, not just playground banter. Over the past three decades, Professor Way has interviewed hundreds and hundreds of boys on their psychological development for her research and she is adamant they’re trying to tell us something shocking: that boys need as much intimacy and emotional connection as girls do, and they’re simply not getting it. As Professor Way tells it, we are all born emotionally hungry. In childhood and adolescence, we particularly crave the emotional closeness that girls are famous for having, and boys are infamous for rejecting in favour of banter about sport, or whatever. Professor Way says that’s a fallacy: actually, boys secretly want what girls seem to manage so easily, and they have an equal need to connect emotionally with their peers, but that becomes harder as they begin to get socially conditioned as men. She argues boys do have those delicate, beautiful, intimate best friendships as children and young teenagers, but as they get closer to adulthood, they’re told connections like that are feminine and so they start to fear being called gay for having too close a friendship with another guy. That fear is so consuming, they sacrifice friendship intimacy with other guys and make their friendships more casual and more centred on manly banter than emotional disclosure. The disconnect between what these boys want and what they end up cultivating as men is extremely damaging. According to Professor Way, it’s the resultant loneliness, isolation and confusion that leads to things like suicide, mass murder and violence. When a heinous crime is committed by a lone man, we always say we didn’t see it coming, that the guy seemed so normal, that perhaps he’s mentally ill or an extremist. But what if violence and criminal behaviour is a worst-case scenario reaction to the systemic undermining of social connection for young men? What if these seemingly inexplicable atrocities can be partially explained by the lack of intimacy in men’s lives as they grow up? Young men are allegedly having some of their most important, formative relationships severed at the fragile age of impending adulthood, and that can affect them dramatically.
Professor Way returns to one phrase in particular that was uttered by a 16-year-old boy one time, in her confidence. ‘It might be nice to be a girl,’ he said, ‘because then I wouldn’t have to be emotionless’. She repeats this sentence to me several times in her American drawl, each time more emphatically. She is still, after this long, shocked by the things she uncovers in her own research. She is still astounded by the things young boys tell her about themselves and the world. She says that this 16-year-old boy’s idea that he has to be emotionless because he’s a boy is echoed again and again by other boys, all of whom think stoicism is a requisite part of their identities as they get older. Professor Way believes boys know the problem of their own lack of intimacy, but they also know the solution — and they’re trying to tell us what it is. She explains with an anecdote.
Professor Way works at a school in the Lower East Side in New York, where the boys are 12 or 13 years old and mostly black, Latino or Asian-American, usually from working-class immigrant families. She spends time in an English class, where she talks to the boys about friendship and identity. She starts with a very simple exercise: she asks the boys to recite a quote from the opening page of her book, Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendship and the Crisis of Connection. The quote is from a boy around their age and it’s about how much he loves his best friend. He says he couldn’t live without his friend and that he knows him so well, he doesn’t even have to express it. When it’s read aloud to the class, all the boys start laughing. ‘Why are you laughing?’ Professor Way asks, knowing exactly why but wanting to coax the boys into some self-awareness. They keep laughing and then, finally, one boy pipes up: ‘Well, this guy sounds gay, miss.’ Professor Way starts off by saying she has no idea what this boy’s sexual orientation is because that’s not the point of her studies. Then she tells this classroom of boys a simple fact: 85 per cent of all the boys she’s interviewed over three decades of research sound exactly like this one at some stage in adolescence. There’s silence in the room, then one boy says ‘For real?’ and she says ‘For real. That’s what teenage boys sound like.’ ‘Do you know what happens next?’ she asks me. I hold my breath. ‘Within a second, I tell you it was under a minute, I have boys all raising their hands wanting to tell stories like the boy on the first page of my book. When they first hear the emotional quote about friendship, they see it through a cultural lens and read it as “gay”. All I did was normalise it and they’re ready to talk.’ So, boys simply need to hear that real friendship is perfectly normal and they’re ready to divulge their own needs and experiences. It could be as simple, or as complex, as changing the way we speak about intimacy between two boys.
This makes me immeasurably sad. Teenagers are so impressionable; they’re right in the middle of working out who they’re going to be. Young girls have their own problems at this stage of life, and I feel like I know them well, having lived them or observed them. I’ve spent less time thinking about what young boys might face at that age, and it’s devastating to think that just when they need social reassurance the most, it could be taken from them by a society that demands manly stoicism above the right to be vulnerable. Because I think that’s what we’re talking about here: boys are frightened to be vulnerable with their mates. They’re scared to talk about or get too close to another guy in a conventionally feminine way because they’ll be mocked for being gay. The fact that appearing gay can still be used as an insult or a slight is deeply upsetting — we’ve made a grave cultural error here, doling out value judgments about certain incarnations of love. Everyone deserves the right to adore another human being, and that includes straight men who love each other as friends. It is disturbing how virulently we have judged, banned and mocked certain types of love between combinations of people. And that homophobia is so pervasive in our culture, it can taint young boys just trying to connect with the people around them.
It isn’t just Professor Way who speaks about this fear of being gay among men. Dr Geoffrey Greif — Professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work — writes about it, too, in his book Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships. Greif interviewed hundreds of people and says about a quarter of the men he spoke to worried aloud about coming across as gay in a friendship situation. He met a guy in his mid-thirties on an aeroplane whose first question when he found out what Dr Greif does for a living was, ‘How do I make friends without seeming gay?’ According to Greif’s findings, that miserable teenage fear of seeming gay travels into adulthood, especially as men struggle to make new buddies in their twenties, thirties, forties and beyond. Dr Greif agrees with Professor Way that men tend to struggle making and maintaining friendships as they age — he says a lot of men feel like they have to know someone a long time to qualify as their friend and that they lack the skills or the confidence to make new friends as they age. Greif says men are simply not taught to initiate a bond, pick up the phone and organise a get-together or, scariest of all, follow up that first conversation with another one. That explains the onslaught of middle-aged male loneliness, when men sometimes find themselves left with one meaningful close relationship: the one with their spouse. Both research and my own conversations with people reveal that once they’re married, men tend to shut down some of their extra-marital friendships as though there’s some sort of unspoken rule that they can’t have both a marriage with a woman and friendships with people outside of that. Women tend not to do that, they tend to hold onto friendships throughout their marriage and invest time and emotion in them for the duration of their lives. Lifelong friendship is not an easy feat, but women appear to be far more adept at it, perhaps because their upbringings equip them with the requisite emotional skills to do so.
Dr Greif doesn’t agree with Professor Way’s thesis that men’s friendships are in any way deficient, though. He does not think there is a ‘crisis of connection’. He thinks Professor Way is looking at things from a female perspective, judging male friendships through a female lens and expecting the same levels of intimacy across sexes. He says some men yearn for closer, more intimate and traditionally feminine friendships, but most men are perfectly content with the level of emotional disclosure they currently have with their mates. They’d be uncomfortable having the level of intimacy female friends have, and they’re perfectly delighted to escape from that intensity by hanging out with other men. They have their jokes and their gestures and their unwavering loyalty, and they’re sweet with that. Dr Greif believes men do friendship differently — and that’s okay. They have friendships based on activities and doing things together, where women’s friendships are based on talking and exchanging information. Men are shoulder to shoulder against the world; women are face to face. Men, archetypally speaking, bond over a specific thing they can watch or engage in, like sport. Women, generalising wildly here, are more likely to directly focus on each other, perhaps sitting across the table with a glass of Pinot Grigio. As far as gender comparisons go, the difference in friendship style between stereotypical men and women can be baffling.
Here’s an example of the exasperation some women feel when they realise how male friendship works. Man goes to his mate’s house to watch a sports event. Men drink beer and hang out. Man returns home to wife later that night and wife asks how the mate is doing after his recent split with his partner. Man says it never came up, so he doesn’t know. Wife despairs at men’s limited capacity to connect and wonders how they could possibly have spent hours together without the topic of the mate’s crumbling marriage coming up in conversation. Wife asks what they actually talked about, if not something that important. Man shrugs shoulders in masculine gesture of nonchalance: he was just happy watching the game and he reckons his mate would come to him if he really needed to talk about the break-up. Woman tells her girlfriend about this the next time they meet for brunch. They roll their eyes and reiterate that they know every detail of the mate’s break-up already, including the time, date and place the relationship started to disintegrate and who said what to whom — they heard it from the mate’s wife last week. It’s their evolutionary prerogative to gossip about other people and emotional disclosure is the currency of their friendship — it’s just how women operate.
Male friendship might seem shallow in comparison to the deep connections women tend to build out of secrets and confessions and confidences. It might seem perfunctory, with minimal effort required to maintain it. It might seem, let’s be honest, inferior to what women have. But are we doing as Dr Greif says: expecting male friendships to comply with the standards we set for female friendship? I look at the friendships I have with women — we mean everything to each other, we couldn’t live without each other, we lift each other up and talk about one another with such hyperbole you couldn’t be blamed for thinking we’re all polygamists madly in love. We speak as often as possible, no matter what platform it’s on. We invade each other’s privacy as a matter of routine and keep barely any secrets between us. And we’re incredibly loving towards one another. It’s all ‘love you’ and ‘xxx’ and dancing lady emoji. Then I look at the friendships between the men around me — they tend to be all about innuendo, action, gestures of loyalty, jokes, mockery and bravado. There’s an unspoken understanding that if it was required, some sort of support would be deployed, but they don’t feel the need to reiterate it all the time like women do, or offer it on every occasion it might be necessary. Male friendship doesn’t seem to be effusive or expressive in the same way as female friendship, and that could well go all the way to our evolutionary instincts as early human beings. Men would go out and hunt together, women would stay at home and bond for social protection. Perhaps the way we conduct friendship now is a remnant of those very early foraging days.
But, then, if you’ll allow me to undermine everything I’ve just said, maybe it’s totally unhelpful to talk about friendship in gendered terms. Perhaps it’s a ridiculous thing to do, to force something as malleable and unique as friendship onto a spectrum of gender. Maybe it’s considerably more helpful to think about friendship existing on a spectrum of intimacy: there are close friendships and there are more objectively distant ones, but both men and women are capable of both. The connection between two human beings is so wholly idiosyncratic, it seems almost absurd to insist they would follow gendered patterns. Men should have the right to intimate friendships if they want them, hang the traditional mores of masculinity. Equally, women are capable of casual, loyalty-based friendships and should be allowed to cherish them as little or as much as they like.