This is a tough one. Where do we begin talking about male friendship?

I’m going to try to talk about it candidly. I’m certainly not a guru or an expert which I suspect will come through quite clearly. There’ll be no neat categorisations (although I’ll probably manage to squeeze in a list or two). I also don’t have any idea if the things I want to talk about are things that feature for me alone or for others too. It may be that I get sidetracked here or write more than one post but this is a beginning.

I find friendship difficult. By that I mean that I find the concept of having and being friends one of my heart’s desires but I also don’t really know how to do that. I moved around a lot as a kid. I was also the only brown boy in school (and then at A-levels too).

I remember being told I wasn’t welcome at the only Asian club at University because I wasn’t a Hindu (brought up a good atheist by parents desperate, I think, to integrate).

All this means I don’t really have friends from school (there are a couple on Facebook) and I have a few friends from University but most of the friends I have now are those who I’ve met and built relationships with as an adult. In that sense I have no nostalgia for being younger. My school days were absolutely not the best of my life.

I open there partly because it colours how I see friends, especially as someone who identifies as male. I don’t like watching sport and I don’t like drinking beer. I am, in many ways, that weird nerd whose interests are almost entirely his own.

If friendship is built on shared experience I’m not one for doing the kinds of activities that build it. I love running, reading, movies and writing. I’ve been a good fencer (a sport, sure, but hardly a team one), I love cooking and thinking about things. I also love parties and dancing and eating out with friends.

My friends are all over the place – some are like me in some ways but many aren’t. I’m the kind of person who can, because being a social chameleon was absolutely vital growing up, adapt to most situations but I’m not sure I’m the person you think of first to invite to things, to ask if I’m ok or to include.

Since I’m writing about friendship this is what I want – people who I can pour my heart out to, who I can be silent with, who I can share my failures with and with whom I can laugh, find/offer support and feel safe.

In practical terms I’m fairly rubbish at all of the above. I worry that telling people how I feel will alienate them, I worry that being silent bores them. I am frightened of admitting my failures and because most of life has been one where having space to be me has been lacking…well you can see the direction here.

Add to this the toxic and strained conversation about what being male looks like in the public space and it makes sharing these kinds of experiences and desires challenging.

My experience of the representation of male relationships is that they’re functional or sexual. We work together or we relate to sexual partners too often via ownership language rather than partnership language. i.e. where we come together it’s nearly always in a way that then separates us again.

I remember one baffling conversation with a friend who insisted that the entirety of Frodo and Sam’s relationship should be read in a gay context. When I challenged this (let’s not even start to talk class, trauma, education and the hierarchy of armed forces) by suggesting that men could have relationships as close as Sam and Frodo without it being seen via primarily a sexualised lens they were baffled. I wanted to challenge this because, whatever my sexual attractions I also want to have friendships that are so very deep as they are there. I want to be able to tell my male friends that I love them and for that to be understood for what it means. English is rubbish in this regard. Classical Greek at least has different words for different types of love. That would be far more convenient.

This friend didn’t say they didn’t have male friends like this, but they also admitted they couldn’t imagine it for themselves. My heart dies a little when I have these kinds of conversations.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this. I think the difficulties I experience in trying to be me with my friends are extremely complex. What is clear is that I don’t mean being me in the moment but I mean being me over the long term with people who grow to understand my rhythms; the threads which make me. I think these challenges are largely constructed (ie there’s nothing essentialist in them, they’re largely a product of the society I exist within) but that doesn’t make them any less constraining.

The life I’ve led also feeds right into the kinds of relationship I can sustain, the kinds I want and the kinds that threaten me.

So there’s a few subjects I’d like to think about at some other time.

  1. anger and safety
  2. belonging
  3. whether a lack of common identities means we struggle to build meaningful relationships
  4. loneliness among men
  5. transgression and forgiveness
  6. What it’s like being friends with someone who identifies as male
  7. Fatherhood and friendship
  8. rolemodels for friendship among and with male presenting people

This is rather confessional but I don’t think I can talk about these issues without being honest about myself. I hope that’s of some use.