Man's Best Friend? No One
by David Loftus
[This essay appeared in the Portland Oregonian,
August 1, 1993.]
One of the truisms of the women's movement says that men historically have had all the advantages and women few or none. But feminism also has encouraged a hard look at men's lives that reveals areas in which we have missed out, tragically.
One is friendship. Many of us don't have friends.
Perhaps that should be "most" of us. And we don't really know how to make and keep them. This may be hard to admit, but it becomes clear enough either during a divorce or as we get older.
"One of the major problems men have is with loneliness and the social inability of knowing how to make friends," says Letitia Kirk, a psychotherapist in Portland, Oregon. Kirk does a lot of marriage counseling and work with divorcing couples.
As a standard practice, she urges her divorcing clients not to get involved with anyone for at least a year after the divorce. It's all right to date people, she tells them; just try not to get serious.
Kirk says her women clients usually take to this arrangement well: They go back to school, they take up new hobbies, they spend more time with friends. Mostly, they are just glad to be free.
Her men clients, on the other hand, almost invariably start looking for an immediate replacement. Many remarry within a short space of time. "The man sees it as, 'I gotta have somebody!' I think it's a lot harder for men to be alone."
The inability to manage friendship cuts across all ages, professions, and levels of education in men, according to Kirk. "They could be very intelligent people and still be at a loss."
For men, the idea of a friend can be confused with that of an acquaintance. Many men know lots of people but have no real friends. For us, friendly relationships are often highly contextual. We know a person in connection with a specific location (office or club), activity (sport or service organization), or business relation (mechanic or client).
A real friend, however, is someone with whom one has a relationship that cuts across many or all contexts. You could run into a friend anywhere and not be caught at a loss, unsure of what to say.
Kirk says younger men seem more aware of this gap in their lives, but are no more inclined or equipped to overcome it. Sometimes the lesson only begins to hit home in late middle age, when people around us start to die and we find ourselves really alone.
What are the causes of this maladjustment? Kirk believes that men are not taught closeness. Many were not friends with their parents. As a parent, a man will say, "I want a close relationship with my children," but fail to notice that he doesn't have one until it's too late. Men don't see their kids as potential adults with whom they could form a relationship of basic equality.
It's hard for a man to say "I love you" to another man, partly because everything we do has a note of competition in it. Men who do bother to play with their sons often tell them that winning is everything, and sometimes they won't let them win. Boys may spend their whole lives trying to beat everyone else, both in order finally to beat their father, and to impress him, whether or not Dad is alive to see it.
Kirk encourages even married people, men and women, to develop an exclusive friendship. People need someone who will listen to them, only hear their side, and not get involved in the middle of the primary relationship.
"At least one. If you can have one friend like that, you're extremely lucky. You know you have at least one friend you can tell anything to and they're not going to enter your life.
"Sometimes you need to verbalize things that the other person (your spouse or significant other) doesn't need to hear. You need to say, 'It makes me feel mad when. . .' and your friend says, 'Well, yeah. I'd feel that way, too.' "
It takes just a couple of basic steps to overcome this dreadful hole in a man's life. We need a little structure that gives us permission and space to build something.
A man in one of Kirk's therapy groups chose another man with whom to meet for breakfast at a regular time -- once a week or twice a month. They began to talk about things other than the weather and the Blazers; they talked about their marriages, their work, their worries.
Soon, she says, "he could miss everything else, but he could not miss this relationship with his friend." Eventually, they arranged to meet three or four other men they liked for dinner every month -- something none of them had ever done before.