This time last week, Malc, Jez and I were lazing in the sun-dappled garden of
an ancient Somerset pub, limb-sore from seven hours spent navigating country
lanes on our ritual yearly motorbiking weekend. I was waiting eagerly for
the landlord to unlock the doors to one of the West Country’s oddest
alehouses, but suddenly I remembered something very, very important: “We’d
better have the Emotions Conversation,” I said. My oldest mates chuckled,
but knew that it had to be done. So we all asked each other: “How’s the
wife, family, home life?” Good. Yep. Fine.
Great . . . Ah look, the bar’s open. Male friendships are a mystery to many
women. How can these apparently intimacy-free interactions be emotionally
healthy? It’s tough to explain, so at football matches, on biking weekends
and the occasional foreign foray, my best pals and I have evolved the ritual
of the Emotions Conversation to preempt the wifely inquisition that
inevitably greets our homecoming – questions that, if unanswered, provoke
spluttering incomprehension: “You mean you spent two whole days together and
didn’t discuss anything personal at all?”
Well, OK, dear spouses, it’s all a lie. We don’t really go near the
motorbikes. We sit down over coffee, discuss clothes, jobs and
relationships, barter intimacies with intimacies, form cliques and
sub-cliques, subtly undermine each other and then watch a weepy movie. As
if. But really: men’s close friendships are, as research shows, vital to
male wellbeing. They’re just different. The sociological studies all agree
that no matter whether you’re male or female, having close friends is
important to your long-term physical and mental health.
Heading out with the old gang for a day’s biking, followed by some pints and
curry, then waking with bleary-headed cravings for a full-English might not
immediately seem to constitute healthy living (particularly for three men in
their early forties), but Peter Nardi, an American sociology professor and
the editor of the book Men’s Friendships (Sage, £34), says
mates are vital for providing each other with crucial levels of material and
emotional support. “Do I have someone I can get advice from, someone I can
get identity from? If those forms of support are there, you’re much more
likely to be healthier mentally, and the healthier you are mentally, the
healthier your immune system,” he says.
Admittedly, these male connections are resolutely camouflaged, compared with
feminine friendship. Male material support often involves lending your mate
a torque-wrench, and the emotional support may simply be gained from basking
in the deeply ingrained sense of connection and identity you get from being
staunch, firm mates. Researchers tend to miss this, not least because most
studies on male friendship make the fundamental error of comparing it with
female friendship. So we get simplistic contrasts: women meet
“face-to-face”, while men hang out “side-by-side.” Women do lunch; men do
things, such as watch soccer. Women talk about everything; men hardly talk.
“I always find that annoying,” says Professor Nardi. “What is it about our
society that says that talking over coffee has a higher score on the
intimacy scale than if you play golf for five hours?” Indeed. And Steve
Biddulph, the author of The Secret Life of Men(Marlow, £21.69),
even contests that men “don’t have friends”, just buddies with whom a
secret, subtle and elaborate code allows “serious feeling or vulnerability
to be deflected”. I can’t comment on Biddulph’s relationships, but that’s
only a surface description of Jez, Malc and me – and so many other old pals’
acts I’ve encountered. Biddulph’s is the sort of conclusion you’d get if you
stuck your head round the pub door and earwigged us disagreeing over:
something that happened in class 2C, the precise meaning of some punk-rock
lyrics, and whose round it is next.
But if you could invent a crystal set that tuned into the buzz of our
geezerish telepathy, you’d find that we not only went to school together,
went pulling together, rode mopeds together, got into trouble together and
stayed together in loose but firm formation for more than three decades:
we’ve also all lost parents, suffered emotionally exotic girlfriends, found
ourselves in lives we didn’t quite want, and had to grow older and – in some
cases – fatter. We discussed those things then (but only when necessary),
and we discuss such things still (but only when necessary).
There was another old boy who should be with us on these weekends, but Steve
was killed by a speeding driver when we were 17. Maybe that loss makes our
dynamic a little different from most. But not that different, says Lynne
Zarbatany, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario, who studies
the development of friendships. She says the results of her research came as
a surprise. She admits that she expected male friendships to be less engaged
and supportive than pairs of girlfriends. “Watching them was a revelation to
me,” she says. “In interviews, the male friendships might have looked more
distant, but seeing them interact – the way they joked about their problems
and finished each other’s sentences – showed a depth that many of the female
friends didn’t have, even if they talked more.”
The great shame is that despite the healthiness and depth of male friendships,
the strength of this institution is dwindling. A study by Duke University
last year found that between 1985 and 2004 the number of close confidants
that men could identify had fallen from three to two. But before we reach
for the “males in crisis” headline, the Duke investigators found that women
said their friendships had dwindled by exactly the same amount, too.
Perhaps we can blame modern life: with all our connectivity and opportunity,
we often seem to have less time for maintaining deep and committed
connections. And traditionally, men have also found that marriage has also
put extreme pressure on their ability to retain old pals. A 2003 study in
the journal Social Networks, for example, found that men who were
living with a partner had fewer contacts with friends – and more new friends
shared with their partners – than men who were dating.
Usually, those new shared friends are actually the female partner’s old
friends, says a study in Men’s Friendships. It’s just a pity
that so many men find themselves at the other side of marriage as
Billy-no-mates. The Duke University researchers found that widowers were
least likely to have any close friends, and were also the most likely to be
in ill health.
So despite our wives’ understandable qualms about letting their men lurk
together within the collective conspiracy of each other’s bad influence, I
hope that they will continue to let us old rockers drag our bikes out into
the sunlight, pump up the tyres and wobble off for the weekend. I hope that
the biking, the soccer jaunts and the foreign forays keep going for ever –
or at least until our knees, and livers, finally fail us. Meanwhile, we must
never forget to have the Emotions Conversation.
Decades of friendship
Thirties
BEN AFFLECK AND MATT DAMON (actors) Affleck: “If I ever woke up with a dead
hooker in my hotel room, Matt would be the first person I’d call.” Damon: “I
remember exactly what he was like (as a child) – gregarious, outgoing. It
was no surprise that he grew up into the totally obnoxious guy he is now.”
Forties(ish)
MICK JONES AND TONY JAMES (guitarists for, respectively, the Clash and
Generation X) Jones: “Tony’s abilities complement mine for sure. He’s a
planning, strategic guy and I’m a natural. It’s a healthy exchange. We’re
still developing and learning.” James: “We’ve been best friends for 30
years, though that does seem hard to believe. We met before the Clash or
Generation X or any of that, when Mick was being thrown out of a band for
not having enough talent.”
Fifties
JEREMY CLARKSON AND A. A. GILL (broadcaster and TV critic) Clarkson: “Despite
what you might think, Adrian’s very polite. He sits there, drinks a lot of
coffee and barely says a word. He claims to be Indian, French or Scottish or
whatever, but he is the most English person I know – never utters a word of
complaint.” Gill: “There is now a lot more dross on TV, mostly presented by
Clarkson.”
Sixties
DANNY DeVITO AND MICHAEL DOUGLAS (actors and Hollywood producers) DeVito: “We
lived together while I was in my twenties and it was fun. I’ve always been
fortunate enough to be close to a babe magnet – and Michael and I always had
a great time together. And it’s definitely true what they say about laughing
them into bed.” Douglas: “I still have my old friends from college. Danny’s
been a dear friend of mine since 1964. Your personal life is so public in
this business, you become isolated, so you end up holding on to your old
friends.”
