I tend to flinch when I see headline that proclaims anything about ALL people, or men, or women. There are very few absolutes, if there are any at all. But this seven things on this list are pretty accurate, and I would guess that most men want/need these qualities in a relationship - I know I do.

7 Things All Women Need In A Relationship

Jordan Gray - Relationship Coach
12/7/2013


Men and women are at an emotional stalemate.

We feel something’s lacking in our relationships. The majority of men aren’t able to penetrate their women fully, nor are women fully opening to their men.

Women aren’t opening because men aren’t giving them what they need. Women feel disappointed and resentful; they are suffering. When women suffer, and they feel like they aren’t being seen, they close off to their men.

Fortunately, you can learn the right tools to be able to more fully penetrate your woman. You can give your partner what she needs, allowing her to feel seen so that she will open again.

Take the time to read through these needs. Let them sink in. Understanding what you can do to help your partner fully open will not only improve your relationship, but it will improve your entire life.

Here are the seven things that all women want in a relationship.

1. To Feel Loved

When women feel loved, they relax and open to us. The arguments dissipate, the sex is abundant, and their nurturing feminine energy flows throughout our lives.

Not feeling loved is the subtext of every argument that you and your partner have.

If she is unhappy that you are going out with your friends, or she’s upset about her day at work, or she is only responding to you with brief snippets of sentences, then the cause is most likely her not feeling loved enough.

Learn to see through her words, actions, and moods and see what the real root of it is.

2. To Feel Safe

There is a war being waged on women’s self-esteem, sexuality, and safety from a very young age.

Because of the barrage of disempowering messages being sent to women regarding their sexuality, women need to have a safe space where they feel that they can trust their partners.

She wants to trust your strength. She wants to feel like you can handle whatever she shows you.

She wants to feel like you will not judge her if she asks for something risqué. She wants to know you won’t collapse in defeat if she tells you to do it “This way” instead.

By creating a safe space for your woman to open up to you emotionally and sexually, you will be giving her a very powerful gift- you allow her to grow within your relationship and undo old emotional damage.

3. To Feel Seen

Women want to feel seen.

She wants to feel you hearing her, and being aware of her emotional state.

She doesn’t necessarily want you to be affected by her emotional state, but she does want you to be witness to it.

If she is sitting across the room from you and you aren’t picking up on the fact that she is suffering emotionally and on the verge of tears, she will begin to trust you less. She will think, “If he can’t see that I am hurting now, how long will it take him to figure it out? Will I be suffering for days or weeks before he is aware of it or cares enough to help me through this? I guess I have to rely on myself for my own emotional support.”

Life can seem extremely lonely, even within a relationship. You have to constantly show your partner that at least one person will be witness to her and her journey through life. (Hint: that person is you.)

4. To Be Allowed To Be Nurturing

Just as masculine energy has the need to protect, feminine energy has the desire to nurture.

Women want to see the cracks in our armour. They want to see that we trust them enough to open up to them. They want to be able to help us through our sadness.

An integrated, evolved man who has a balanced masculine energy as well as his own sliver of feminine would welcome his woman’s nurturing.

If you are a guy reading this, have you ever held open a door for a woman because it’s the polite thing to do (but more just because she’s a person and it wasn’t even a gender-based act) and she chews your ear off for it? “Oh what? I can’t open the door for myself because I’m a woman?! You sexist pig!”

That is an example of a wounded, unbalanced woman who doesn’t want to accept help from a masculine source. This is exactly how it feels to your partner when you push her away when you feel the most vulnerable. “I don’t need to lay my head down on your chest and tell you about my feelings because I don’t have any!” That is a lie. It’s a lie that serves your purpose of not letting your partner in. This lack of vulnerability and authenticity is what is making you and your partner suffer.

So let her in. She wants to love you.

5. To Feel Sexually Desired

What’s a major difference between your relationship to your partner and your relationship to everyone else in your life? You have sex with your partner.

Women need to feel sexually desired. They want to make sure that you see and appreciate them as a feminine, sexual being.

Praise her body. Feel her and grab her appreciatively. Remind her that you see her as a sexual being and you will both benefit.

6. To Be Appreciated

The feminine in all people responds primarily to praise and appreciation.

Remind your partner that you love her. Tell her that you appreciate what she brings to your life. Show her how much she means to you.

The fastest way to run your relationship into the ground is by ignoring your partner and taking her for granted. Appreciation is the opposite of those things. Appreciation is the embodying this mindset: “I am aware of what you bring to my life, and I want you to be sure that I am aware of it as well.”

So tell her what you appreciate, and tell her often.

7. To Feel Like She Can Count On You

Life gets pretty messy sometimes.

When life’s unavoidable difficulties arise, do you fall apart under pressure or are you able to bend and not break?

Women want to know that we can handle ourselves when life happens. They want to know that we won’t run and hide when they get a bit ‘too emotional’ for our liking. They want to know that they can count on us.

When you tell your partner you’ll do something, and then you don’t do it, it hurts her. She loses a piece of trust in you that has to be earned back. Even seemingly small things break that trust like you saying that you will wash the dishes shortly after dinner, but washing them the next morning instead.

When enough small transgressions like this are sprinkled throughout your relationship, she will distrust you.

Do what you say you will do, be who you say you are, and be consistent in your actions.

What Do Women Want In A Relationship?

Women want partners that care.

Women don’t want perfect partners; they want men who are striving to be their best selves.

She doesn’t necessarily want someone who has every step of his life pre-planned, but she wants someone with drive and with goals.

She doesn’t necessarily want someone who cries every day, but she does want someone who has the courage to cry in front of her when he needs to.

She doesn’t necessarily want someone who stays in therapy for his entire life, but she does want someone who has the courage to face his own emotional demons.

So put in the work. End the stalemate. Decide that you want to be in the kind of relationship that most people don’t have and you want to put in the effort necessary to become that kind of man.

The women of the world are waiting for us. And they want us to step up just as badly as we want them to open up.

Dedicated to your success,
Jordan

Ps. Want do women want in a relationship? Check out my best-selling book Keep Her Captivated: Lead Your Relationship To Its Maximum Potential to become the ultimate relationship partner (and the kind of man that women crave). Not much of a reader? You can check out my video course Fight Less, Love More instead.

Kevin Charles Redmon - The Rise and Fall of Sexual Promiscuity

According to this article in Pacific Standard, sexual promiscuity is on the decline - and has been for a very long time (don't tell that to the men and women who wait longer than ever to get married and have children, thus experiencing a greater number of sexual partners than previous generations).

The basic premise of a new research study (discussed in this article) is that at some point in our evolutionary history, males who were not alpha figured out that the only way to secure a mate to pass along those pesky selfish genes was to offer something the alphas did not - security. So females, in essence, traded the greater benefits of multiple male partners (better gene diversity, greater chance of fertilization, decreased infanticide, and more male providers) for the security of one male who provides food (for sexual access) and helps care for/protect the offspring.

This is the first model of this type that includes females as agents in the equation - in the past they have been relegated to passive roles. That, in itself, makes it a more viable model than others. 

The other interesting aspect is that this is still somewhat true today. Alpha males are "playas" and are not likely to settle with or be faithful to one female (obviously, this is a generalization). Non-alpha males, however, i.e. "nice guys," are more able to provide security and more likely to be faithful. And again, this is a generalization that has a lot to do with the developmental stage of the males in question. Those with less egocentric tendencies will likely be better mate material. It also depends on women to choose nice guys, and we know there are plenty of women who are only attracted to "bad boys," which is probably also a factor of ego development.

Anyway . . . this is interesting stuff (even if it only conjecture). Original abstract is at the bottom.

The Rise and Fall of Sexual Promiscuity

Sleeping around once had its benefits, but turns out women may have given up better fertility for better security.

August 2, 2012 • By Kevin Charles Redmon 

Long before Match.com and The Bachelor—even before yentas and oracles—there was the primal jungle, and finding a mate was messy business. Violence and hierarchy ruled the day. Alpha males got the girls; lesser competitors did not. Evolutionary biologists have long tried to trace the human path from combat to courtship: When did we crude animals trade polygamy and paternal absenteeism for “I do” and BabyBjörn?

A new study from Sergey Gavrilets, professor of ecology, biology, and mathematics at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, reviews the current evidence and offers an intriguing hypothesis. The transition from “promiscuity to pair-bonding,” Gavrilets writes in the journal PNAS, occurred only when lesser male hominids, realizing their physical inferiority, adopted a “provider” role in partnerships, and female hominids, in turn, began to show fidelity to these partners. (Others have postulated that the rise of agriculture helped smooth the way for the transition.) The role of female choice is not often considered in evolutionary biology, but if Gavrilets’ models are correct, it may be integral to explaining our past.

Scientists have also long debated the origins of pair-bonding, not because its advantages are in dispute, but because, according to evolutionary logic, it ought never to have happened.

Many species are indeed better off, Gavrilets explains, when their males live cooperatively in societies, helping raise families, rather than warring over mates and leaving their offspring fatherless. But males face a “social dilemma” when it comes to spreading their genes: if they choose to spend their energy providing for—rather than fighting for—mates, other males may cheat and “free ride” on their largesse. (So-called “free rider” problems show up not just in biology, but in every corner of economics, psychology, and environmental policy.) Of all the theories that explain why cooperation (i.e. pair-bonding) replaced competition (i.e. promiscuity) among our ancestors, Gavrilets argues, none account for this social dilemma.

The study highlights several current theories of pair-bonding: instead of fighting, male hominids began to devote effort to caring for offspring, protecting their mate, or provisioning food for sex. But Gavrilets builds mathematical models to show how each of these hypotheticals leads to a “sub-optimal” outcome—how “investing more in offspring means that there is more paternity for other males to steal.” Run the model, and instead of choosing cooperation, the males will choose to fight. It’s not the outcome any one male desires, but the free-rider problem effectively “traps” the whole group in a benighted state.

Gavrilets proposes a modification to existing theory. What if we assume that males began to provide for one—and only one—female, and females, likewise, began to depend on a sole mate for food and help with childcare? First, not all men are created equal; there are few Ryan Goslings and many Kevin Redmons. The weaker among us quickly learned the futility of direct competition, and turned to “alternative reproductive strategies” to spread our genes. (I may not be a dreamboat, baby, but I’ll bring you coffee in bed.) Second, females make choices. Whereas previous models ascribe females a passive role, Gavrilets asserts that “because they receive direct benefits from provisioning males, females should be choosy, and they may become, to some extent, faithful” to their providers.

Promiscuity is a funny thing in nature. Despite what your mother and youth pastor spent so many years telling you, sleeping around has real (genetic) benefits. Polyandry—in which females take more than one mate—allows for better gene diversity, boots the likelihood of fertilization, decreases infanticide, and means more male providers. Gavrilets acknowledges that in switching from promiscuity to monogamy, females actually risked lower fertility. The tradeoff was security.

When he runs the model again, with these two assumptions in place, the outcome is different: instead of a spiral into violent competition, male provisioning and female faithfulness “co-evolve in a self-reinforcing manner.” Males escape the “social dilemma” and pair-bonding replaces promiscuity.

Critically, Gavrilets notes, this process begins with the weakest males—those who have the worst chances of beating out Ryan Gosling for a mate—because they stand to gain the most from an alternative strategy like provisioning. Slowly, the strategy works its way up the dominance hierarchy, as females begin to reward the weaker males with their fidelity. Out of this sexual revolution comes self-domestication. A new kind of society is born, one in which, “except for a very small proportion of the top-ranked individuals, males invest exclusively in provisioning for females, who have evolved very high fidelity to their mates.”

A few million years hence, here we are—imperfect creatures, a long way from the jungle, somewhat closer to commitment.

About Kevin Charles Redmon
Kevin Charles Redmon is a Middlebury Fellow in Environmental Journalism. He writes for The Washington Post, Minnesota Monthly, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, as well as at TheAtlantic.com, The Millions, and The Rumpus.

Full Citation:

Gavrilets, S. (2012, Jun 19). Human origins and the transition from promiscuity to pair-bonding. PNAS, 109(25): 9923-8. Epub 2012 May 29. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1200717109

Abstract for the original article:

Human origins and the transition from promiscuity to pair-bonding

Sergey Gavrilets

Abstract

A crucial step in recent theories of human origins is the emergence of strong pair-bonding between males and females accompanied by a dramatic reduction in the male-to-male conflict over mating and an increased investment in offspring. How such a transition from promiscuity to pair-bonding could be achieved is puzzling. Many species would, indeed, be much better off evolutionarily if the effort spent on male competition over mating was redirected to increasing female fertility or survivorship of offspring. Males, however, are locked in a “social dilemma,” where shifting one’s effort from “appropriation” to “production” would give an advantage to free-riding competitors and therefore, should not happen. Here, I first consider simple models for four prominent scenarios of the human transition to pair-bonding: communal care, mate guarding, food for mating, and mate provisioning. I show that the transition is not feasible under biologically relevant conditions in any of these models. Then, I show that the transition can happen if one accounts for male heterogeneity, assortative pair formation, and evolution of female choice and faithfulness. This process is started when low-ranked males begin using an alternative strategy of female provisioning. At the end, except for the top-ranked individuals, males invest exclusively in provisioning females who have evolved very high fidelity to their mates. My results point to the crucial importance of female choice and emphasize the need for incorporating between-individual variation in theoretical and empirical studies of social dilemmas and behaviors.

NPR - A Father And Son Go On Their Last 'Odyssey' Together

Author Daniel Mendelsohn, below left, and his father, Jay, went on a cruise that retraced the mythic journey of Odysseus. Shortly after they returned, Jay passed away. It's a touching story - and the context of the cruise is also fascinating.

A Father And Son Go On Their Last 'Odyssey' Together

by NPR Staff

Listen to the Story

All Things Considered

[7 min 1 sec]

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• Transcript

Andrea Wyner/Travel + Leisure - April 2012

Author Daniel Mendelsohn, left, and his father, Jay, on the Odysseus-inspired cruise.

April 15, 2012

A few years ago, author, critic, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn was teaching the epic Greek poem The Odyssey when his father decided to take his class.

Jay Mendelsohn, a retired research scientist, wanted to understand his son better, and understand his life's work. When Daniel decided he wanted to retrace one of the most epic journeys of Greek literature, Jay became his travel partner.

Daniel, a professor at Bard College in New York, wrote about the trip for the April 2012 issue of Travel and Leisure Magazine. His father did not like the character of Odysseus in the first place, Daniel tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.

"He said, 'How can this guy be a hero? You know, he lies, he tricks people, he cheats on his wife, he cries' — my father didn't like that at all," Daniel remembers – "How can you make this guy the center of a poem,'" Daniel remembers.

But Jay did love Homer's first poem, The Iliad, and he wanted to learn more about Homer and Ancient Greece. So, they partnered up and began cruising the Mediterranean, starting in the ancient city of Troy in modern Turkey – the city where Odysseus' journey begins.

"One certainly gets a sense of the cultural power and authority of the Homeric poems, both The Iliad and The Odyssey," he says, "from the fact that already in antiquity, it was a tourist destination to go to Troy." Even Alexander The Great visited the city as a tourist, he says.

Of course, Daniel and Jay didn't stop there. They visited places throughout Greece and the Mediterranean associated with locations in Homer's The Odyssey. There's a lot of speculation, however, about whether these sites are truly the places mentioned in these epic poems.

"A lot of these sites," Daniel says, "like Calypso's cave on Malta, one definitely feels like they were sort of invented — or at least hyped." Jay got a big kick out of each location anyway, Daniel says, even the phoniest ones.

The two companions traveled the ancient world on a cruise ship, which offered lectures by academics and archeologists. It was a small cruise ship, with about 80 passengers on board, but that didn't stop them from having unlikely encounters.

"The Odyssey is, of course, about funny encounters and unexpected coincidences and meetings that are too good to be true," Daniel says. "We got to talking with a couple that we had seen a couple times, and it turns out he had been the CEO of my dad's company," he says.

Some of the people they met even had an uncanny resemblance to characters from The Odyssey. 

For example: There's one key moment in The Odyssey when Odysseus returns to his palace in Ithaca — in disguise, to slay all the suitors who had been courting his wife while he was away. Once at the palace, however, he's recognized by a scar on his leg from a childhood wound.

Coincidentally, Daniel was sunbathing on the deck when he noticed a Dutch man with a scar on his leg and an extraordinary story.

During World War II, this man was a starving teenager. He was weak and malnourished and ended up injuring himself while chopping firewood, swinging the axe into his own leg. This wound almost cost him his life.

"A family friend, who was a classicist, helped him get through this illness in part by reading The Odyssey to him," Mendelsohn says. "Even though he was not a classic student, he recited to me, on the deck of this ship as an elderly man, lines from The Odyssey in Greek," he says.

The man told Daniel he was on the cruise because he had vowed to see what Odysseus saw before he died.

All in all, it was a good trip for both father and son — and an especially poignant one. On April 6, 2012, Jay Mendelsohn passed away.

"I can't travel with him anymore," Daniel says, "but in a lot of ways, he will stay with me during the remaining trips that I am making and the readings I am making of these texts," he says. "That just became a different kind of odyssey."

Brendan Tapley - The guy code: Deciphering the mysteries of male friendship [updated]

[When I first posted this, early this morning, I somehow missed the 2nd page . . . it's now included - sorry about that.]

This is a revealing little first-person explication of the "guy code," the unspoken rules that define how men relate to and with each other. For most straight men, this "scene" looks familiar, give or take a few details, right down to the use of alcohol to facilitate bonding.

Whole books have been written about this process - but the best explanation is recognition of a scene that could be from our own lives. Tapley, however, reveals his own sense of knowing how the game is played, knowing that Sean's image is a pose.

The guy code

Perspective

Deciphering the mysteries of male friendship.

April 24, 2011|By Brendan Tapley

The downward nod (a male gesture of respect) had taken a year to become the upward nod (a male gesture of friendship), so I wasn’t surprised when, six years after meeting, Sean and I hung out for the first time. “Anne’s away for the weekend. Come over, have some beers,” he said, pronouncing “over” and “beer” as New Englanders do. “Sounds good,” I said.

Sean and I worked out at the same gym; like clockwork, we showed up at 5:35 a.m., parked our trucks in our usual spaces, and descended the staircase to the locker rooms. For a while, the nod was all, but thanks to the occasional good joke or well-timed silence, we began pausing at the bench or leg press to exchange small talk. It was months before those conversations got around to each other’s work; years before we spoke about family or relationships.

Sean always wore the New Hampshire uniform: Carhartt’s, baseball cap, and fleece vest. He was solidly built with dare-me facial hair, but his kind eyes softened his potentially menacing impression. His reserve didn’t bother me; I knew it belonged to a variety shared by most men: Having once been teased for revealing something, we pursue an aloofness that defies being made the punch line again.

I had grown up in a matriarchal family where revelation reigned supreme, but in the eight years I’d worked in this stalwart town, I’d found that masculinity’s protocols required an “earning” that made any breakthrough (a nod, a playful punch) more meaningful. Such moments were analogous to those 19th-century novels where subtle gestures belie the feelings behind them. Men, by their very Victorianism, offered an old-fashioned sincerity that these days was dismissed as sentimental.

I arrived at Sean’s around 6. He had recently moved in with his girlfriend, and the house reflected that – the considered paint colors, the careful appointments in the dining room. But he made a point of showing me the roofing he had installed over the kitchen and the bathroom he had renovated for Anne.

After the tour, we started drinking, alternating tequila and beer. We grilled venison, the freezer burn indicating it was not Sean, but one of his Puritan ancestors who had made the kill. We played ping-pong until sweaty, and half-watched episodes of a television show that, in my inebriated state, seemed to consist of only one shouted line: “Hey, you – hold it!”

While Sean was retrieving more venison from the grill, I spied a single photograph of his on the wall. He was pictured with three other guys on a beach. They were shirtless, their arms over one another’s shoulders. Impervious.

“That’s when I looked halfway decent,” he slurred, coming up behind me.

“What are you talking about?” I shoved him.

“Oh, I don’t know …”

I waited for him to finish, but nothing came. He was still staring at the photo. “It’s just …” he cleared his throat. “Well, what do you think – you think I still look OK?”

From a guy whose every deliberate silence projected authority, the vulnerable look that had come over him was unsettling. Intimate. I looked back to the photograph.

Make a joke, I thought. Something predictable, defusing, along the lines of “Well, man, you’re not my type, but Anne’s not kicking you out of bed, so no worries.” But as much as my joke would return to Sean his – well, his “guyness” – I thought there might be something else worth returning more.

“Listen to me,” I said. “She’s very lucky to have you.” Sean scanned my expression, looking for the trapdoor. “Very lucky.”

His hand found my shoulder. He gripped it. Then he walked back outside.

We passed out in the living room. I woke around 4 a.m. My arm, flung over the couch, had fallen asleep, my hand nearly touching Sean’s on the floor. I rose, found a blanket to lay over him, and left.

We never got together again.

Recently, I picked up the phone in my new office at my new job; it was Sean. He had called to say he was engaged to Anne. I was pleased for him and decided to write him a note. In it, I described the qualities I admired about him, what kind of man I believed he was. On the way to the post office, I considered whether this was a breach of protocol, an aberrant gesture. But I recalled that night and slid the envelope across the counter, nodding (downward) toward the postman. He postmarked it, tossed it into the mail bin, and nodded back.

Brendan Tapley is writing a book on masculinity. He lives in Northampton. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.

Tags: Brendan Tapley, The guy code, Deciphering, mysteries, male friendship, Boston Globe, men, friendship, bonding, masculinity, guys, Brendan Tapley, pose, manliness

Tom Matlack - Male Bonding

This is an interesting post from Tom Matlack and the Good Men Project Magazine - on male bonding, from a variety of different perspectives, all of which appear to be white, upper middle class - not a lot of diversity.

In some respects it reveals how hard it is for men to talk to each other - and that most men seem to just accept that as how it is - why? Why should men only be able to bond through sports, or drinking? Why can't we just talk to each other? And why should we just accept that limited way of sharing?

Male Bonding

September 24, 2010 By Tom Matlack

Tom Matlack asked guys what makes them feel connected to other men. The good news? Not a single man said “chest bumps.”

One of the reasons we started The Good Men Project was to help guys talk about the things they don’t normally talk about. In that pursuit, here are men talking (in print, for the world to see) about what makes them feel most connected to other men. Guys, there may be hope for us yet…

Nude yoga.
Daniel, writer

Men prefer not to call it “male bonding.” We can’t call it “man time,” either, because that just sounds… questionable. Either way, it’s usually something involving little-to-no speech and a good amount of physical exertion. Your mind might immediately go to sports, but I’d say lumberjacking or drinking. Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder. Oddly enough, the guy friends I still have today are the ones I used to go behind my house with so we could shoot each other with airsoft pistols at close range. The friends that bleed together stay together.
Seth Palmer, television producer

I’ve read so many stories about men who could only communicate with their fathers when the subject of conversation was baseball (or football, or basketball, or golf), and it’s gotten to the point where these stories make me sad. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with talking to one’s father or to other men about sports. At best, our games give us glimpses of perfection and provide great entertainment. But these guys for whom games and the discussion of them are all—even when they maintain that when they’re talking about sports, they’re really talking about matters more profound and significant—these guys ought to get out more… which probably means they should more frequently walk away from their television sets.
Bill Littlefield, Host of “Only A Game”

I choose to bond with men when there is a vehicle and a long road trip ahead. Guys are most comfortable speaking when they’re looking straight ahead (not at each other) and don’t really have an excuse to escape. My most serious conversations with all men—my Dad being the most influential—happen in the car. It’s partly why I think guys like cars so fucking much.
Dylan Leonard Brown, executive assistant

Vegas.
Matt Villano, writer.

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but back in the days of communal life at school, “poo dollar” was a game played by adolescent males, where a dollar bill is smeared with excrement and placed on the sidewalk for an unfortunate person to pick up. I got to admit that I’ve never laughed so hard with friends in my entire life. And I’d love to think that I’ve outgrown such humor, but 20-plus years later a friend emailed me, knowing that I’m working in London for a month, to find out if the kids here “poo pound.” We still found it incredibly funny.
Joe Schrank, interventionist and sobriety coach

As a gay man, I’ve had the best bonding experiences of my life in electronic superstores. No matter what you are—gay, straight, bi, transgendered—most guys love electronics. Stick a bunch of men in an electronic superstore and the discussions and debates about plasma vs. LCD vs. 1080P vs. 1080i vs. Sony vs. Samsung vs. 7.1 surround sound vs. 5.1 surround sound vs. Blu-ray vs. 3-D is truly extraordinary. It always brings a smile to my face when a bunch of guys (gay and straight) can literally bond over a piece of electronic machinery.

Stafford Arima, theater director

Primal screaming. My best friend from middle school and I have seen each other through the last 20 years—all the ups, downs and sideways that adolescence, high school, college and our 20s brought us. We have reinforced our closeness in many ways over the years, but none in as memorably exhilarating a way as primal screaming. I was visiting him at his then-new house out in the woods. The neighbors are distant, and on this particular night his wife was out with friends. We were hammered, mixing yet another round of gin and tonics in pint glasses from the rapidly dwindling handle of Bombay Dry in the kitchen. I don’t remember how it started, but we began to yell, tentatively at first, amazed and somewhat unsettled at the noise we could generate, but soon increased in volume and gusto. We took turns, trying to outdo each other, but then began to overlap; one drunken, screaming, rope-necked 30-year-old gasping for a breath while the other continuing to scream, mouth open with drool stringing toward the floor, until the other could begin and spell the first. For some ten minutes solid we yelled into the quiet of his night kitchen, our bellows echoing around the house, until our heads were light and our throats hoarse. When we stopped, we laughed at ourselves in the uncanny silence, both swaying drunk but conscious of the catharsis of the moment and strange intimacy of knowing that there was no one else in the world but each other with whom that rawness would have been possible.
Drew DeVoogd, attorney

My roommate and I used to try to figure out what soccer team was better looking. That’s men’s soccer team. We’re both straight.
Ryan O’Hanlon, Good Men Project Magazine staff writer and former collegiate soccer player at Holy Cross

I don’t do anything different with my guy friends than I do with my female friends. Generally the best place to bond is an area with a creative energy, good conversation, and an adequate amount of coffee and cigarettes.
Eli Cadwallader, college student

Rafting down the twin fork of the Salmon River in Idaho with my business partners. I learned how smart my friends were playing hearts, how their minds really worked, and saw how they handled camping and the challenges of a foreign environment. Some guys I liked less, and many I liked a lot more.
Todd Dagres, venture capitalist

The bond that comes from playing competitive sport on a team is analogous to the bond that is created on the battlefield in war. Athletes will tell you that their bond to teammates can be stronger than any other in their life, including the bond they have with their wife and children. Something special occurs between men when they are in battle on the playing field-it could be the hormones that flow or simply the highly competitive situation-that leaves a lasting impression like no other.
Dr. Gregg Steinberg, professor of sport psychology at Austin Peay State University and the author of Full Throttle

Biking with my older son. Boys and men communicate better while doing things. Good luck sitting a boy down across from you and saying, “Okay, let’s talk.” My wife recently thanked me for not sharing with her the more intimate details of what we talk about on our biking excursions, because ignorance is bliss!
Geordie Mitchell, educator

The first hour you wake up, hungover as hell, after an absolute ripshit night of going out somewhere with your friends. Half your buddies aren’t there, the other half is scrambled around on couches, stretched out on pillows or right on the hardwood floor, or on top of (insert random potentially soft, or seemed soft at 4 a.m., object here). This first hour when everyone wakes up feeling awful, not drunk but clearly not sober, and recounts the events of the previous night. The stories you hear are likely the funniest they will ever sound. Whatever happened, happened, and it doesn’t matter who hears it or who thinks what, because you’re likely surrounded by a good group of men that you’d trust with anything.
PW, medical researcher

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Tags: men, bonding, friendship, masculinity, culture, Tom Matlack, Male Bonding, Good men Project, intimacy, male friendship, communication, sports, drinking