One of the issues I have experienced in my own life, and seen in the men I coach or see in therapy, is that after high school or college, we often have a hard time making new friends. If we take a job in a new city, and we are alone, it can takes year for many men to make even a couple of friends.

In this recent article from Salon, Lisa Wade looks at the issue and some of the reasons men struggle to create intimate friendships, the kind where we can be open about fears, hopes, struggles, and successes. We NEED these kinds of friends.

American men’s hidden crisis: They need more friends!

Men aren't making the same kinds of intimate friendships many women have -- but they want to

Lisa Wade
Saturday, Dec 7, 2013 

Of all people in America, adult, white, heterosexual men have the fewest friends. Moreover, the friendships they have, if they’re with other men, provide less emotional support and involve lower levels of self-disclosure and trust than other types of friendships. When men get together, they’re more likely to do stuff than have a conversation. Friendship scholar Geoffrey Greif calls these “shoulder-to-shoulder” friendships, contrasting them to the “face-to-face” friendships that many women enjoy. If a man does have a confidant, three-quarters of the time it’s a woman, and there’s a good chance she’s his wife or girlfriend.

When I first began researching this topic I thought, surely this is too stereotypical to be true. Or, if it is true, I wondered, perhaps the research is biased in favor of female-type friendships. In other words, maybe we’re measuring male friendships with a female yardstick. It’s possible that men don’t want as many or the same kinds of friendships as women.

But they do. When asked about what they desire from their friendships, men are just as likely as women to say that they want intimacy. And, just like women, their satisfaction with their friendships is strongly correlated with the level of self-disclosure. Moreover, when asked to describe what they mean by intimacy, men say the same thing as women: emotional support, disclosure and having someone to take care of them.

Men desire the same level and type of intimacy in their friendships as women, but they aren’t getting it.

***

In an effort to understand why men’s friendships are less intimate than women’s, psychologist Niobe Way interviewed boys about their friendships in each year of high school. She found that younger boys spoke eloquently about their love for and dependence on their male friends. In fact, research shows that boys are just as likely as girls to disclose personal feelings to their same-sex friends and they are just as talented at being able to sense their friends’ emotional states.

But, at about age 15 to 16 — right at the same age that the suicide rate of boys increases to four times the rate of girls — boys start reporting that they don’t have friends and don’t need them. Because Way interviewed young men across each year of high school, she was able to document this shift. One boy, Justin, said this in his first year, when he was 15:

[My best friend and I] love each other… that’s it… you have this thing that is deep, so deep, it’s within you, you can’t explain it. It’s just a thing that you know that person is that person… I guess in life, sometimes two people can really, really understand each other and really have a trust, respect and love for each other.

By his senior year, however, this is what he had to say about friendship:

[My friend and I] we mostly joke around. It’s not like really anything serious or whatever… I don’t talk to nobody about serious stuff… I don’t talk to nobody. I don’t share my feelings really. Not that kind of person or whatever… It’s just something that I don’t do.

What happens?

During these years, young men are learning what it means to be a “real man.” The #1 rule: avoid everything feminine. Notice that a surprising number of insults that we fling at men are actually synonyms for or references to femininity. Calling male athletes “girls,” “women” and “ladies” is a central part of motivation in sports. Consider also slurs like “bitch” and “pussy,” which obviously reference women, but also “fag” (which on the face of it is about sexual orientation, but can also be a derogatory term for men who act feminine) and “cocksucker” (literally a term for people who sexually service men). This, by the way, is where the ubiquitous slur “you suck” comes from; it’s an insult that means you give men blow jobs.

So men are pressed — from the time they’re very young — to disassociate from everything feminine. This imperative is incredibly limiting for them. Paradoxically, it makes men feel good because of a social agreement that masculine things are better than feminine things, but it’s not the same thing as freedom. It’s restrictive and dehumanizing. It’s oppression all dressed up as awesomeness. And it is part of why men have a hard time being friends.

***

To be close friends, men need to be willing to confess their insecurities, be kind to others, have empathy and sometimes sacrifice their own self-interest. “Real men,” though, are not supposed to do these things. They are supposed to be self-interested, competitive, non-emotional, strong (with no insecurities at all), and able to deal with their emotional problems without help. Being a good friend, then, as well as needing a good friend, is the equivalent of being girly.

Of course, not all men buy into these prescriptions for male behavior, but these expectations do influence most men’s friendships at least a little bit. They mean that, to make good friends, men have to take risks. In a context in which being a man is good and being friendly is being womanly, each time a man tries to form intimate bonds with another man, he potentially loses status. Men who want truly close friends have to fight the instinct to protect their standing above all else. This isn’t easy, as they’ve been told for a lifetime that their status as male, and their place in that hierarchy, is a significant part of why they’re important and valuable human beings.

Men also have to find other men who are willing to take those risks with them. Knowing who to reach out to isn’t always easy, as men often wear a masculine guise, a mask that projects masculinity and hides the things about them that are disallowed. In one study of men’s experiences, one college-age man explained: “I am more of an emotional person. … I never really felt much like who I [pretended to be] because I [was]… putting my man face on.”

It’s tough to know who to reach out to and it takes courage to do so. Complicating things further, men can feel threatened by the initiation of intimacy and strike back to protect their own guise. Another college-age interviewee explained, “If a guy starts opening up to another guy, he will joke around like, ‘You look like you are ready to make out with me.’” “I have done it,” he confessed.

Finally, because men often don’t have a lot of practice being a good friend, men who value friendships with other men may have to teach others how to be friends. They may have to model friendship for other men or be understanding when their friends fail them and respond with greater disclosure instead of anger or dismissal (e.g., “it hurt my feelings when you didn’t call to see how my surgery went”). This calls on great emotional reserves, but it’s worth it.

***

Having a friend to whom you can disclose your feelings a major determinant of well-being. People with friends are healthier. They’re less likely to get common colds, to develop fatal coronary disease, to develop physical impairments or reductions in brain functioning as they age. People with friends are more likely to survive the death of a spouse without any permanent loss of vitality. Medical doctor Dean Ornish explains:

I am not aware of any other factor — not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery — that has a greater impact on our incidence of illness, and [chance of] premature death.

Depending on which research you consult, people with good friends have a 22-60% lower chance of dying over a 10-year period.

People with friends are happier, too. Friendship is correlated with a more joyful life. If a person is depressed, having a friend interact with them regularly is as effective at treating depression as antidepressants or therapy. In old age, friends are more important than grandchildren for maintaining morale. According to sociologist Rebecca Adams, friendship is more strongly correlated with happiness than relationships with a spouse, children, parents or siblings.

Guys, it’s time. Man up and make some friends. We can’t do it for you. And I’m not saying it’s easy, but there’s every reason in the world to make friendship a priority. 

~ Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the principal writer for Sociological Images: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/. You can follow her on Twitter @lisawade and on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lisawadephd. More Lisa Wade.

The End of Men - Peak Masculinity

This comes from Adbusters - The Big Ideas of 2013. I have known guys like the one in this piece, guys who seemed to fear the natural bodily processes we all learn are normal as children - and with books like Everyone Poops, it's even easier to help kids become accepting of bodily functions.

Sometimes, however, I have seen this denial of bodily functions in some of my trauma clients, for whom urination and/or defication are stimgatized so severely by a dysfunctional care-giver (often the mom, though not placing blame) that they will literaly starve themselves (in part) to avoid having to shit. That is an extreme example.

Many other children are raised to be proper at all time and in all locations (kind of like the narrator below) - so much so that they are unable to imagine pulling out their penis and pissing outside. They have never experienced the challenge of writing their name in the snow with their urine stream. Sad.

The End of Men

Peak Masculinity

Adbusters,13 December 2012

After years of hand sanitizer, hotel suites and shimmering porcelain, releasing anywhere other than a hand-crafted Italian basin seemed rude, disrespectful, inhuman. Growing up I'd been taught that the essence of humanity was about shedding this animal skin. And though no one ever said it out loud, I knew from a very young age that there was something blasphemous about my piss.

 

Over time I learned to push the disturbing biological reminders farther and farther from my consciousness. I ran the tap to hide the sound. I stopped looking into the bowl to see if it was yellow or clear. I outfitted the house with the best fans. I insisted on calling the restrooms. I excused myself to the restroom quietly in social occasions, eventually dropping the restroom altogether and just went with "excuse me." I sat down to piss.

Then I met these men from the suburbs. Friends of friends. They joined me at an upscale lakeside retreat. soft roughing it I called it – the elements of the wild with the amenities of home. The restrooms were the best I'd ever experienced. Spaces as large as bedrooms. Basins like small baths. Exquisite. Almost artistic. Complete and total disguises.

But these friends of friends didn't share the same appreciation. In fact they barely noticed the restroom except to comment on the power of the basin's flush. They preferred to pull out their dicks in the middle of the gravel driveway and piss. They often did this in mid-sentence while talking to each other – without even so much as a pause.

Imagine it. Holding their dicks. Laughing. Making eye contact. Shaking the last droplets out of the end. They would zip their trousers in stride as they returned to whatever it was they were doing.

It wasn't long before they stopped using the toilets to piss altogether. Even in the dark of night, they'd stumble across the room banging their knees, tripping over haphazardly strewn shoes and clothing, to unlatch the front door so they could release barefoot under the night sky. Sometimes they'd dribble on their own feet, smiling as the warm urine cut through the damp lakeside air on their skin. I watched from the kitchen one evening as they chuckled to themselves, rubbing the tops of their wet feet on the back of their trousers. God I wanted that.

One day, instead of discretely turning my head and moving to the side, I stood beside them as they pissed together on the driveway. "How come you never piss outside?" one of them asked. I stared blankly at the streams of urine flowing from the large dark puddles of piss. It didn't seem to matter to them either way. They carried on with their conversation. Maybe it was just an idle curiosity. And I couldn't answer because I didn't know why. 

A single close friendship can ease a boy’s passage through middle school

From Slate, an article on the importance of buddies for young boys as they enter middle school. There are big piles of research (decades worth) demonstrating that kids with close "buddy" friendships "are healthier, do better in school, and don’t get bullied as often." More importantly, friendships help mitigate "the negative impacts of family problems and, according to Dr. William M. Bukowski, make kids less anxious about trying new things."

The Buddy System: A single close friendship can ease a boy’s passage through middle school - But what if your son can’t find a pal?

By Joshua Glenn and Elizabeth Foy Larsen | Posted Thursday, March 15, 2012

Research has shown that kids with close friendships are healthier, do better in school, and get don’t get bullied as often. Photograph by Digital Vision.

Recently both of our oldest sons switched schools for junior high. While in many ways each of their transitions were smooth, both of us were surprised that these two terrific, well-adjusted, handsome (natch) boys seemed at first—at least to their parents—to have no friends.

We reacted to this information in manners befitting our personalities. Josh gently encouraged his son to pick up the phone and call his elementary-school pals; his son resisted, saying he wanted to move on. Elizabeth, on the other hand, went full-on helicopter. After a call to her son’s adviser revealed the not-encouraging fact that he’d been eating lunch with that same adviser, she phoned the school counselor, who assured her that her son wasn’t roaming the halls by himself and that this temporary friendlessness was in the range of normal, especially for introverted boys like her son. “He’s still most likely putting all his energy into getting to the right classroom for each class, not to mention finding the bathroom,” she said. Needless to say, soon Elizabeth was asking her son for the names of everyone he ate lunch with, much to her son’s disgust.

We remember from our own treacherous passages through junior high how strong friendships can ease the pain of those change-filled years. Josh and his best friend from childhood, Dooley, lived on the same street and attended the same middle school. Though they both made other friends, the two were joined at the shoulder most days from breakfast, which Josh often ate at Dooley's house (where Carnation Breakfast Drinks were an accepted alternative to oatmeal), through dinner, which Dooley often ate at Josh's father's house (where reading a Tintin book at the table was by no means considered rude).

In fact, decades of research have shown that kids with close friendships are healthier, do better in school, and don’t get bullied as often. Friendships also can minimize the negative impacts of family problems and, according to Dr. William M. Bukowski, a psychologist who researches friendships at Concordia University in Montreal, make kids less anxious about trying new things. In one University of Virginia study, researchers placed students wearing heavy backpacks at the base of a hill and asked them to estimate its steepness. The participants who stood next to a friend gave lower estimates than those who were alone.

Perhaps most important, friendships can validate kids in a way that sticks more than their parents’ You rock! praise. “Kids know that parents are supposed to love their children,” says Bukowski. “But when someone shows you affection who doesn’t have to, it has a stronger effect.”

Given these benefits, it makes sense that we parents of boys should see the middle school years as an opportunity to encourage a life-long appreciation for friendship. Unfortunately, for boys growing up today, maturity is mostly defined as being cool and independent. You’re not supposed to need a relationship with anyone. In fact, the very idea of having a “relationship” with a guy friend, much less talking about it, seems icky to many boys.

 “You have to shift the whole game and say that maturity should be defined as having quality, mutually supportive healthy relationships,” says Niobe Way, an NYU psychology professor. Way’s recent book, Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, shreds the assumption many parents make that boys can take or leave their pals. Instead, her research shows that boys actually love their guy friends, and have the instinctive intelligence to be able to talk about those attachments. “We think boys are emotional clods who don’t know how to express their feelings,” says Way. “What I hear from listening to boys for almost 20 years is that they have an incredible astuteness about the emotional world. It’s not just that they can say they love a friend, but they can say things with more nuance, like ‘I can act like I’m mad but I’m really hurt.’ ”

Unfortunately, according to Way and other researchers, intimacy between boys vanishes as they progress through high school, in part because many boys this age are afraid of acting in a way that makes them seem girlish or gay. (Jocks, on the other hand, can openly show affection with their guy friends—especially on the playing field—because their popularity and status as manly men insulates them from being harassed.) It’s a loss that the boys Way interviewed mourn intensely and still grieve as adults. Since publishing her book, Way says she’s been surprised by all the letters she’s received from grown men telling her how much they missed their own boyhood chums.

The loss of close-knit guy friendships in middle school may lead to more than loneliness. “If you live in a culture in which the definition of manhood is independence and autonomy and where we aren’t valuing our social and emotional sides,” asks Way, “is it so surprising that we have this culture of bullying and cyberbullying and people being so brutal to each other?”

We agree. But encouraging authentic relationships at a time of life when kids just want to fit in is no small challenge. Here are a few friendship-encouraging strategies recommended by experts—and that would possibly be recommended by our sons, if they were ever willing to talk about this.

Don’t confuse popularity with friendship. If your son has one friend in whom he can confide, and who he trusts won’t talk behind his back, that’s all he needs. Research shows that to get all the benefits of friendship, one is the magic number. Don’t crusade for him to acquire friends the way he used to collect Pokémon cards.

Don’t freak out if your son doesn’t have friends from time to time. In his study of 350 kids, Bukowksi found that every single one went through a period when he had no friends. “There is going to be turnover in friendships,” says Bukowski. “These downtimes are a chance for parents to encourage the importance of relationships and take stock.” And so …

Talk about friendship. Even though most boys don’t want to have a heavy sit-down about their buddies, you can still talk about the importance of friendship in a way that will get your point across. Bukowski and Way both suggest talking about your own friendships: how much they mean to you; what disappoints you. Just don’t overshare! A simple, “I really care about my friendship with Mike and it bums me out when he doesn’t return my emails” will do. Elizabeth had great success recently when she told her sons that a friend is someone who can keep your secrets and doesn’t treat you well one day and then turn on you the next. Both of her sons told her which boys they knew who fit this description. And then they also were able to say which kids didn’t and how it makes them feel when that happens.

Give him a chance to bond over things he loves. You can’t stage-manage a middle schooler’s friendships they way you could when he was in elementary school. But you can provide boys with opportunities to do things with kids who share their interests—filmmaking classes, batting practice, hip-hop. But don’t think that just because your kid has met another LEGO robotics nut that your work is done. “One of the challenges for middle school boys is to change their friendship relationships from being activity based into experiences that are more relational,” says Bukowski. “If a 7^th grade boy is playing basketball together with his friends, he should be aware that he shouldn’t gloat about it if he’s better than his friend. Boys who are friends compete with each other, but they can manage that competition.” If your son has a hard time not lording his greatness over others, Bukowski recommends watching the ESPN TV show Pardon the Interruption, which pits two sports reporters against each other to hash out the issues of the day. “They fight about everything,” he says. “But it never becomes personal. You always have the sense that they love each other.”

***

And how, over a year later, have our boys fared? Elizabeth’s son did make friends at his new school while also staying close to a few guys he’s known since he was little. He’s bugging her about seeing The Hunger Games with his pals on the day it’s released, is excited about being on the middle school tennis team, and is going to camp with four classmates this summer. Josh’s son took up the electric bass and made friends through his school’s jazz band. He and his friends have co-ed parties, go ice skating together, and never stop IMing. Proving, as is always the case with parenting, that solving one concern just begets another.

Bryan Curtis - Man-Cave Masculinity: A man’s quest for his soul starts with a walk downstairs

Well, damn, I don't have a man-cave, so does that mean I am soulless, less than manly and masculine?

No. But men are gathering in their homes now instead of at the corner bar - this is probably not a bad thing. I have a client who quit drinking a couple of years ago who is starting a poker night at his house, sans booze, to have some "man time" away from his girlfriend, but also to avoid the temptation of alcohol.

Men need spaces to hang out besides bars and the tools and hardware sections at Home Depot.

Man-Cave Masculinity

A man’s quest for his soul starts with a walk downstairs.

By Bryan Curtis|Posted Monday, Oct. 3, 2011, at 6:44 AM ET

Students of anthropology, by now you’ve heard of “man caves”: the basements and above-the-garage spaces where men gather to watch the Red Zone Channel. What requires further study is the culture that has arisen there. It is man-cave masculinity—a new male code. Study man-cave utterances (“This is everything and more of what I’ve ever wanted in a basement”) and you begin to see fear. You see confusion. You see men galloping into adulthood like Leon Lett running toward the end zone in Super Bowl XXVII. That this unsteady manliness would be celebrated with big-screens and kegerators and Golden Tee machines is part of what makes it so touching.


To see how far men have come—or maybe how far they’ve retreated—we need to start at midcentury, at a proto-man cave: Toots Shor’s eponymous saloon in New York City. The décor at 51 West 51st Street was manly in extremis. “[I]t is as devoid of subtlety and fussy trimmings as a boxing ring,” John Bainbridge wrote in his three-part New Yorker profile. Fleshy and obscene, Shor pulled in manly types—Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason; sports stars like Joe DiMaggio; sportswriters like Jimmy Cannon; even Chief Justice Earl Warren—to join his nocturnal party. As Shor liked to say, “A bum who ain’t drunk by midnight ain’t tryin’.”


Shor also enforced a male tribal code. To be one of his “crumb bums,” you had to make frequent and tender declarations of friendship. You were expected to smother your ego. (Charlie Chaplin, enduring a 20-minute wait for a table, was told by Shor, “Have a drink and be funny for the people.”) And although he was happily married, Shor did not make his inner sanctum particularly woman-friendly. Bainbridge: “[A] member is not forbidden to bring a female companion into the restricted area, but it is understood that he will not do it too often.” Switch up a few particulars, and this is man caving today.


What changed is that middle-aged male “palship”—Shor’s excellent phrase—is now practiced on sofas. The saloon came home. There are two big reasons for this. First, there was the women’s movement, which made it verboten for married men to be at bars until all hours. Men (or this was the idea, anyway) took on a bigger role in rearing children, cooking dinner, and maintaining the house.


The second reason is that the sports bar became redundant.

Read the whole article.

Ken Solin - What does it mean to be an authentic man?

Nice post from Ken Solin . . . I am sharing the whole post because it's short enough that only seeing a part of it misses the whole point - go check out the rest of Ken's blog for other good material. We all need friends like the men he describes here.

What does it mean to be an authentic man?

Posted by: kensolin on: August 31 2011 

There’s lots of talk going around about authentic men. I’ve read articles about what it means to be an authentic man, and some point in the right direction. I have my own sense of what it means to live authentically, and when I veer from what I consider my authentic path, I invariably suffer the consequences.

I try to surround myself with men who are also trying to live authentically. These are men who live openly and with integrity, and have little about their lives they feel they need to hide. Of course, this leaves lots of men out of my life, but experience has taught me that it isn’t the number of friends a man has that matters, but rather, the quality of his friends.

I refuse to be associated with men who live dishonestly with their wives and girlfriends. I’ve been asked to cover for men who cheat on their wives, and I’ve declined, because a friend would never ask another friend to lie, for any reason. I especially avoid men who don’t have a moral compass and who pretend not to know the difference between right and wrong when it suits their needs. A man who lies is untrustworthy. Where there’s no trust, there’s no love.

What’s left to choose from are the best of men who can always be depended upon for their straightforwardness and integrity. My friends are concerned about me and my well-being. I know if I need a favor or help of any kind, they will be quick to come to my aid. My authentic men friends work hard to be the best husbands and boyfriends possible. When their relationships hit a rough patch, the first thing that comes into their consciousness isn’t to have sex with other women to make themselves feel better, but rather, to do the work to figure out how to get their relationships back on track. Again, it’s all about integrity.

My friends understand the basic principles I taught my sons from the time they were young. Nothing worthwhile in life ever comes easy, and that hard work is nearly always necessary to achieve real life goals. There are no shortcuts for living authentically, and it’s nearly impossible not to alienate men who believe otherwise.

Sometimes a man has to admit he’s wrong and be okay with that. He may feel embarrassed by how other men view what he’s done, but he understands on a deeper level that everything about his manhood isn’t connected to his ego or dick. He also understands that no one is right all of the time and that apologizing isn’t a sign of weakness.

My friends never utter racial slurs or espouse any form of bigotry. They’re bigger men than that. Like me, they have no interest in or tolerance for racial or religious jokes either. While most of my friends have spiritual values and beliefs, none talk about them or try to convert anyone.

My friends don’t offer each other advice, because they realize that advice has little value. What we do offer each other is information drawn entirely from our own experiences in similar situations. We talk about what we did that worked, and what didn’t work, and we talk about how the experience felt, on an emotional level. We understand the need to help each other heal when we’ve been hurt.

My friends know that being a father means that instead of playing ball or golf on Saturday morning, a father spends that time teaching his children the lessons that will carry them throughout their lives. They know that being a father doesn’t end the moment their children go off to college or into the military after high school. They accept that as long as they’re alive, they will be involved in their children’s lives.

They didn’t browbeat their kids, they nurtured them instead. They don’t offer their grown children advice unless asked for it. That’s a part of building trust with adult children, because our sons and daughters know that they can trust us not to preach to them every time they come to us with their problems. My friends and I resist the urge to fix everyone’s problems, particularly since most people just want a sounding board, not a fix.

Most of my closest friends are men I’ve been in a men’s group with for decades. We have helped one another understand how to live authentically, and when we fail to stay on that path, we gently guide each other back onto it. Does all of this make my friends and me authentic men? It does in my book.