“There is a time in a boy’s life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone.”
– Norah Vincent

The shrinks all say that male friendships are different from female friendships. Men are not as likely to have confidantes as they are to have playmates. A Harvard study found that women loved dogs because they saw them as emotionally complex and unconditionally loving. The study found that men love dogs because they don’t talk, thus make the perfect friends. When my friends and I get together, we all hug and pet Red so much I sometimes think we are all closer to  him than one another.

“I sometimes think that if men didn’t talk to women, they might not talk to anybody; they might go through life telling dirty jokes and quoting baseball statistics to one another,” wrote Dr. Frank Pittman, author and therapist and famed student of men and their lives. “But sometimes there is something that a man needs to reveal, needs to talk over with another man, and there many be no man available to him. Sometimes, manhood is lonely.”

I have often wondered – and sometimes written about – why many men have so many problems being close friends with other men in the ways that many women are close to other women. Pittman says one reason is that young and adolescent men are terrified of being gay, or of being thought of as being gay. They need to be careful about getting close to other men, about hugging or touching them or sharing too much intimacy. The culture still may ridicule or punish them for being gay,  their fathers may be frightened or even outraged by it. Their  fathers and brothers and role models are all strong and lonely.

In our society, Pittman writes, the most acceptable form of male friendship is when men die for one another, as in war, or risk life and limb for each other, as in professional football and other sports.

This, I think, is what we men saw, how we were trained by our fathers and brothers. We learn early on that loneliness is the price we pay for power. Loneliness is the toll we pay for true masculinity (John Wayne, in every movie he made, is riding off into the sunset on a horse at some point, loneliness is the price he paid for bravery and sacrifice.) I believe many men lead – and accept – shockingly lonely lives. I have often been one of them.

Friendships with men have always frightened me, boys are cruel and unforgiving and Darwinian, especially if you are different or seen as weak or strange (all of the above for me). I did not have a father who taught me anything, let alone how to be a man. He was a good and much-loved man, but he was one of those men who could be an angel to people outside of his family, but had no idea how to be a husband or father. It is not, I find, that unusual a story.

My father was profoundly disappointed in me, and said so often. He thought I was a sissy. I was a bed-wetter and physically clumsy, and he told me so. He was embarrassed by me. He had been an athlete, and he believed that was the path to acceptance and success, as it had been for him. Athletics build character and taught boys how to fend for themselves. Books and fish did not.

My father was puzzled by  his odd and bookish son, who preferred to sit in his room and breed tropical fish to playing baseball or basketball. I imagine he was worried about me. He was cruel and demanding about his ambitions for me and his determination to change me, and when I was eleven, he forced me to swing a bat at pitches he was throwing from a baseball mound nearby.

I was terrified of sports, of gym, of my body, of my father. I think he thought he could bully me into manhood. My father threw one pitch hard and high and it hit me on the forehead, knocking me momentarily unconscious and off of my feet. He did not rush over to comfort me or apologize, instead he yelled, “get up, you sissy, take another pitch” several times. You have to get right back on the horse when you fall off, he shouted. I had a great and life-changing epiphany at that moment, I will never forget it. I crawled to my feet, stood up, my head ringing, my vision blurred, and I threw the bat as far away as I could toss it.

I turned and walked off of the field and headed for home on foot, two or three miles away, as my father shouted at me to come back and hit the baseballs again. I still remember every  thing about that encounter, the sun, the field, the sky, the clothes we both were wearing. I turned around and looked at  him, and I told myself:  I am done with him. I will never listen to him or be with him again. And I wasn’t. I understood that my sense of self, of my survival, depended on walking away from him, and staying away from, sealing him off from me and his image of me.

It was possible for me to do that.  When he came into my room to lecture me, I pretended to be asleep.I think he may have reached the same conclusion that I did. After awhile, he stopped coming. I think he gave up on his campaign to make me into his idea of man. Perhaps he thought it hopeless.

My father was not a brutal man, he was never consciously abusive, he really didn’t want to be with me any more than I wanted to be with him. I walked away, but it was somehow mutual, he never really challenged it or tried to change our new dynamic. We left each other alone.  After that, we were mysteries to one another, peering at each across an unbridgeable divide. I think my decision to walk away that day saved my life. When I became Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News, my father congratulated me and said he couldn’t imagine how I had ever gotten a job like that.

He was, he said, astounded.

We never really talked again until he was near death at 88, and I sat by his bedside. We agreed that he was not the father I wanted, and I was not the son he had hoped for. Curiously, it was the best talk we ever had, the most honest and true. I think it was the first time in all those years that I allowed myself to feel some love for him.

I had real trouble over the idea that I was a sissy. When your father thinks you are a sissy, you believe it is true. Sometimes I thought I must be a homosexual, because that’s what other men said sissies were. I saved up my work money when I was 16 and secretly went to see a psychologist to ask him if I were gay – homosexual was the word we used then. He asked if I wanted to have sex with women, I said, yes, very much. He said “you are not a homosexual,” and refused to see me again. But I thought I was a sissy for a long time, I thought other men thought I was a sissy too. I was terrified of getting to close to another man for fear it might be misinterpreted. Nobody wanted to be friends with a sissy, not even the other sissies.

So, at first, I struggled to make friends, and then, I couldn’t make friends.

It was a few years before I could see for myself that being a sissy and being homosexual were not remotely the same thing. And then, a lot of therapy. I might not have been talking to my father, but he sure got inside of my head.

I believe that men need male friends. Men who can’t find close male friends may look too much to their wives and girlfriends to meet all of their needs for human contact. I see the neediness and loneliness in many men, yet I also see that this is something many women rarely see or believe. Men hold so much power in the world and use it so foolishly and destructively, I think it is hard to see them as vulnerable and fragile.

But we can see it in one another, we recognize it in one another and it frightens and disturbs us, it shatters the walls around us. Most of us know what it means to be lonely. We never quite figured out who it was safe to get close to and who it wasn’t. We didn’t learn that true friendship doesn’t necessarily mean dying for our buddies.

The real men, I see now, are compassionate and nurturing, not bullying and dominating.

I know that now, I have made some wonderful male (and woman) friends.  We are committed to one another, we find time for one another, we confide in each other. We talk honestly and often. Just like woman. Friendship is a bridge men can cross, it is never too late.

There is a great loneliness in men, it often shows itself in bluster and cruelty. I remember how close I sometimes felt to the other boys when we were growing up together, and exploring the world together, before adult notions of friendships and maleness clouded our vision and poisoned our friendships.

It hasn’t changed, not really. We just stopped talking to each other about it, we put on our male masks and started feeling responsible for things, we started closing up. I have come to believe that the only men I can be friends with were either tortured as children or humiliated as adults. Because they are the ones who could never afford to close up and stay closed. Wounds take their own time to heal.

If we can open up, if we do take the risk, it is possible, I think to still feel that very familiar closeness, perhaps what it really means to be a man might make sense again, and perhaps we might start healing the world instead of blowing it up.