Friendship
Last weekend I went to see Friendship, the Tim Robinson/Paul Rudd A24 movie about male friendship. I don’t exactly know if I can recommend that you go see it, as it made me so profoundly uncomfortable that I almost left halfway through after sustaining a cringe for so long that my leg fell asleep, but as I’ve thought about it I’ve been forced to recognize that if it provoked that strong of a reaction in me it has to be good art on some level. My advice? See it in a theater so you don’t turn it off halfway through, because you’re going to want to really badly. I’m not going to recount the plot of the movie, but you can watch the trailer here if you’d like. My good online buddy Scott said “It’s exactly what making friends as an adult in the suburbs feels like”, and I found that to be horrifying, because the movie is horrifying, but that’s also a true thing to say.
I’m thinking about the man who gave the speech at my wedding, Bijan. We met through dating, just in a roundabout way. He started dating my sister, and I liked hanging out with him so much that I probably extended the duration of the relationship by a month. When my sister finally broke up with him, the first thing he said was “you know I’m going to keep hanging out with your brother, right?”. It taught me something important — male friendship is actually harder than dating.
We, as men, are pretty terrible at making friends. I would like to believe that I’m better at it than a lot of people, and I still saw myself in Tim Robinson’s painfully uncomfortable character in more ways than I would like, which I suppose is the point of the movie. Trying to make a new friend is putting yourself out there for rejection because of any number of the many different small things about yourself that you don’t like but can’t change in the moment, but I think it’s especially fraught because a lot of us think about it like dating, even if it’s not like that at all.
We spend our twenties trying to get good at dating so that we don’t have to do it again, but we let our ability to make new friends atrophy because of it. It’s not an intentional thing, it’s a part of the path of adulthood. You work to try to meet someone, you then inherit their group of friends (dating pro-tip: part of being a good match for each other is getting along well with each other’s friends), and the skills you used to have get worse. We partner up and grow more isolated. Old friends have kids and don’t have the time to see friends as much anymore. As Dan Bejar of Destroyer sings on his newest album, “Women fill out, men crumble inwards”.
One of the things I’ve come to understand as I watch other men date, and examine what I’d been ambiently taught about dating as a younger man, is that you’re trained that you’re supposed to trick a girl into dating you by being someone you’re not. This is, of course, stupid because the way to succeed at dating is to be yourself and find someone who likes that, but that’s also why young men are so bad at dating. As we think about making friends as a warped-mirror version of dating, you can see how that insecurity can seep in. Everyone wants to be Paul Rudd’s confident, interesting man who attracts people, not Tim Robinson’s uncomfortable guy who has crumbled so far inwards that he doesn’t know how to be normal in a group of other men, sitting in his chair every night at home. But it also doesn’t actually work that way, that’s just a lie you’ve been taught that’s actively holding you back. You don’t have to be cool to make friends, you just need to find someone you get along with and make a little effort.
A female friend dropped an insight into male friendship on me recently, saying “not to be so essentialist about it but i think women can bond over feelings while men bond over Stuff” in a groupchat, and I think that’s right on the money. I remember living in Washington DC as a 25 year old man with no friends in the city, reeling after the failed relationship that had moved me out there, and what allowed me to build a social circle was sports. Sports are a cheat code for socializing, an instant thing to bond with other people about. This is why men generally hang out in groups and around a topic. “Do you wanna get together and watch The Game?” is a much easier ask than an open-ended conversation one-on-one, which can, you know, feel like dating. This is also why there’s a kind of guy who loves to wear signifiers like band t-shirts. A Titus Andronicus shirt is a way to signal the kinds of Stuff you’d like to bond over.
I’ve been thinking about this because of the movie, but it’s been banging around in my head longer than that. A friend came out to visit and he mentioned that his fiancee couldn’t remember the last time he just hung out with the guys. I’m a social guy, and my friend is less social than I am so I’m not concerned about him, but I wonder how long other guys go without hanging out with other men even though they want to. We let ourselves fall inward because it’s comfortable, and I get it. My wife is my favorite person to hang out with, but she’s filled out an active social circle, and I owe it to her and to myself to do the same. You owe it to your partner as well. If you don’t have friends to talk to and lean on, all of your Big Feelings become your partner’s problem, and that’s not fair to them.
I’m not perfect or even great at this stuff. I’ve let my own insecurities keep me from asking someone new I enjoy hanging out with if they’d like to hang out more, and some old friendships are now more distant than they should be for reasons that are neither side’s fault, that’s just being a person. But being an adult is identifying the things you’re doing poorly and trying to get better at them, and I’m willing to bet there are a lot of men who are in very similar positions. We’d be a lot happier if we put aside our fears of rejection, stopped thinking about friendship like dating, and just asked more guys if they wanted to hang out. It’s still not illegal to drink a beer with the guys, and it feels pretty good.
