Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?

Magazine|Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?

And so, when the boys at the party gathered in the TV room for movie time, long after the pizza and sundaes were downed, I panicked. I remember being ready to call home when Rob announced he’d rather play Nintendo than watch a movie, and walked into the birthday boy’s bedroom. I followed him and sat there, watching him play a relaxing, G-rated game featuring wandering elves until the sun came up. I don’t remember anything we talked about, but I vividly recall the sense of having been saved by Rob, the feeling that he must have intuited how afraid I was and did this for me.

It turned out that Rob — whom I didn’t actually befriend until we enrolled as seventh graders at the same big public exam school — was an exceptionally sensitive person. While almost everyone else I knew admired the elite and powerful, Rob always seemed to be scanning the room for an underdog to get behind. He was also genius-level smart and witheringly funny, especially when it came to outing liars and charlatans. He carried a fortune-cookie message in his wallet, which he loved both for its simple, solemn truth and its diabolical double meaning: “If you promise someone something, keep it.”

For years, Rob and I were inseparable, bonding over our love of the then-hapless Boston Celtics, our disdain for posers who engaged in underage drinking, our lust for (and paralyzing fear of) girls. One summer night, after playing hours of basketball in his backyard, we climbed out of his bedroom window and onto his roof, where, under a purple and orange sky, we reflected on the physical perfection of one particular classmate, a girl neither of us would ever have a chance with, and pounded the shingles beneath us in sheer anguish.

The notion that men in this country suck at friendship is so widespread that it has become a truism, a punchline.