Male friendship needs a purpose. Join the Volunteer Fire Department, and you’ll have great friends. You’ll see them often, both at meetings and when called out to help. They’ll be good people, virtuous people, the kind who get out of bed to help strangers at night just because they’re needed. They’re better than me; I’m improving a bit by knowing them.
It’s a very solvable problem, this loneliness. Just get out of your comfort zone a little and find a purpose to serve. That’s where you will make new friends.
Agree strongly. It is paradoxical, but we become less lonely by giving - and not because it makes others more likely to give back, but somehow it seems to work on its own. It shouldn't be that way. We expect that the exchange of selves should work more like the exchange of goods. But there is something in the accounting that is less visible.
ReplyDeleteI don't think we learn this lesson by hearing, only by doing.
Since I'm feeling a bit curmudgeonly this morning, I'm going to take a bit of a different tack. This is another analysis of men positioning them as defective women. I think you both make strong points about the nature of quite specifically adult male friendship. Female group intimacy is far more transactional, working out who is in the group, who is out, and who is where in the hierarchy using rhetorical conflict. It is natural, then, that female relationships revolve more around talking rather than doing.
ReplyDeleteTucker Carlson's interview with Bishop Barron contains a similar theme, there in the context of membership in the Church. 'United around transcendence' would be a homely short take on the convo.
ReplyDeleteThere is an evo psych theory about male and female intrasex cooperation, that men stress loyalty to the group or the project, while women stress dyadic, individual loyalty.
ReplyDeleteThe article seemed sort of feminine, in a way- maybe because the author is a NYC writer?
ReplyDeleteGrim gives good advice re. vol.fire dept.
Men make friends by DOING things, not talking about them. They ride motorcycles, join the military, work on fishing boats, etc. And the riskier the activity, the tighter they bond, apparently. And it is over time- lot's of guys will not really have much contact with an old buddy, and then say, after they get together, it was like they had last seen each other yesterday. They know where they are coming from.
I was talking about this with my wife, and we reflected on the division politics has made in our friends, and also the covid debacle- that one was interesting in the way it drew divisions not left and right, but also top to bottom. It really changed our circle of friends- shrank it too, big time.
So it comes down to trust, really- a deep friendship has to have deep trust.
A really good friend will tell you what you need to know, not what you want to hear. And if you do the same, they will listen. They may argue, they may reject the idea, but they will not sulk behind a wall of pride.
People talk about the loss of church groups, Fraternal organizations, etc, as a vector for the thinning of male friendship- The organization itself may be incidental-
It is what they DO that is important- are you more likely to find a true friend fighting a fire, or raising a barn, or tipping drinks at a party?
I’d argue the first two, because 1) both are doing things and 2) both involve shared risk, although not risk to the same degree (unless something slips and drops during the barn raising.)
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As a matter of fact, we did a house raising some years ago and somebody dropped a joist I was handing up to them right on my face. It split my glasses and cut me just below the eye. Fortunately I always get polycarbonate lenses for safety, so they didn’t shatter.
DeleteI would suggest that you are more likely to _make_ friends elsewhere, though. If you’re taking a week off to do physical labor for free for someone, you’re probably already friends.
I feel like there is some relationship here between what we are reading the EN about having to exercise virtue in action, and men building bonds in the doing of virtuous things, or at least things they hold as meaningful within that group of friends, but I'm too tired right now to expand on the idea.
ReplyDeleteThat’s ok. We will be doing the EN for quite a while. We’re still in book one, doing the groundwork. There’s a lot about friendship coming in the later books.
DeleteI've never much liked parties with no purpose. It's easier for me to meet people when we're sharing a task. I won't make friends with everyone there that way, but some fraction of them will be people who can bond with me and vice versa. Making friends isn't easy for me, but I do know the burden is on me to get out there and make contact. You can't expect people to come knock on your door and ask to be your friends.
ReplyDeleteThe friends my wife and I are closest to are the ones we used to work with at PTA events at the kids elementary. Those days of shared sacrifice bonded us in ways casual contact could never accomplish. Of course, it also shows you something about those people and their values, and that's a great filter.
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