what is missing in my relationships with men

thinking about the nothingness at the heart of many of my past relationships with men

photo my own (icebergs, glaciers, and mountains in iceland)

yesterday while poking around substack i visited my friend

Liz

‘s feed and stumbled across this piece on female friendship. here liz writes,

“We put a different weight on our relationships as females, generalizing here but I think there is codependency that males don’t tend to put on their friends to give them. I don’t think it is always unhealthy, but I think the lines can get blurry and before you know it it’s hard to tell if you are stifling your bud or to tell them they are stifling you, for example. The level of depth and vulnerability is often so much, so fast or so deep for so long, that sometimes those friends know more than your partner might about you. It just hits different when your gal friend of two years ghosts you, out of nowhere without explanation and then resurfaces a year later like nothing happened. It hits different when a friendship breakup feels like a real break-up, mourning period and all. According to my husband’s experience anyway, this is not how he and his friends operate. They “say what they mean” and “mean what they say” and “don’t take it personally” when a friend moves on. Wow, must be nice”

when i read this paragraph, i immediately thought about my friendships with other assigned-male-at-birth people. a few of these relationships slipped into turmoil or went dead almost the moment i came out. why?

with so many men, I was never truly known, and i felt that. i could never really open up, and i knew that. i knew that to really open up in a “male-to-male” friendship is, generally, a process to avoid: men do not want to feel like girls, and emotional connection is what girls do.

“true blue” is one of my absolute favorite lucy dacus performances), and these lyrics made me want so badly to have more experiences of true and authentic friendships in which I can be myself and know that I am loved:

and it feels good
to be known so well
i can't hide from you
like i hide from myself

i wanted that: to show my full self to my friends and have them love me for my mere existence rather than for the performance i put on for them.

i always knew i could not truly open up about my feelings and experiences with many of my male friends, even after many years of friendship, even being family members! I could not have coded what i was repressing at the time, but now it is clear to me that what i was repressing was everything that would be taken as girly. this wasn’t just about the “guys” being weirded out by my scrunchies and girly amulets. this was deeper than that. yes, there were other guys who watched buffy — cousins, in laws, friends — but i never told these guys how i felt when i saw willow and when i saw tara. for too many men, passion is kept floating at the surface.

the emptiness of it all: throughout all our discussions over the phone with my men friends and family members, i never got into the details of my feelings — Even when we were discussing common interests! somehow i sensed that this level of vulnerability was forbidden in these relationships. it bothered me, this sense of self-repression, but it was easy to convince myself i was just in my head.

and then there were just so many interests i never shared with my many of my men friends at all! things that consumed so much of my free time and i never said almost a word about to him: romance novels, art and architecture books, my own reflective diary writing that i sometimes shared with women friends but never with him. yes, it’s normal not to share all our interests with friends: but there was a common thread to the parts of me i was holding back from so many of the men in my life.

my relationships with so many men have been oriented toward the external world, toward the surface of things. even when it comes to music, I find sometimes that when I want to talk about feelings, men want to talk about “objective ratings.”

so many men are just obsessed with this concept of “the objective best.” in so many of their conversations about so many of their interests — music, sports, politics, the economy — they are captivated by debating who or what is “the best.” the best player, the best candidate, the best guitarist, the best policy, the best gun, the best battle, the best brain, the best president, the highest earner, the biggest pile of shit. “objectively speaking,” says the man before introducing his subjective criteria. for so long i have wondered: why the focus on objectivity? and i think it is because the focus on “objectivity,” an illusion, allows the man to avoid discussing what he is most specifically forbidden from expressing: feelings.

now, i have a few very close cishet man friends. these men have been incredibly supportive and loving toward me; open with their feelings; expressive with their bodies. they tell me they love me when we get off the phone. they hug me tight when we say goodbye. but these are exceptions.

so often with my man “friends,” the conversation never turns to feelings, which are what feel real to me when i think about things. when it comes to music, we must discuss “the best guitarist” or “the best band”: the interesting aspect of these “objective standards” is that there’s an instinctive sneering at girly music. i cannot help but think it is the feelings in “girly” music which scare away the man, just as my emotional connection with my bracelets convinced some men in my family that i’d lost my mind.

i just have this sense in groups of men that i rarely have with women: this is a place where i cannot open up about my feelings in a true, authentic way. if i do, these men, essentially identity drone men, will redirect the conversation to avoid becoming girls. we must talk about the news. we must analyze the factual details of politics.

and then there’s this sense of competition with men. i know this sense of competition exists in very intense ways for women-women friendships, but with men the competition seems to center around one thing: being the best. who is the best at this video game? who is the best at this board game? who has been to the most places? who has slept with the most women? who knows the most random shit about this random topic that no one cares about? i felt this need around men to constantly perform: look how much i know! look how good i am at this video game! look how many countries i’ve been to! look how educated i am! all of this is surface display.

in college whenever i went to hang out with men i always knew i would need to demonstrate how much i knew about politics. the identity of the man is so disconnected from the realities of his inner feelings that his expressions end up focusing on showcasing his knowledge, his specialness, his status. he wants to show how “insightful" and “smart” and “informed” he is. and the more he can focus on the supposedly concrete objectivity of evaluation and logical assessment, the further he can take his mind away from himself. not only from himself. the further he can steer the conversation toward the external, the more easily he can avoid seeing the internal reality of those around him. there are many reasons why he does not want to truly see those around him: he may also see himself; he may see that he has put them into a flimsy cardboard box; he may see the truth: he does not really know these people he calls his friends, and they do not know him.

there are men in my life whom i have known for years, even decades, and not once have i heard them openly discuss their feelings.

finally i am understanding why i have often gravitated toward friendships with women. my experiences of friendship with women have often been fundamentally different. i have had very turbulent friendships with women, but i think sometimes the turbulence itself comes from the higher level of vulnerability in the friendship (not to discount my own past mental health issues lol and the problems that come with performing as a man).

with the women who know me, there’s something so tranquil about being really known, just like in “true blue,” but there can also be something so turbulent.

Liz

:

The level of depth and vulnerability is often so much, so fast or so deep for so long, that sometimes those friends know more than your partner might about you. It just hits different when your gal friend of two years ghosts you, out of nowhere without explanation and then resurfaces a year later like nothing happened.

I prefer the turbulence to the nothingness.

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