This was a scene that played out on occasion when my kids were young. My husband would come home from the rare night out with the guys. I would ask him how his friend [fill in name of hurting friend] was doing since the [fill in appropriate calamity: break up, miscarriage, job loss]. My husband would blink at me as if I had just spouted Latin. 

“Fine. I think. We didn’t talk. We played poker.”

I’ve never understood this, how emotionally opaque John can be with his closest friends. I don’t know if his friendships always looked like this, or if, at some point, things shifted. But if my friends are to be trusted (my friends are totally to be trusted), he’s not alone. A lot of men adopt this I-am-an-island approach with other men, even ones they consider their closest friends. It’s like they have a silent agreement to limit their relationships to the emotional range of the Terminator.

A lot of Men have a hard time maintaining close relationships with other men as Adults

Aside from John, my closest friendships are with women, and that is not what friendship looks like in girl-world. We expect one another to share problems. In fact, keeping too many things to yourself might earn you a concerned conversation about the status or quality of your friendship. 

Among women, problems/concerns/feelings are almost always shared with friends. The history and facts of the situation are laid out in exquisite detail, punctuated by a barrage of questions like “So then what did you say? . . . So then what did he say?” This is followed by a round robin of similar experiences, a protracted and intense discussion about how to “process” the thing, and – usually – a group consensus of how we feel about the problem/relationship/offender. 

I can’t tell you how much richness these deep friendships have added to my life. My closest friendships have not only made me happier, but also actually made me more psychologically, emotionally, and even physically whole. Most importantly, my best and closest friendships have taught me more about my authentic self than I ever could have learned ruminating on my own.

In John’s world, I think friendship looks a lot less like group therapy and a lot more like . . . poker. Inscrutable faces, cards close to the vest. I’m not saying men’s friendships need to be like women’s, but if the men in our lives are struggling to cultivate truly intimate connections with one another, that’s a problem for all of us. And some researchers argue adult men’s friendships are at an all-time low, leaving the men we love isolated and hurting.

Needless to say, I wanted something different for my boys. So, when it came to my attention that they were stealthily creeping toward manhood – around middle school – I set out to learn if there was any way I could help them make and keep the kind of rich, nuanced, deep friendships that carry us through the fray.

But Research tells us that Boys Crave Intimacy and Emotional Connection as much as Girls do

I found answers in a book called Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection by Niobe Way, a professor of developmental adolescent psychology at New York University. Dr. Way had spent twenty years studying boy’s friendships and had concluded that boys come into this world every bit as self-aware, emotionally articulate, and desperate for intimacy as girls do. They crave – and make – genuine, deep friendships based on mutual trust, emotional support and shared secrets. And their friends of choice?  Other boys. Why, then, do many adult men seem so unwilling to open up to their adult male friends on that level? 

To explore that question, Way and her associates followed hundreds of boys throughout high school and discovered a pretty consistent pattern. As freshmen, nearly all of the boys interviewed had one or two best friends and openly admitted how much they loved them. Their best friend was the one who knew their “real feelings” and “deep secrets.” They trusted him, “talked about everything” with him, and they leaned on one another for insight and emotional support. These boys said they would “go crazy” without their best friends.

By the Time Many Boys Graduate from High School They’ve Lost their Closest Friendships with Other Boys

But, by senior year of high school, all that had changed. Most boys’ friendships were barely a shadow of their former selves, either broken entirely or hollowed out of the trust and strong emotional bonds the boys had openly cherished just a few years earlier. They had girlfriends now, the boys said, or their friend had moved to a new school or a new neighborhood, or they were just too busy for one another. 

Way wasn’t satisfied with these explanations. Girls routinely maintain deep personal friendships despite these obstacles. Why not boys?  

Way concluded the problem isn’t inherent in the gender, nor is it an inevitable piece of a boy’s drift to adulthood. The problem is cultural. Our society tells boys that real men are stoic, independent, athletic, strong and silent. Girls are the ones who feel and talk and share. Rather than risk being seen as “girly,” boys often choose to be “real men.” In doing so, Way argues, our boys begin a process of suppressing and denying their deepest, most authentic selves – a process which ultimately leaves them lonely and craving the kinds of friendships they had so naturally as boys.

Depressing, right? The idea of battling all of western culture for the souls of our baby boys?

Mothers can Help their Sons Form and Keep Close Male Friendships into Adulthood by . . .

Maybe not. Way believes that mothers – and schools – are especially powerful in shaping this next generation of men. By abandoning the “boys will be boys” mantra and teaching our sons that men are made, not born, Way believes we can alter that march from happily companioned boyhood to solitary manhood. She has three specific suggestions, each of which I actively applied to my boys. 

Explicitly Teaching them that “Real Men” are Empathetic and Interdependent . . .

First, she suggests explicitly teaching our boys that “real men” are empathetic and interdependent. For us, that involved a lot of calling attention to things that otherwise might have gone unnoticed, both in our kids’ daily lives and in the books and movies we shared. My son’s cuss-spewing, no-nonsense coach, for example, privately consoling the sobbing boy who lost the game by kicking the ball into the other team’s net. The Beast who had to show love before he could – literally – become a real man. Frodo and Sam  marching into hell with little more than one another to lean on. The young wizard who comes to understand that what separates him from the Dark Lord is the fact that Voldemort can “never know love or friendship.” 

When they were sad and needed to cry, we gave them a safe place to do it. And I mean that literally. One of my sons is a very intense athlete. When he was ten or so and giving everything in him to lacrosse, losing a game felt like the end of the world. I remember more than one occasion when, seeing the near tears, tortured look on his face after a loss, I spirited him into the car, drove just far enough away that none of his teammates could see, then let him cry his heart out. 

Ideally, I wouldn’t have had to spirit him anywhere. Ideally, these boys would have cried together, if that’s what welled up in them, and consoled one another through the tears. But we weren’t there yet. The best I could do was give him the chance to express himself in private. The world may tell him it’s “unmanly” to cry, but he certainly weren’t going to hear that from us.

Prioritizing our Boys’ Friendships with One Another . . .

Way’s second suggestion is that we go out of our way to encourage and value our boys’ friendships with one another. Honestly, I had to work against my husband’s example on this one. So I leaned into my own. I talked – and still do talk – openly about my relationships with my closest friends. About how they build me and I build them, about the gifts of shared history and different perspectives. I make sure that all my kids – particularly my boys – know how important it is that my friends and I give our time to one another. 

I also tried to spend time with my boys’ friends, so that I could have more meaningful conversations about their friendships. “Nolan seems a lot more politically conservative than you. Does that ever cause tension?” “Is it hard to make time to see your band friends when you’re so wrapped up in crew?” And when a name dropped off the conversational roll call, I probed. Boys have friend break ups too, and you’ll learn a lot – about your son and his friendships – if you ask about them.

And Staying Deeply Connected to our sons.

Way’s third suggestion is one every mom will embrace wholeheartedly: we need to stay deeply connected to our boys so they learn what it is to be deeply connected. But what if our boys are less than enthusiastic about all this sharing? Don’t worry. Even when their lips are sealed tight, their ears are open. Share yourself. Prompt others in your family to do the same. 

In my house, dinner was our dedicated time together, and I encouraged all my kids to bring their problems, including friendship problems, to the dinner table, where they are hashed out and chewed on by everybody, regardless of gender. This let my boys see what we, as a family at least, see as intimate connection. But it also gave them an emotional vocabulary which I think is incredibly important to parsing out and truthfully expressing complicated feelings. It helped them replace vague thoughts like I feel weird or uncomfortable, with more insightful ones, like I feel vulnerable. Cautious. Moved. Hurt. Seen.

Did it work?  Who can really say? We never know what our kids might have been or done without the choices we’ve made.

But I will tell you this. A few years ago, when my son was in his last year of college, his best friend from high school broke up with his girlfriend, and I asked how his friend was making out. “He’s ok, mom,” my son told me. “We talked and I’m helping him through it. But I don’t really want to tell you anything more. It’s just between me and him.”