I met my best friend on my very first day, in the very first class of high school (and ironically, the only one we’d have together until college). I’d had ‘best friends’ before, and I don’t want to lessen their importance. I was consistently and enthusiastically bullied for all of my elementary and junior high school life; and the very rare friends I had in those years were wonderful people who made me feel valued. But I wasn’t very good at having a best friend, not for a long time at least. I didn’t know what it really meant to have a best friend and more importantly, to be a best friend for someone else.
Our memories conflict on how exactly we first started talking, but as I remember it he’d been sketching (as he often did in those days) in his notebook next to me. When I looked over I made out a very familiar, key figure among a page full of doodles. I don’t remember the exact words I said, but I complimented him on his drawing and asked if he too liked that dark, heroic figure that had helped shape my life: Batman. It turned out that not only did he like the character as much as I did, but within minutes we discovered that our mutual love for the character arose from the exact same source from the early 90’s: Batman the Animated Series.
Now I should mention that up until this point in my life, in addition to not making friends easily, I didn’t make them quickly either. Years of bullying taught the younger version of me to be cautious: even when someone appeared to be friendly, they might actually be waiting to spring a nasty prank or stab you in the back. So I took my time observing people before really starting to open up, and that’s a sad mentality for a child to have. But luckily for me it all changed with Dave.
Dave and I talked incessantly in class. This was highly unusual for me because I was the studious type who felt guilty I wasn’t giving the teacher my full attention. But Dave and I were so excited, so relieved, so amazed to have found another person with the deep level of attachment to the show that made such an impact on our lives, that we just couldn’t help ourselves! And so, defying over ten years of cautious behavior; I went over to his house the Friday of that first week of class.
I still vividly remember sitting down at the kitchen table in the early afternoon at his parents’ house and talking deeply about countless areas of our lives. We talked about being bullied, we talked about growing up lower (and sometimes very, very lower) middle class, we talked about the magic of Christmas, and about the things we feared. We talked for so long at that dinner table that the house grew dark and we had to turn on the lights.
Over the months and years of high school that followed, it was easily apparent to everyone around us how much Dave and I cared for each other. And it defied the expected behavior of high school.We didn’t talk tough, we went for a full hug instead of a ‘bro hug’ or fist bump. We made a big deal about birthdays and presents. We went for long walks. All of those details added up to the perceptible “difference” about a friendship between two men. We simply weren’t raised with or built for the manly “no homo” culture that expected us to act a certain way. We’d both read many stories that featured the strength of a bond between two male friends. I, in particular, had read the Lord of the Rings in late elementary school, and my whole family had been enraged when the films had arrived. Not just because of the missing pieces from the beautiful story we knew so well; but from the way the general movie going public reduced one of the most beautiful fictional friendships of all time to jokes about how Sam was clearly gay for Frodo. Even though acceptance of homosexual relationships was finally gaining ground at an accelerating rate, the public at large still couldn’t seem to stomach this idea of a deep friendship without tipping it over into being a romantic one.
This was the case for Dave and myself. While we found a decent sized group of friends for the first time in our lives during the remaining years of high school, most of them couldn’t resist the occasional reference to “Dave and Walter getting married” or something similar. Now I should point out that most of our friends quickly learned that such jokes weren’t welcome and they didn’t need to “prove their masculinity (or femininity for that matter) by asserting that it was weird to have this middle ground between “manly bros” and “gay couple”.
But every once in a while, the sort of “in-gag” would return, and while it was generally easy to brush off it still frustrated me that a relationship so deep, beautiful and complex wasn’t always recognized for what it was. Indeed, that same depth and complexity made others feel uncomfortable.
As high school came to an end and as the years began to pass, I learned to gauge how much to say about Dave when I met new people. Within a few minutes of meeting someone I could usually determine who would be weirded out if I truthfully described my relationship with my best friend. It became a nice indicator of who would make a good friend moving forward; those who responded positively to my friendship with Dave were usually people in search of deep and long lasting friendships themselves. But the simple fact that I had to pick and choose what truths I told when introducing this important person in my life was frustrating.
A few years ago, Dave and I decided that we were going to celebrate our upcoming 10 year anniversary of becoming friends. Almost immediately, that trip became a new trigger for the semi-threatened joking of others. We were excited to talk about this trip because anyone would naturally want to share that they’re taking a trip to Okinawa. However, after the first few times answering the commonly asked question of ‘Why?’, I found myself altering how I would describe my reasons to other people. Instead of saying, “My best friend and I are celebrating our 10 year anniversary of knowing each other.” I might just leave it at “My best friend and I are going together”. Or I might attempt to divert the questioners attention to the things we were excited to see, allowing them to infer that the massive aquarium in Churaumi was the reason for us going. It felt just like being in high school again with this unspoken judgement and awkwardness about celebrating a deep and close friendship with another man.
My experience with this ongoing social stigma has appeared in every male friendship I’ve had. It’s an invisible battle going on under the surface where the desire to be openly affectionate, honest, and caring goes to war with the societal pressures to keep interactions between male friends “manly” and “tough”. Hugs are quicker than either participant may actually want them to be. Even if it makes whatever activity more difficult, my male friends choose to sit on the other couch in my apartment, much less next to me.
In the lead up to writing this, I was discussing this with someone and was asked if I felt that the social stigma against deep, close, and/or affectionate male friendships had decreased in my experience. And overall, I think it has to some extent. But the reactions to my trip with Dave to Okinawa, just 4 years ago, keeps me from feeling like things have improved too much.
My friendship with Dave has certainly gone through a lot in 14 years. We’ve spent a ton of time learning how to communicate better, how to pick between the disparate things we wanted to do, and how to stay close when separated by many miles. We’ve had moments where we weren’t really speaking to each other, but then we would sit down and talk out our problems. All of which sound a lot like the things romantic couples go through., This may be because as far as the average person might believe, it’s only romantic couples who work at their relationships like this. That, above all else, is the aspect of social awkwardness around male friendships that makes me most sad. If you believe your relationships with friends don’t deserve the same level of work and communication you devote to your romantic relationships, your friendships are most likely doomed to remain at the surface level.
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