I Guess this is Growing Up

I un-ironically adored this song in high school, which, not coincidentally is when I spent a majority of my down-time ruminating on what “growing up” really meant, among other sophomoric philosophical pursuits.  Now, I enjoy Blink-182 ironically, but, although I was love-sick like a little teenage puppy recently, this post isn’t about emo-rejection popularized in such pop tunes; but rather, as I begin my third decade of life, I’d like to consider how I’ve developed an ability to better function in a male friendship by admitting and expressing my feelings.  This shouldn’t be such a big deal, but it is.  Why?

In my lifetime, a masculine American male has always had trouble showing affection for his fellow man.  Witness the hand-slap, fist-bump, pound it, man-hug–all designed to minimize body-contact between two men who care for each other.

I was no different.  And saying “I love you” to someone beside my mom, dad (only when he had terminal cancer), and girlfriend was not even a possibility.

Same-sex phone conversations seemed suspect.  ”Are you sure everything is okay?” my close high school friend once said after a few minutes of mildly awkward conversation.  I’d called J.P. at his expensive east coast liberal arts school from my expensive mid-west liberal arts school, with no agenda other than catching up.  ”Just wondering why you called,” he said later in the call, clearly confused. We had a good talk, but didn’t call each other “just to talk” for many years after.

Over an over-priced beer at a Tribeca bar, a recent conversation with Bob, one of my closest college friends got me thinking about peculiarities of male friendship.  ”I’ve started telling my brother I loved him at the end of our phone calls,” he told me.  Bob and his brother are as close as two people can be: best friends and brothers.  ”I’d known I’d loved him for years, but couldn’t manage to say it.”

“What changed?” I wondered aloud.  Neither of us were sure.  Getting older?  Hitting thirty?  A brush with death?  All possible.  For close to five years, he’d been living and working as a graduate student and writer in New York.  Now he’s out in LA, being a prostitute.  (That’s from Catcher in the Rye–like D.B., Bob is not selling his body; he’s writing for the movies.)  And doing well.  He was in New York because his thesis-short film had gotten into the Tribeca Film Festival.

Seeing each other, catching up, getting silly drunk together, was great.  He’s one of the few friends who share my love of sports and writing.  Our conversations swerve smoothly from Mark Sanchez to Jonathan Franzen.  We share a (often crude) sense of humor, values, goals, and more recently, the writing-life.  But we only talked on the rare occasion we were in the same city and hanging out together.  If we couldn’t meet up for a few weeks, we weren’t going to call just to keep in touch.

After dinner and drinks a second night that trip, we hugged goodbye at his subway stop, and I got ready to drive back to Jersey, wondering if we really would “keep in touch” like, as always, we’d promised.

The details are not important, but I’d been heartsick over a girl for the last couple months.  Enough emo to make an indie-album go platinum.  But maybe a month after the dinner, we made plans for a phone conversation.  And one night, while cooking dinner, we talked for over an hour.  I went to bed and woke feeling positive, refreshed, recharged.  Neither of us said he loved the other, but it still felt like growing up.