Male friendship struggles deeply with ritual, minus maybe two key slots
Look at the above image. It’s from Eric Barker’s newsletter. He’s trying to pre-sell a new book about emotionally-intelligent friendships, so he’s been writing about that for a second. Now, I’ve also written a literal metric poop-ton on male friendships over the last 2–3 years, which nicely rolls up with a period where I’ve lost a good chunk and gained a few others here and there. Life is weird, and honestly, a lot of life friendships are highly situational and contextual, i.e. “My son is in second grade with this kid Thomas, and his dad doesn’t seem bad to get a beer with.” In fifth grade, Thomas goes to private school, and those dads never speak again. This is just reality. I wrote something once about how you need to temper the expectations of male friendships especially, and I generally stand by that comment.
In fact, if you look at the above pull-quote from Barker, he’s talking largely about ritual, right? It’s very hard for men to establish rituals with other men short of two key areas:
- Working out
- Kids’ activities/youth sports
I just don’t know a lot of guys who will schedule a weekly Zoom with each other. I know some, yes, but not many. Now, there are other things I could add to this — I have friends from bars, for sure, and I’d repeatedly…
