A Post-40 Primer On Friendship With Men: Hope & Betrayal

After 40, I see male friendship without illusions. Connection is more nuanced and I no longer ignore the betrayals it can hold.

I’ve always wanted to nurture friendship as much as the world says we must our familial and romantic relationships. But the family and the romantic/marital partner devour everything else in an Indian woman’s life, including her identity. And the one thing that a good friendship needs is a sense of self. How else could you possibly appreciate another self free of agenda, unless you were complete in your own?

This is what I hope for from friendship:

I want to be your friend not because I want to sleep with you, not because I want you to fund my life, not because I need a bodyguard.

I want friendship because I want you to be my friend. I seek friendship because I think your existence in the world makes it a better place. Your friendship is important to me because I want to spend some of my finite, waking moments being impacted by you. I want to be your friend because I want to bear witness to your life and for you to bear witness to mine.

I don’t usually get it but still I seek it.

~O~O~O~O~O~O~

‘Just Friendship’ with masculinity

I naively assumed that friendship with men was difficult because all relationships need work. I failed to consider that Indian men are not required to make an effort in any relationship. Least of all in one where they are not guaranteed some ego-enhancing return – sex, servitude, class upgrade. Friendship, like all other relationships exists within a larger context. It needs nurturing by the two people but also air to breathe that doesn’t actively poison it.

A married friend spoke to me about her husband’s friends. They were all his schoolmates from the small town where he grew up. He had grown in his career and moved to a metro while they had stayed where they were. It worried her that this was all he had by way of friendship. Like most men, he had never learnt how to form friendships. Life had been prescribed for him – even his striving in career and romantic partner. It had never occurred to him that as his world evolved, his social world could and should evolve too. Is it a wonder that platonic friendships are so rare? All the onus of effort falls on the woman as does the social penalising. The men don’t even know.

~O~O~O~O~O~O~

I ran into an acquaintance years later. I did not recognise him. When I last knew him, he had been a scrawny, brooding teenager in oversized clothes, long hair overpowering his face. The man delightedly calling my name was clean-shaven, muscular and in the prime of good happy health. As we reconnected, he told me about learning to choose better clothes for himself as he started earning. And then about wanting to go to the gym because it made him feel good to look good. Vanity is empowerment, I told him, women already know this. Something seemed to click in his mind. Like he had needed someone, anyone to tell him that he was on the right path. I never saw him again but I like to think that that was an act of friendship. His trust and my recognition.

~O~O~O~O~O~O~

I went to a discussion of ‘The Emperor of Gladness’ by Ocean Vuong. We talked about the unusual friendship between a 20 year old Asian man and an elderly Lithuanian woman, which is the entire focus of the book. One participant, a woman likely my age spoke of her anxieties in dealing with younger men who approached her. Then a 20-something man in the group piped up,

“You should feel happy that younger men feel this for you.”

~O~O~O~O~O~O~

~O~O~O~O~O~O~

A friend and I first met at a crowded open mic. I thought he was smart and had a lot of potential. To my surprise a week later, he asked if I liked letters and fountain pens. Thus a pen palship began between two people of different decades living in the same crowded suburb of Mumbai. Weeks later, he asked if he could talk to me on a call. I feared he was going to ruin it. Instead, he confided in me. He had dropped a friend home after she got very drunk. His friends had been mocking him for not ‘doing something with her’. I heard the anguish in his voice as he said, but she was so drunk she couldn’t even stand, how could I have taken advantage of her?

This was one of the turning points of a person’s life, where they demonstrate who they truly are. He asked me to bear witness and that is a profound act of generosity for an Indian man, unused to sharing vulnerability with a woman. It became the bedrock of our friendship.

Both sides of how a romantic commitment weighs on a friendship

In my 20s, I was hunted like tasty prey by the masculine gender. This was regardless of their age, relationship status or connection to me. I spent my 30s trying to navigate my hope for meaningful friendships with men through predations and their relationship statuses.

Not one person I’ve dated has been respectful of my friends; not a single male friend showed that sensitivity towards my relationships. But that kind of narcissism is for men, I’ve realised and I don’t have to match it to feel empowered. I still try and it’s very hard. I too experience desire and loneliness. But I have far more to lose than the men do, over any misstep. So it falls to me to navigate around my male friends territoriality over me as well as my partner’s sense of ownership over me.

In theory, it should be easier when I’m single. There’s just one side of male selfishness to manage. Not true. The onus is still on me to ensure that the man behaves. Married men are generally easier to have conversations with than the single ones. The assumption is that the marital status acts as a buffer to keep any uncomfortable situations at bay. And yet, from experience, I know this doesn’t stop the wilful predator. Thus, I engage with them only publicly and openly.

~O~O~O~O~O~O~

Me-Too & Its Impact on Male-Female Friendships

Do men consider the impact of their actions on the people around them? Me-Too forced a cultural recognition of masculinity’s fundamental predation on women. We are experiencing the backlash of speaking up with the rise of the manosphere. Most predators walked scot-free, most victims are still struggling to cope with life.

What happened to the other women, the ones connected to these men? It re-triggered our own traumas because face it, almost every woman has experienced this kind of violence. It shook our very foundations that even the men we built our fragile foundations of hope on, had been revealed as poisonous.

Perhaps not coincidentally, this happened around the same time as the rise in ‘Women hold up other women’ syndrome. We only have each other was the spoken narrative. But modern bite-sized feminism is a mirroring of male narcissism. I keep hearing versions of ‘Why should I care about anyone else when men don’t?’. And thus the very nature of friendship has been eroded. All because masculinity is the ruling model of living and it is narcissistic.

~O~O~O~O~O~O~

Many women got caught in the crossfire of the newly empowered-to-outrage feminist. One person distanced me because of my friendship with a man who had been named. I walked away from that friend telling him why. Much later, he texted telling me I didn’t need to respond but that he just wanted to wish me happy birthday. It opened a conversation. I raged at him, my most screaming question,

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He asked why he would do that. I had to think before constructing my answer because why after all was I owed that fact when I didn’t demand that my friends tell me about their sex lives? Because I said, I am a woman, because I am a survivor of assault and because I am your friend. I was owed. To his credit, he did not challenge this. He said he did not want to dump his problems on me. He talked about what had happened and the corrective attempts that he took therafter. And he did not ask for absolution from me.

More recently, a long time friend called me to ask if I was sure I wanted him in a particular group activity when I knew about a complicated situation in his past. I don’t think it matters what my responses to each of these men has been. Me Too became a cultural touchstone in opening up honesty between men and women. Not every man or even every accused man will do this. Not every woman is in a position to receive this or even required to do so. But there is the option. And honesty is only a good thing especially in a language ambiguous, morally complex society like India.

Cross-Gender friendships in my 40s

Indians only began publicly hugging across genders around 15 years ago. It coincided with the proliferation of American TV and more Indians travelling to the West. ‘Me Too’ gave me a voice to say that I did not want to be body-slammed by someone that I did not know, under the excuse of friendship. It allowed me to register the nuances in the way the more sensitive of men touch women.

The ‘Me Too’ movement made me ponder not just the violations but also the ways that I incorporated consent into my life. I have begun asking the men in my life if I can hug them. Even the ones I’ve known for decades. Beloved uncles, friends who have bought me sanitary napkins when I was doubled over in pain. One of them this week remarked that, it’s more important that a man asks a woman for consent. I told him no. Consent is a human right. You are a human being. I’m offering something that I believe comes from a good place. You have the right to decide if that is true and if you want to accept it. Whoever you are.

~O~O~O~O~O~O~

Years ago when I was a child, I was travelling with my family. My father in moving some luggage knocked into a young couple that was walking past and the woman fell down twisting her ankle. She must only have been 4 or 5 years older than I was. Both my parents rushed to help her sit down and give her a bottle of water. Then my father knelt at her feet and said,

“May I touch your ankle? I just want to check that it’s not a broken bone. Would that be okay?”

I remember wondering why he had to ask when he was obviously at least her father’s age. I remember thinking she’d be really silly if she thought my father was being creepy. I remember judging her before she even responded, for ‘making’ my father kneel in front of her. And I was raised by this man who respected the consent of a much younger woman, even to touch her foot. So as Indians, even those of us of the female gender, even the ones raised in what we think of as progressive environments, consent is still a new idea.

~O~O~O~O~O~O~