Man Dates
July 07, 2010, By Craig J. Heimbuch 0 comments
I celebrated the birth of our nation with some of my college friends and their wives. Some of these men have known me since my first night away from my parents’ house freshman year. Some have been there on my best days, some on my worst. Through it all we have remained friends, though, admittedly, I don’t see as much of them as I would like. I’m up in the ‘burbs, working too much and dividing my ‘free’ time between family and other professional pursuits. They live a more cosmopolitan life near the city. Some have moved way in that inevitable act of geographic contrition that breaks up so many collegiate cadres. Others spend their nights in bars, their weekends sleeping off their Friday nights, but time is beginning to play the great equalizer, as more of them settle into the life of marriage and family, following in my early adopter example.
As great as it was to spend the evening with my closest friends and reconnect on an adult level, I couldn’t help but spend the evening pondering just what had become of my social life. I know I have had one in the six years since becoming a father, but what was I doing? And with whom?
Then I realized that I have slowly, and with no conscious effort, been replacing my guy friends with substitutes, stand-ins culled from a pool of my wife’s friends’ husbands and that all of them had come into my life via the Man Date.
When we had our first child, my wife wanted to build a social network in the suburbs. We have no family in the area and she wanted, no needed, a supportive group of friends – other women who could identify with our lot, station and location in life. She did just that, finding friends in whom she could confide and on whom she could rely. These are really great women – all of them – and they have done a lot to make where we live feel like home.
The unfortunate corollary to my wife’s social nature is that, sooner or later and with all eventuality, there comes a time when she and a friend get together to decide the time has come for husbands to bond. My wife is the social one, the one who needs friends. Me? I’m happy with the ones I made when I was 18. Still, once the idea that husbands should become friends is introduced, it’s going to happen.
“But honey,” she says, “I think you’ll really like him. He’s very nice.”
“I doubt that,” I say. “Besides, he’s ten years older than me and a chemical engineer. What the hell will we talk about?”
“He likes sports. You like sports. I’m sure you’ll have plenty to talk about.”
Really? She’s playing the sports card? I mean, I’m only moderately interested in sports. Cleveland Cavaliers basketball, the occasional baseball game and a regular run-down on what’s happening with the ATP and I’m good. Besides, if I tried to justify setting her up on a Girl Date with a friend’s wife on the sole premise of they both like to shop, I’d be sleeping on the couch. Without a pillow.
Do women really think so little of us? Sports as the great connector? Isn’t it enough that I shake his hand and politely nod from the other side of the table at Outback Steakhouse when we double-date? Why do I have to be friends with the guy?
Some Man Dates work out. My friends John and Kevin are perfect examples of that, but we are friends less because of the commonality that our wives saw in us and more because we all hate meeting new people and usually end up at the same social gatherings, thus giving each other built-in excuses not to mingle. And that’s, what, two times it’s worked out in how many attempts?
The truth is that no man can create bonds and friendships more powerful than those he made during two crucial times in his life – the onset of puberty and in the first couple years away from home.
The Wonder Years
Ask any man which summer of his youth was the best and more than likely he will tell you it was the one when he was around 12 years-old. Why? Because this summer was a crossroads, where we went from girl-hating baby to hormone-fueled, shit-talking teenager. It was when we built our identity, the one that would carry us through to the onset of adulthood.
When I was 12, my best friends were Bobby Miller and Brian Maguire, two jockey, smart kids who taught me how to swear, how to scope girls at the swimming pool and how to ride a bike so that you thought you were Maverick from “Top Gun.” It was an incredible time in my life, an incredible time of life, period. And it’s maybe why I still send Brian and Bobby e-mails on their birthdays despite the fact that I have not seen either one in nearly 15 years.
Back then, our lives were like “The Sandlot” – talking trash, slamming each other’s moms and pretending we knew a whole lot more than we actually did. This is how men build bonds. This is how we become friends.
The Best Years
College. Man is that a time to make some friends. There’s a point in a lot of young men’s lives, usually during spring semester of freshman year, when you realize that you are a lot cooler than you thought you were in high school; when all the baggage and BS that went along with your 9th through 12th grade experience is pointless and you are free to start becoming the man you always wanted to be. And this epiphany, this revolutionary evolution is shared by the guys in your dorm, the guys from your classes, the guys from your fraternity and, because of it, you create bonds that will last an eternity.
I was talking to my friend Rob not long ago. He’s a new parent – we are Godfathers to each other’s sons – and his wife was wondering if they needed to find new friends in the part of the city where they live. She wanted to do what my wife did, build a close at-hand network of likeminded and equivalently stationed friends. Rob resisted. “I hope I have the same friends when I’m 60 that I had when I was 20,” he told her – no doubt while taking his pillow and blanket down to the couch. Rob understands that no adult interaction can ever create the same kind of affection and deep-seeded love that watching your friends puke in the bushes of a neighboring fraternity house can. No tea parties, no trips to the ballgame, no weekend getaways. It’s a guy thing.
So before my wife sets me up on another Man Date, I hope she understands that I have nothing against her friends’ husbands…
It’s just that I already have friends.
