I should make it clear – I’m heterosexual. I’m looking for a man to have a bromance – not a romance – with. By that I mean a deep emotional and social connection with another man. I want one of those best-buddy relationships, like Frank Skinner and David Baddiel, Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, or Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
Of course I have male friends – I just don’t have male friendships. I don’t hang out with the guys and do guy things. I haven’t been to a football match in fifty-five years. I’ve never been to a strip club. I’ve never gotten pissed and said to a male: I love you, man! I don’t do banter and I don’t bust balls like men in The Sopranos do. And I’ve never been asked to be the best man at a best friend’s wedding – which makes sense as I don’t have any best mates.
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We men are good at talking about our worries when it comes to relationships with women – but when it comes to our worries about men, we prefer to stay silent. A new American comedy called Friendship – starring Paul Rudd and Tim Robinson – is being hailed as a “cringe classic” about a clueless guy who wants to be one of the boys and fails with acute embarrassment.
In fact the whole idea of bromance – once celebrated in dozens of Hollywood buddy movies – is looking more like an unattainable fantasy. The realities of work, marriage and children are taking its toll on male friendships. Yesterday’s best friend – the one you’d say, after a few drinks, I love you man to – is the same man you now promise to call for a boy’s night out, but never do.
Lucky for me I’m not lonely, thanks to plenty of wonderful female friends. But how did I end up with no mates? The truth is that I lost interest in men when I got interested in women in my early teens. The excitement, fear and joy I found in the company of women, I could never find around men. The ways and pleasures of men were a mystery to me; who wants to go fishing or to a football match with a bloke when you can sit in a cool hotel bar and drink martini cocktails with a beautiful, brilliant woman whose conversation is so intoxicating your heart is hungover for days?
But lately I’ve been thinking it goes deeper than that. Men find it hard to admit that part of their problem with men is that they fear them. For me, this fear began in the playground of a rough North London comprehensive school in the 1970s, where every day I faced bullying or gratuitous thumps and whacks for no reason at all. Sixty years later and I’m still crossing the street whenever I spot a bloke who triggers memories of my playground tormentors.
Landesman was bullied as a child and 60 year later it still affects himSo I chose to keep my distance from men and stayed on the sidelines watching and sniggering at men young and old. In the Nineties there was the rise of the Lad, an evolutionary step backwards, and before that the appearance of Iron John and the Men’s Movement – guys going off to forests to get in touch with their maleness. Back then I could think of no greater hell than joining a men’s group – but now I’d give it go.
Since I don’t really like drinking or going to pubs I’ve started inviting men out for coffee or a nice walk by the Thames or a London park. At first I felt a bit awkward asking a man out on a so-called “man date.” Unfortunately, my man-dating life has been a bit of a disaster so far .
One man I had lunch with spent the whole time telling me about all the great mates he had – and how every year they grew mustaches for charity. I thought it had potential. But when he asked me if I wanted to go-carting with him sometime I knew it wasn’t going to work. Still, I will keep trying.
But for now it’s me who complains to my single female friends that a good man is hard to find.
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