Real Boys

by William Pollack

  As we’ll learn in this chapter, though some boys show their love and caring in traditional ways, many have their own “boy-like” ways of doing so. First, rather than showing love through words, many boys do so through action. Thus, instead of declaring their love directly through words, many boys use indirect ways of conveying their feelings by doing things for or with other people. So, for example, rather than telling his mom how much he loves her on Mother’s Day, the boy may instead simply ask her if she’d like to go to the movies with him that day. Boys also show love through acts of protection. When they see somebody they love in a vulnerable position or in trouble, they leap to the rescue and do whatever they can to help their friend or loved one through the situation. A third way that boys show love and form relationships is through work: instead of using words to tell his parents that he cares deeply about them, a boy may signal the same feelings by offering to repair the leaky toilet, fix the roof, or drive his younger brother to his trumpet lesson. Finally, many boys express their love and their longing for human relationships through acts of justice and kindness. Whether it’s helping an elderly person cross a busy city street or sticking up for the rights of the first person of color to come to his all-white high school, a boy may often show his love and caring by standing up for what he believes is right, good, and fair.

  LOVE THROUGH ACTION

  Even at a very young age, boys may show their love not so much with words but through action. The early ability to “attach”—in the terminology of psychologists—refers to a child’s capacity to develop intimate, powerful emotional bonds to others, such as his mother and father and his peers. Research shows that boys have this ability as much as girls do, yet their typical attachment styles often differ from those of girls.

  For example, boys and girls show their feelings toward their parents in very different ways. A girl might seek connection with her mother by snuggling up beside her, kissing her, smoothing her hair, or just talking with her. A boy is more likely to ask his mother to do something—to play a game, give him a ride. Or he might express love indirectly—give her a playful nudge and then run away, hoping, of course, that she’ll give chase. An adolescent girl might seek connection with her mother by giving her a hug or bringing her a small gift for no particular reason or occasion. An adolescent boy typically tries to make connection by offering to help his mother with some task that he normally avoids—taking out the trash, cleaning up his room, agreeing to an errand, or doing his own laundry. Or he may suggest some activity they can do together, such as taking a bike ride together or going to a movie. A girl may seek attachment with her father by asking for help on her homework. A boy in the same family might tease his father—an indirect way of showing love—or initiate a wrestling match.

  Similarly, boys and girls often approach other close caregivers, such as teachers, in substantially different ways. While a young girl might seek attachment with her schoolteacher by complimenting the teacher on her special outfit, a young boy might make a connection with the teacher by asking whether he can stay after class and help out by erasing the blackboards. On the whole, boys tend to seek attachment less through asking for it directly and more by trying to bring it about indirectly or through action.

  LOVE IN ACTION: MRS. KOSLOWSKI’S CLASS

  Mrs. Koslowski was flabbergasted when the boys in her all-boys English class began asking her questions about her upcoming wedding. She recounted a striking story about how boys’ love is expressed through action.

  “I already knew these boys were gutsy to take a class devoted to poetry, but this, this I never expected.” The boys had become concerned that she be able to take time off to buy the matching shoes and veil to go with the wedding dress, which she had not been able to do. So they volunteered to clean up the classroom and read extra chapters in their textbooks so that she could take the day off. Two of the boys offered to go with her.

  “I knew they cared,” she said, “but I never imagined they’d feel so close to me that these concerns would matter to them too!”

  Mothers, too, report ways in which boys use action to promote closeness. Mrs. Schwartz told me the following story about how her son Jamie connects with her each day. A serious student and captain of his local soccer club at age fourteen, Jamie takes time every morning to send a loving E-mail message from the school-library computer; and every afternoon during “half-time,” he calls her up to check up on how her day at work is going. “He knows this new job at the hospital is very stressful, and we’re so close, he just wants me to know he’s thinking of me.”

  “When he was born,” Mrs. Schwartz continued, “his grandmother told me, ‘He’s a beautiful child, but boys just don’t think of their mothers the way girls do, once they’re grown up.’ I prayed my mother would be wrong, and now I know that she was.”

  Boys show their yearnings for attachment in a unique way, but as different as their attachment styles may sometimes be, boys, like girls, benefit enormously from both feminine and masculine forms of mentoring, and they rely significantly on their connection to the women and men who raise and educate them.

  THE INDIRECT APPROACH— AND ITS USE WITH FRIENDS

  To initiate or deepen a friendship, girls may tend to do so directly through open verbal communication, but boys may take an indirect route, through an action or activity of some kind, as in the case of Brian. Wanting to be friends with David, Brian might plan an activity and offhandedly ask David if he wants to come along or join in, acting as if it doesn’t really matter whether David accepts. The activity may be a game of pickup basketball, a saxophone rehearsal, or simply hanging out at the local hub. Though the approach looks different, the feelings behind it—the longing for closeness—are the same.

  Little boys, too, may seek emotional bonds in indirect ways. With other boys, these bonds may be forged through exuberant, rough-and-tumble play. With girls, they may start with teasing—a method of seeking connection that is usually motivated far less by malice than by a fundamental desire to stir up possibilities for friendship.

  And sometimes boys may surprise us with how innovative they can be in drumming up relationships. Consider, for example, the other creative approaches by Jason and Aaron, discussed below.

  A “GUY PLACE”

  Jason, a “four-letter man” (he qualified for four varsity sports in high school), had proposed that the school set up a place where the boys in his class could create an after-school “peer support group” talk center. “There are so many pressures on us, and no place to talk. I thought if we had a ‘guy place’ with rules that no one could come there and poke fun at what anyone said—just listen and help—it might help take a load off us.”

  Jason’s school implemented his idea, and soon the idea was so popular that extra groups had to be added. Mr. Hanritty, the school principal, commented to me, “Who would have thought that boys would want their own space to ‘relate’?”

  Aaron Spencer, another high school student, created his own relationship-building project. Tired of hearing all the ranking down of the “nerds”—bright but slightly weird science whizes in the tenth grade—Aaron, as class president, decided to create a forum with representatives of girls and guys, popular and unpopular, brains, jocks, feminists, cheerleaders, nerds, “artsies,” liberals, and conservatives. He brought them all together to talk, and encouraged them to form relationships that transcended their basic differences. Aaron’s program, it turned out, was a great success. But perhaps the most striking result was that Aaron found a new friend—Jake, a science “nerd.”

  “We just got to talking at the forum,” Aaron said. “Then we went to a movie, and now we do all kinds of stuff together. I’ve really learned that to find a true friend you’ve got to stretch yourself a little.”

  As these stories reveal, boys—if we read their signals correctly, and if we encourage them—not only want to form close relationships but actually are often very creative and successful in doing so. Habits of thought in society con
fuse us into imagining that close relationships are not central to boys’ normal growth and development, and that a boy’s only possible path to healthy adult masculinity is through self-reliance, autonomy, and solitude. Yet in reality, boys yearn for close relationships just as much as girls do.

  PROTECTIVE LOVE

  Boys’ love and protectiveness may show themselves through a unique form of action. One middle-school teacher told me the following story. One of his students, Jeremy, heard a rumble of voices in the cafeteria that sounded like an argument in progress. He ambled over, shouldered through the crowd, and saw two girls in the middle of the group screaming at each other—both shaking with anger and on the brink of physical violence. One of the girls was Jeremy’s sister, Cassie, a freshman. The other girl, Tara, was a junior, a bigger girl and one of the most popular kids in school. In fact, Jeremy had dated her a couple of times and had wanted to continue the relationship, but Tara had started going out regularly with a senior.

  The situation was a difficult one for Jeremy. He cared for his sister, but she was very independent and might not appreciate his getting involved in the argument. He also had little interest in making a scene in front of Tara. Everybody knew that he liked her and that she had “dumped him.” He didn’t want any more embarrassment. But the argument was getting more intense and he knew that Tara, who was a weight trainer and center of the girl’s basketball team, could do some real physical damage to Cassie if she felt like it.

  The confrontation had reached the breaking point. Rather than allow his sister to get involved in a fight, Jeremy stepped into the center of the circle. “Hey, Tara!” he shouted. Tara looked at him, startled. “What do you want?”

  “Want to go out Saturday night?” Jeremy asked her.

  Tara was thrown off-balance. “I told you I didn’t want to go out with you anymore,” Tara said. The crowd tittered nervously.

  “No. I guess you’d rather beat on my little sister,” he said calmly. The crowd laughed with him.

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I would,” taunted Tara. “It’s more fun than making out with you.” A big laugh from the crowd.

  “But, Tara, what did Cassie do that makes you want to fight her?”

  “It’s none of your business,” Tara replied.

  “OK. I just can’t imagine why someone as smart as you would want to beat up a freshman. Why can’t you talk it out?”

  “Just stay out of this,” Tara insisted and turned back to Cassie.

  Jeremy looked at his sister. She was holding her ground, but he could tell she wouldn’t mind some help in getting out of her predicament. Jeremy simply took her by the arm and said, “Come on,” he said to her. “This is stupid. Let’s go.”

  The two made their way through the crowd, leaving Tara behind. She watched them go and the crowd wondered what she would do. Finally, she spoke, with a grudging admiration. “If he loves his sister that much, maybe he’s not so bad after all.” The crowd broke up with laughter.

  As they walked away, Cassie said to her brother. “I could have handled that.”

  “I know,” said Jeremy.

  “But thanks. That was really nice of you.”

  “I had to do it.” He smiled. “You’re my sister. I love you, don’t I?”

  “I guess you do,” Cassie said, marveling, never having really thought about it.

  You might expect a brother to protect his sister, especially a younger one, but in today’s climate a boy may feel too constrained to express this kind of protective love. He may fear that he will be criticized for being too macho, or think that no boy should presume to intervene in an altercation between two girls. But Jeremy felt he had no choice but to get involved and show his love and support for his sister, and he found a way to do so that did not make her seem foolish or incapable.

  Another boy, Kim, expressed a similar kind of protective love—in this case, for a neighbor with a serious illness. “When I was ten,” Kim told me, “I volunteered to help take care of my neighbor kid down the street, named Michael. He had something wrong with his spine, and had to be in a body cast for a whole year. I didn’t really know him, but his mother asked my mother if I could come over and just say hi, and I said OK. When I first saw Mike I thought the whole thing was really weird and I wanted to go home. I thought we could never be friends. He’s sick and can’t walk. But then we discovered that we both liked playing that card game, Magic. That was about the only thing Mike could do besides watch TV. Once we started playing and I got to know him better, I liked him. So, then I really started looking after him. Sometimes I would just go over and read to him. He couldn’t walk, but he liked going outside in this cartlike thing. So, I’d push him around the driveway and down the street sometimes. If anybody looked strangely at him, I’d give them the evil eye back. If anybody said anything bad about him at school, or laughed at him, I’d tell them to shut up and say that he was a really good kid.”

  Kim found it rewarding to be able to help and protect his friend. He felt very close to Mike, and showed it by helping him and defending him to others. “It made me feel really good about myself,” said Kim. “Part of being a friend is letting other people know it.”

  Love is the core of each and every boy.

  EXPRESSING LOVE THROUGH WORK: MRS. SUMMERS

  Another way boys (and men) express their feelings for others is through engaging in what we call work. A boy’s inclination to do hard work and willingness to take on duty and responsibilities—virtues traditionally celebrated as “masculine”—may be shaped into a strong motivation not only for improving academic performance but also for caring for others in a disciplined way.

  Just as men will work toward a goal that they believe will please or protect a loved one, boys will undertake a project or a task as a way of expressing affection. Though sometimes we may focus only on the task that’s being accomplished, we should be aware that behind the labor there’s often the devotion of a boy engaged in what’s truly an act of selfless generosity, an act of love.

  Bob and Tim had always liked Mrs. Summers, one of the most involved and thoughtful fifth-grade teachers at King Elementary School. She liked to regale her students with stories of her vacation adventures, and always brought back some sort of live animal to show the class. Over the years, the classroom came to look like a zoo, filled with cages containing small furry creatures with Latin names the boys could not remember. Mrs. Summers joked that if she brought in any more animals, the children would have to go. It was a warm, inviting, caring, and nurturing environment.

  One winter weekend, vandals sneaked into the school. When Mrs. Summers’s students arrived in class Monday morning, they found the room in a shambles. Most of the animals had been let out of their cages and had escaped; others had been killed. Mrs. Summers was devastated, as were the kids. They talked about what had happened, and why. During the day a few of the girls used photos of the animals to make a collage and pinned them up on the bulletin board. Other students talked about having a party to cheer up Mrs. Summers. But Tim and Bob came up with a different idea.

  Both boys did odd jobs in their neighborhoods—shoveling snow, moving lawns, walking dogs, and baby-sitting. They each managed to save about five dollars a week, which they deposited in their own checking accounts; they had promised their parents they would save the money to help with the cost of their college educations. The boys’ first thought was to withdraw the money and give it to Mrs. Summers to buy some new animals. But, after some discussion, they decided that it wouldn’t make sense to spend all their hard-earned money, and, besides, they had made a promise to their parents.

  Finally, they came up with a clever idea. They realized that they had more time in their weekly schedules that they could devote to work. They enlisted several other boys from their class, and made posters advertising their services. Their earnings would go to the Summers Wildlife Fund, established to restock the animal kingdom in Mrs. Summers’s fifth-grade classroom. They even created a website that
detailed their services and enabled their classmates to follow their progress.

  For three months Bob, Tim, and their friends devoted every Saturday and Sunday afternoon to do the work for the Wildlife Fund. By June, they had accumulated seventy-five dollars. On the last day of school, the boys surprised Mrs. Summers with a check. She was overwhelmed. “You boys are unbelievable!” she exclaimed, hugging them, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I have never seen such a hardworking, caring bunch of guys.” Bob and Tim felt tremendous joy that their hard work had been appreciated by a person they cared very much about.

  Bob and Tim had found a way to express their love for Mrs. Summers through action, a way to use their inclination to do hard work to benefit another person. And she received their message very clearly. Seventy-five dollars, even for a public school teacher, did not represent a significant sum of money. But three months of free time spent on work by five young boys represented not only a real sacrifice but a tremendous investment of love and energy—all for her benefit. No wonder she wept.

  It’s important for parents, for all of us, to be aware that boys often choose to express their love through action and work, and to recognize and respond to it when they do. When father and son team up to create a homeless project for Scouts, or when brothers tackle a snowed-in driveway together for a disabled neighbor, we are seeing the traditional male work ethic buttressed by a demonstration of love and affection.