Real Boys

by William Pollack

  THE CODE OF BOYS’ FRIENDSHIPS

  So what exactly is the boy code of friendship? Observers may not see it, but boys understand it. As we have discussed, the themes of friendship in my “Listening to Boys’ Voices” study focused on the activities boys enjoy together, the conversations they share, the way they deal with one another’s sadness and disappointments, the way they work through conflict and competition, and remain loyal by “being there.” It appears that talking is not the only thing that brings these boys close. As sixteen-year-old Phil puts it, “We talk, but it’s not like we sit down and have a conversation. We talk while we’re doing something else. We always back each other up. We always stick together. My friends would do anything to help me out.” So a primary part of the boy friendship is also just finding someone whom you trust enough to be around him. As Shawn put it, his friends “know me for who I am and accept me.” Friendship is a place to let down the mask, or at least to let it slip a little bit. With a friend, a boy can show his vulnerabilities and not be shamed for them. And yes, boys expect a certain amount of good-natured teasing, insults, and playful abuse from their friends. In their games, boys generally learn not to take arguments too personally. They like resorting to a rule book or applying a principle to decide an argument in part because it’s fast and fair. In fact, that well-developed sense of fairness is one way boys take care of one another.

  Boys and men have had to learn to walk a fine line: to have intimacy without sentimentality, closeness without long conversations, empathy without words. Once we can read this code of boy’s friendships, we can see that boys on a soccer field are engaged in sociable activity, building friendships that matter.

  As I stressed earlier, if we want to raise boys who are empathic to us, we must first show them our empathy. We need to respect boys’ friendships. They serve boys well and are vitally important to them. Given the amount of shame society heaps on boys when they attempt any sort of closeness, the depth they achieve in their friendships is worthy of our praise and recognition.

  PLATONIC BUT DEEP: BOYS’ FRIENDSHIPS WITH GIRLS

  One of today’s best-kept secrets is that many adolescent boys and girls are great friends—deeply yet nonromantically involved with one another. In my interviews with boys, I have found that almost all of them report having girls as friends, important and special friends in their social network. For many boys, intimate but nonsexual friendships with girls often replenish and restimulate the “lost half” of the feeling selves they buried when they experienced the trauma of prematurely separating from their mothers. These platonic girl-boy connections help boys regain access to long-forgotten and repressed aspects of themselves, and gives them the opportunity to expand emotionally. It seems impossible to overestimate the significance of these deeply platonic boy-girl connections.

  JULIAN AND ALYSSA

  On Wednesday after soccer practice, Julian heard the bad news. His parents sat him down and told him they were getting a divorce. Julian was devastated. When he told his “shameful secret” to John Simpkins, a trusted school adviser, Mr. Simpkins suggested he join a time-limited psychotherapy group with other ninth-graders who were struggling with similar problems. Julian, who did not like the idea of sitting around and talking about his feelings with “a bunch of losers,” decided he was in so much pain he would try anything. One Saturday morning he found himself in the school cafeteria attending a Rap About Home Group with three boys, three girls, and the school guidance counselor. Nervous about talking about his problem in front of girls, he relaxed when he suddenly saw Alyssa Garrity, his neighbor from across the street who used to be his best buddy in his preschool days.

  “In preschool we were so close we even had our birthday parties together, but then, you know, you start doing things with the guys, she took ballet, I tried out for football, and before you knew it, it’s just ‘Hi, how you doin’?’ every few months,” Julian told me. “When I first saw her again in my freshman English class this fall, I had this very weird feeling deep inside me. She felt like a sister or cousin, someone I had missed without even knowing it. In the group, I found there was something different about her, especially the way she could talk about things. She could apply words to the pain I always felt in my gut. We started to spend time together as friends. We’d talk on the phone for hours, especially after one of our folks drove us crazy. It was like something from way back. Something deep was coming back. She was helping me to talk and loosen up. I think I was helping her too, because sometimes I thought she was thinking about things too much. She’d obsess and then I’d say, let’s go out for ice cream. I even taught her to play 21 in basketball. It seemed to cheer her up. I really depended on that friendship.”

  BOYS AND GIRLS: TWO HALVES OF ONE WHOLE

  Boys’ friendships with girls help boys come out from behind the mask and experience feelings and activities traditionally forbidden by the old Boy Code. As we’ve seen, we live in a society in which all of the essential qualities we would value in one ideal child get split down the middle by gender. As Carol Gilligan reported, boys grow up with an emphasis on values of fairness and justice, while girls grow up with an emphasis on caring and nurturing. Historically, each gender has had the opportunity to live out only half of what a healthy person might be.

  While girls have recently been encouraged to express a wider range of previously unacceptable behaviors, we continue to keep boys in the tight straitjackets of nineteenth-century models of masculinity. The capacity for boys to create and nurture friendships with girls provides them with the chance to express the “other half of themselves. It liberates them from outdated restrictions and creates possibilities for them to emerge from behind their false masks of self-sufficiency.

  Although boys are frightened of connection with girls, they search for it desperately. They fear rejection and vulnerability, perhaps even more than girls do. “Most of my friends are guys,” explains fourteen-year-old Brian, “but I like this one girl, Rachel. She’s really cool. But, you know, if I try to hang with her and then she’s not into it, people might start saying like, ‘Brian is such a loser,’ and then I’d feel like a total jerk.”

  Boys carry around the wounds from the first premature separation from their mothers, when they learned that being a man meant scorning all things feminine. Being a man meant going it alone. When boys reconnect with girls, old fears and unhealed wounds are awakened. Afraid to express their pent-up yearnings, they fear they will get washed away in a flood of neediness. Yet when boys do connect with girls, they find they begin to feel whole again.

  Boy-girl friendships are profoundly meaningful and emotional center-pieces to teenage boys’ lives. They provide boys with opportunities to express feelings again. They also offer a new chance to reunite with the world of female nurturance from which they were thrust out prematurely and traumatically as young boys.

  A DEVELOPMENT PROCESS—RECONNECTION TAKES TIME

  There is, however, a substantial variation—often of a developmental nature—as to precisely what these cross-gender friendships are all about. For many boys, especially boys younger than fourteen years of age, girls as friends means sharing respectful, fun-oriented experiences that generally involve only limited talking, with this talking focused primarily on shared interests and struggles with parents. For other boys, usually older, having a girl as a friend offers an opportunity for intimate verbal connection and deep emotional support freed from the struggles of romantic demands and sexual nuances.

  Ten-year-old Robert has one good friend, Marianne. They share a level of familiarity that allows them to just hang out and do things together without always talking. “We both like watching fun movies, so she comes over and watches them a lot. We like the same type of music. She is just one of the guys, basically.”

  Some boys, however, engage in long-drawn-out, feeling-centered conversations. Sixteen-year-old Peter says his conversations with male friends tend to stay focused on one subject, while, with a longtime female fr
iend, Eliza, he feels freer to let his conversation wander. “Eliza will call me two or three times a night and neither of us will have anything specific to say. She’ll just start talking about something and I will just start talking about something and the two of us are just rambling on the spot. With Greg, I wouldn’t just call him and say, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ But with Eliza, I call and say, ‘Hey, I’m bored.’ ”

  In essence, as a boy grows older and feels more and more constricted by society’s old rules about masculinity, he may increasingly turn to girls for friendship, to experience at least fleeting moments of liberation when it’s safe to break the rules and just be himself.

  A WHOLE NEW WORLD: A DIFFERENT KIND OF FRIENDSHIP

  After spending years in same-sex play groups, getting used to a girl’s style takes some time. Some boys still talk about how they aren’t quite as comfortable and relaxed around girls as they are around boys. Fifteen-year-old Dwayne says: “It’s not so much when I talk to girls I feel nervous or anything, but it’s just personally I feel that you can open up more to another boy than to a girl. Sometimes you feel a little uncomfortable with some of the things you’d share with one of your male friends.”

  Michael realized that he needs to spend more time in conversation to maintain friendships with girls. “I guess it’s a lot of friendship maintenance with friends who are girls. It’s always a matter of having to call them up and being like, ‘Hey, how’s it going’ or else they get mad at you.”

  While at first this seemed to him to be a chore—he had to consciously remember to do it if he wanted girls as friends—the results were obviously worth it to him, since now he counts several girls among his closest friends and appreciates their different perspective on life. Having made the effort to cross the gender line, he is able to engage rather easily in conversations that would typically be called feminine. “With girls we do more talking and sharing about each other’s problems. We comfort each other.” Some boys, like Justin, who were defensive at first about friendships with girls, soon came to understand the benefits. “Sometimes I think girls aren’t on the intellectual level that I perceive myself to be, so they can understand my emotions more than my thoughts. But that’s not always the case. Maybe I open up to them more because they’re more emotion-centered and observation-centered. If I say I feel really burdened with school or something, they will be a lot more likely to respond with some insight.” Justin’s first instinct is to dismiss girls’ skills at helping him handle his feelings and to view that particular skill as a sign of their intellectual inferiority. Yet he lets himself wonder about his knee-jerk reaction and admit that yes, girls are damn good at understanding him and perhaps that’s a skill to be valued. As Alex remarks: “They will look at a situation a bit differently. You get a different reaction from girls.”

  Other boys are more clear that their friends who are girls are a huge benefit. Sixteen-year-old Patrick says: “Over the past few years, I’ve developed friendships with girls. Girls give you a different point of view than a guy. They sometimes can be more sensitive with advice. When a guy gives you advice you get one half of the picture and when a girl gives you advice you get the other half of the picture. When you get advice from both sides you get the whole picture.”

  Another sixteen-year-old, Chen, counts Liz as his best friend. “We talk to each other about anything and everything. She is a really good friend. I can tell girls all my feelings, feelings I can’t tell my guy friends about—girls have no problem with that. I guess I probably rely more on my friends who are girls.”

  Those parents who become aware of the new friendships between boys and girls are impressed and respectful of these new gender arrangements. Cynthia Reeves is proud of her thirteen-year-old son Greg’s circle of friends. “I can’t speak highly enough about them. I’m especially pleased he has such close friends who are girls, girls who are just like sisters to him.”

  Cynthia did not have those kinds of friendships with boys when she was young. “There is a very different way that they have of relating with each other than when I was growing up. Much of it is casual and warm. They will hug each other. His friend Nina will run up and give him a hug and a kiss after a soccer game. They will all come over here and all watch a movie together. It’s nice to observe, because they have these comfortable relationships between the sexes.”

  Several parents I spoke with told me about how teens today have coed sleepovers that are chaperoned by parents and are completely platonic. One father said, “When Anders first told me he was invited to a sleepover at a girl’s house, I flipped. I thought sure this was some sort of sex-fest. I told him absolutely not, there was no way he was going. He’s only fifteen. But then I started talking to some other parents and found out they’ve sent their kids and it’s all platonic. Hard to believe? It never would have happened when I was a kid,” he concludes, shaking his head.

  These boy-girl friendships allow boys to be more free about emotions and feelings. Without outside society intruding and without other boys around to challenge or shame them, boys feel liberated to verbally uncover that part of them that is tender, caring, and loving. They can, as Michael says, just comfort each other. One of the things that make boy-girl friendships emotionally nurturing for many boys is that these relationships tend to create unique private spaces where the Boy Code is not in force, where boys feel able to be more honest about who they really are and what they are truly feeling. In their one-on-one relationships with girls, boys frequently feel comfortable revealing their true playful, connective, empathic personalities.

  It is important that boys and girls recognize what they are both getting from these friendships. In boy-girl friendships, each sex gets to see the fragility of the other. This is what Judy Jordan at Harvard calls “gender empathy.” Girls begin to see through boys’ bluster and recognize boys’ deep fears and vulnerabilities. Boys begin to see girls as less threatening, and admire their ability to communicate emotionally. These gender-empathy friendships become a blueprint for adult heterosexual love relationships.

  WHEN LOVE BLOOMS

  While the majority of adolescent boy-girl platonic friendships remain just that, they may also create the subconscious foundation for later heterosexual love relationships. In the “Listening to Boys’ Voices” study, I discovered a definite developmental age-related pattern to the maturity and depth of these boy-girl romances that followed these new models of cross-gender friendships.

  Specifically, I discovered that boys take great comfort in romantic relationships, but as with platonic connections, these dating relationships vary in scope. Young boys, in particular, are unsure of themselves in romantic situations. And sometimes they find themselves confused or simply depleted by the need some girls have for conversation and connection before establishing intimacy. Fourteen-year-old Tony broke up with a girlfriend after two years because, he says, “I was getting exhausted. I couldn’t handle it. I would tell her I needed to go and she just kept telling me to hang on a little longer.”

  Older boys begin to be able to meet girls halfway by engaging in certain activities with them, but also by valuing their female partners’ ability to talk about feelings and provide emotional support. Justin finds his girlfriend Theresa’s nurturing style very comforting, an important counterpart to the interactions he has with his male friends. “I talk to her every night and basically everything that goes on in my life we talk about. If something bad happens, we have a discussion about it. It lets you share stuff that happens with someone who isn’t going to be like, ‘Oh yeah, whatever,’ but is going to understand where you’re coming from. I wouldn’t talk to my guy friends about the stuff I tell Theresa.”

  Theresa meets many of Justin’s emotional needs. In fact, Justin told me that dating her last year helped him out of a period of teenage blues. Her care for him gave him some emotional grounding that he was missing before. He struggled to explain to me why she’s so important to him: “It’s just having a person who you know is alway
s thinking about you. Having someone there who cares about you and is there for you all the time. Friends come and go but your girlfriend is always there for you.”

  Here, of course, we may well be seeing the shadow, the echoes, of the earlier prematurely lost connection with the primary nurturant mother showing itself in a newly disguised adolescent form. Such a link may also help to account for the “sexual” or love-related power some teenage girls appear to have over boys. One study, by Thorne and Michaelieu, found that boys’ self-esteem is most threatened by failing to receive love from a girl they like. Boys, then, are not self-sufficient loners but, rather, yearners for connection, seeking security lest the early trauma of premature loss reemerge.

  As our boys begin to form deep relationships with girls, parents can nurture these relationships by supporting them. We must try to provide safe spaces for our sons’ intimate platonic connections and not sexualize their meaning. Try to talk to your boy in a nonintrusive way. Invite the girl as a friend to your home, on an excursion, etc. Fathers should avoid the temptation to suggest the beginnings of a sexual relationship if their sons are clearly not in that type of companionship. Mothers should be wary of a natural jealousy that their little boys are going to other females for nurturing and support.

  The task for all of us, in the end, is to break out of our stereotypes, to look for ways in which we can expand our abilities to be intimate with one another. Boys should learn how to express vulnerable feelings in front of others and show physical affection for one another. By the same token, girls ideally should learn about action empathy, nonverbal bonding, the affectionate insult, and the camaraderie that emerges from competitive games.

  John Bednall, writing about education in single-sex schools, calls for a “bilinguality” between genders; in other words, teaching each gender to speak the language of the other. Education for boys should teach them a second language of love and friendship. As Bednall explains, “It will be the language which enables them to enter intimately and respectfully into dialogue with females, to learn from that dialogue and to see the feminine perspective as enriching and relevant to their growth as complete males. But they will not forsake their own masculine language. Rather they will learn to be bilingual in gender, able to hear and speak the feminine with the same empathy and comfort as they speak and hear the masculine.”