We’re eating outside in the warmth of the early summer evening while the puppy flits between digging up the raised beds and sticking her head into the honeysuckle playing fast and loose with the bees.
My son and his girlfriend are discussing a mutual friend who has contracted scabies and is sensitive about the conditions under which it happened.
“In my day he’d definitely have been given a nickname,” I say.
My son smiles but says that everyone has been quite careful around the subject to avoid upsetting him.
“It wouldn’t have been something subtle either,” I go on, “In fact, he’d probably have been called “Scabies” from that day on.
“That’s why I don’t like men,” my daughter says.
“Yes, you’re right, men are horrible,” I agree immediately wondering whether I’m doing so because I believe it or because I don’t think that any of them are good enough for her.
In the absence of a willingness to talk about emotion in an open and healthy way male bonding often seems to rely on cruelty masked as “banter”.
For some, it is probably a safe place from which to avoid the “weakness” of vulnerability taught by generations of misguided fathers, but for most this insistence on never taking anything seriously or finding a way to communicate emotion properly continues to have devastating results.
The suicide rate amongst men is getting on for four times higher than that for women who, in my professional experience at least, are more willing to face their emotions, however painful.
I have been the architect of my fair share of typically male, bewilderingly idiotic experiences.
I lived next door to a man for a decade without ever knowing his name, a fact that only came to light when he was away for a week and left his answerphone beeping annoyingly. I put a note through his door which opened, “Dear Julien” and when he came home he asked me, “Who is Julian?” His name was John.
For months before a very significant emotional breakdown, I was regularly stuffing sick notes provided by my GP into my suit pocket before making my way back to work unable or unwilling to acknowledge my own inability to carry on.
Even when I finally decided to ask for help it wasn’t because I had talked things through with any of my friends but because I’d thought seriously about throwing myself into the river.
When my friend Paul killed himself nobody, as far as we could work out, even knew he was unhappy.
As a young man, break-ups were routinely dealt with by teasing, physical insecurities were amplified not ignored, and failure was indiscriminately laughed at.
As a result, generations have grown up fearful of sharing and unaware of how to cope when another man has the courage to do so.
“Is it still the same in your friendship group?” I ask my son.
“I don’t think there’s so much open cruelty.”
His girlfriend rolls her eyes, “No, you all just avoid talking about things instead.”
Having asked my son for examples of male bonding cruelty he told me that someone had told a friend of his that he looked like a recent picture of Bear Grylls after he’d been stung by a bee in the face.
It’s true that the likeness was uncanny and, quite honestly, funny. But, in a way, it felt even sadder that the talent groups of men have for finding laughter in almost any situation is not accompanied by a willingness to deal with the genuine pain that is so often at its foundation.
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