On Men and Friendship

For as long as the word has been written, men's friendships have been taken to be the model of what friendship is and how it ought to be. From the Greek philosophers to modern writers like Lionel Tiger (1969), major treatises have been devoted to friendship among men — to the depth of their bonding, to the intensity of their love, to their enduring commitment. Men, it has been written, give each other comfort, support, validation, love — even fulfillment and completion, the very wholeness that, in modern times, is the preserve of lovers. In his essay “On Friendship,” Sir Francis Bacon (1937) wrote that without a friend, men were “as an half piece,” that they needed “a friend to make it entire,” that they might be “princes that had wives, sons, nephews; and yet all these could not supply the comfort of friendship.”

But friendship was for men only. Only men, wrote Jeremy Taylor (1913) in his Discourse on Friendship, were “capable of all those excellencies by which men can oblige the world” — and, of course, each other. Women's friendships didn't count, indeed, were not even noticed. For just as women have been invisible in public life throughout the ages, so were their relations with each other. Instead, they were simply assumed to be too childlike and too given to instability, petty jealousies, and trivial concerns, to be able to maintain friendships with each other.

As we move closer to the present, the romantic and impassioned descriptions of men's friendships that were so much a part of the literature of earlier eras disappear almost entirely from view. True, in the immediate aftermath of our last heroic war, World War II, there were novels to celebrate the comradeship that was forged there (Jones, 1951; Mailer, 1948). But the buddy relationships of war to which these tales pay homage are a far cry from the sustained and intimate friendships so acclaimed by the essayists of earlier times.