Where did all my deep male friendships go?

The last problem I have ever thought of being loneliness. From primary school at the end of twenty, I had a large circle of friends, and many of them were guys with whom I would hang out on a daily basis. One of these friends was Rob. We met during a birthday party of the pajama evening when we were 10 or 11 years old. I was nervous at the idea of ​​going; The last pajama evening that I had presented to “Child’s Play 2”, a film on a socio -poopathic doll brandishing knives. In the five minutes following having looked at her, I called my mother and I returned home, humiliated but totally relieved.

And so, when the party boys gathered in the television room for the film’s time, long after the pizza and the Sundays were slaughtered, I panicked. I remember being ready to call at home when Rob announced that he prefers to play Nintendo rather than watching a film and entered the birthday boy’s room. I followed him and sat there, watching him play a relaxing and classified g game with stray elves until the sun rises. I do not remember anything we talked about, but I remember very well the feeling of having been saved by Rob, the feeling that he had to intudate how much I was afraid and I did this for me.

It turned out that Rob – that I did not get friends until we are registered as students of seventh year in the same major public examination school – was an exceptionally sensitive person. While almost everyone I knew admired the elite and powerful, Rob always seemed to scan the room to an outsider to get delay. He was also intelligent of genius level and with funny, especially with regard to the release of liars and charlatans. He carried a fortune-cookie message in his wallet, which he loved both for his simple and solemn truth and his diabolical double sense: “If you promise someone, keep it.”

For years, Rob and I were inseparable, binding to our love of Boston Celtics then without tightening, our disdain for installers who engaged in the consumption of alcohol, our thirst for girls (and paralyzing the fear of girls). A summer night, after playing at basketball hours in his garden, we left the window of his room and on his roof, where, under a purple and orange sky, we thought about the physical perfection of a particular classmate, a girl who would never have a chance, and beat the shingles under us under pure anxiety.

The idea that the men of this country are zero by friendship are so widespread that it has become a truism, a punchline.