The sexual revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for men.
And not just in the way your brain instantly sprang to.
Sometime in the last 30 years, men pretty much stopped having friends.
The real male retreat from society is husbands vanishing into man caves when not serving as their wives’ life accessories.
Most 18-45 year-old men have no clue that they need – or can even have – male friends after they get married.
Having friends isn’t a luxury. It’s a deep need.
Even more so for men. Contrary to popular misconception, a man’s true final end isn’t a woman.
It’s God.
After all, “Man sharpens man as iron sharpens iron”
Almost all Gen X, Y, Millennial & Zoomer men were raised to think that latching onto a woman is their sole purpose in life. It’s just another form of idolatry – worshiping the creature instead of the Creator.
Here’s what your dad – if he was around – never told you: Your wife is not your friend. You are not her appendage, and she can’t save you.
As a man, you are called to holiness.
If you’re a layman, you gets holy by consecrating the world to God through your life’s work.
But you can’t do it alone. If you’re married, your wife is there to help. Yet you also need male friends who have capabilities and dispositions to assist you in ways she can’t.
Yes, caring for young children is your wife’s job. Providing for the household is yours.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t pitch in with childcare & housework if she really needs help.
It is to say that keeping a man yoked with housework and joined at the hip with his wife, to the exclusion of male friendships, is as disordered as keeping a woman constantly confined to the house.
What Gen X, Gen Y, Millennial, or Zoomer man hasn’t witnessed the cringe spectacle of a married friend pulling out his phone and saying “I’d better clear it with the Boss” *wink*?
That’s effeminate and degrading.
Your wife isn’t your boss.
You are her head.
She needs you to provide direction and leadership.
It’s your responsibility to know your household’s schedule on a given day, because you should be the one who sets it.
So if your male coworkers ask you to help with an after-hours strategy session, or your bros invite you to hang out on Saturday afternoon, your call to your wife should go like:
“Hey, I’m getting together with the guys from work/church/the club.”
“OK.”
That’s it. No further elaboration should be necessary on either end.
Because you should have cultivated the virtues of honesty, charity, temperance, and yes, punctuality.
Let your “yes” mean “yes” and your “I’m meeting up with the guys” mean “We’re doing serious work or legitimate recreation.”
Not “We’re getting plowed and hitting the strip joint.”
If you think about it, there’s no point in having friends who suffer from serious deficiencies of virtue. They’re there to build you up, not drag you down.
So don’t just be the kind of man a woman wants to lead her. Be the kind of man other men want to befriend.
On another masculine subject, giant robots are awesome.
You should read about giant robots fighting:
Amen. Needs to be said over and over. This will likely be a yearly or bi-yearly repost.
In the suburbs, I had zero excuses for not having good male friendships. Now that I’m rural, I have to remind myself not to use the wife as a friend-substitute but instead pick up the phone and call the guys and organize meetups in advance.
It can take discipline to maintain friendships. But it’s worthwhile.
This decline is certainly not helped by the Death Cult’s mass pushing of sodomy, poisoning male-male friendships. Seriously, TRY to find a famous historical male/male friendship that HASN’T been “re-interpreted” as gay in the modern day. It’s gotten to the point that many moderns literally cannot imagine a deep and emotional male friendship that isn’t gay. They will point to Scripture talking about David valuing Jonathan more than a woman’s love and simply see that as undeniable proof that they were sodomites. They won’t even necessarily be dishonest about it, either – they will usually genuinely not understand that it COULD mean anything different, or will think that any such interpretation is cope and an attempt to deny the plain meaning of the text.
You’ve hit the nail on the head again. I’ve been functionally friendless for most of my adult life, to the extent that noticing yesterday that I seemed to have a developed a few male friendships was an epiphany. Some of that is my personality. Some of that is my attitudes about marriage.
My father gave me almost the opposite advice: “Marry your best friend.” So I did. My wife and I are still happily married seventeen years later, so something about doing things that way worked. I have looked to my parents’ marriage as a standard for as long as I have been conscious of how it worked, at least from the outside. I say “from the outside” because I never saw them fight or argue, which is another way of saying I never saw them manage conflict. That’s a one-dimensional view of marriage, to be sure. On the other hand, I have been conscious of not having friends outside of work and church for a long, long time. That has chafed at times, though I had no idea what to do about it. I’m not here to air my dirty laundry, so I’ll say no more. In any case, thank you.
The age-old advice that’s supported by statistics is “Marry our high school sweetheart.”
Men bond by collaborating over activities. The best way to make male friends is to take up a hobby that involves group cooperation.
And congratulations.
I’ve made an observation that might not actually fit here, but seems to say something sad about our generation and the ones following ours. Sometimes, when people ask how long my wife and I have been married, and I tell them, they act amazed or impressed, as if being married for long as we have been were unheard of or a great accomplishment. I don’t totally understand that. Marriage means staying together, among other things, of course. When did that become an achievement?
When half of all marriages started to end in divorce.
Divorce ramped up in the childhood of Gen X. By the time of Gen Y’s childhood it wasn’t common, but most kids still heard of a family that was either going through divorce or threatening it. At the same time pop culture got flooded with divorced couples that always had the message “sometimes your mommy and daddy won’t love each other anymore, but it’s normal and they still love you.” So the default Gen Y expectation is that divorce is normal and very possible. It gets worse for Millennials and especially Zoomers.
I recognize myself in this. For me, it’s not so much about my wife, but about feeling like I’m stealing time from my kids. Both of us work, so when I’m not, I feel like I owe it to them.