A colleague of mine told me this story in a recent email and has granted me permission to repeat it. (I've changed a few details to protect his privacy.)

“For a long time, I considered Gerry my closest friend. We both liked anime, which is how we got to know each other. At first, it was just amazing to geek out with Gerry about Neon Genesis Evangelion for a couple of hours. I never got the sense that he judged me for being obsessed. I couldn’t talk to anyone else like that. After I moved to another city, we talked on the phone a lot. Sometimes, we’d put on a DVD and watch it together in our separate homes and talk as it played through. A couple of times we visited each other and we’d spend the whole weekend talking. Not just about anime but about everything we were going through, like jobs and relationships. It was really important to me. But then something happened, and he stopped calling me back all of a sudden. I still don’t know why. I haven’t heard from him in years. I don’t think I’ll ever have another friend like that.”

Reading over my colleague's statement of connection and loss, you might wonder exactly how old he was when he met Gerry and when their relationship ended. Was he a teenager, making a close friend for the first time? Was Gerry someone he lived with in college?

The truth is, he and Gerry—both American men and both heterosexual—became friends in their late 30s. In so doing, they contravened many of this country's most entrenched but unspoken rules of friendship. As you may have heard, men of a certain age do not have friends.

Maybe you've noticed this or joked about it. Maybe you've seen comedy on the subject, like a well-known Saturday Night Live (SNL) sketch called Man Park. But why is it so easy to imagine close friendships among young boys (as in the 1986 movie Stand By Me) but so difficult to find grown (generally heterosexual) men who still have deep friendships with their peers?

Niobe Way, professor of psychology at New York University and deliverer of a TED talk on the subject, finds the responsibility in us all, collectively—in those aspects of American culture that prioritize stereotypically masculine qualities (meaning strength, stoicism and self-reliance) over those that are more commonly seen as feminine; in short, those that praise thinking over feeling, independence over connection. Boys, according to Way, want and need close friendships as much as anyone else does but are socialized as they grow to suppress these needs and live in ways that are contrary to their nature.

In her book Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection,........

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