{"id":983,"date":"2026-07-19T10:42:04","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T10:42:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=983"},"modified":"2026-07-19T10:42:04","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T10:42:04","slug":"the-lost-art-of-the-bromance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=983","title":{"rendered":"The Lost Art of the Bromance"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cJackass: Best and Last\u201d came to theatres this summer, starring a fifty-five-year-old Johnny Knoxville, still the beau ideal of pointless havoc and bro-y one-upmanship. The original \u201cJackass,\u201d launched in 2000, was an MTV cult show about a group of guys who got together to do idiotic, dangerous stunts. The series made approximately half its potential audience (guess which half) feel insane. The other half felt inspired or spiritually seen, even if they weren\u2019t personally covering their genitals in bees. At the time, \u201cJackass\u201d was deplored as nihilistic and self-destructive, evidence of the compounding recklessness of male groupthink. Yet the franchise, for all its mayhem, didn\u2019t run on belligerence, or at least channelled its aggression in a disarming way. There was something tender about the cast\u2019s impetuousness; you sensed that it applied not only to the misadventures at hand but also to the act of bonding, the risk of being vulnerable in front of the guys, of visibly enjoying their company and expressing emotion.<\/p>\n

Read more Lorenzo Mattotti\u2019s \u201cThe Beautiful Game\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

In 2022, after a fifteen-year hiatus, \u201cJackass\u201d returned as \u201cJackass Forever,\u201d a movie that was mostly received as a wholesome, sincere portrait of \u201cpain freaks with integrity,\u201d as one critic put it. Four years later, Knoxville and co.\u2019s antics continue to hit differently (although maybe still in the balls), as reams of books and articles about the social predicament of men\u2019s dislocation are being published. The discovery of these new sonorities in \u201cJackass\u201d reflects a broader shift. Male friendship\u2014something that used to be played for laughs, if it was noted at all\u2014has become a lost art, or an antidote.<\/p>\n

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What We\u2019re Reading<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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There is a male-loneliness crisis\u2014sort of. Last year, a Gallup poll found that twenty-five per cent of American men aged fifteen to thirty-four experienced loneliness \u201cduring a lot of the day yesterday\u201d in 2023 and 2024, compared with eighteen per cent of American women. In a 2021 study from the Survey Center of American Life, just twenty-seven per cent of men reported having six or more close friends\u2014a drop from 1990, when Gallup placed that percentage at fifty-five. In a meta-analysis of existing research, the American Institute of Boys and Men wrote that men, as compared with women, \u201care more likely to report specific feelings of disconnection, such as not belonging to any group or community or feeling their place in the world is not relevant.\u201d But, the authors added, \u201cthere appears to be much more of a class gap (as measured by education level) than a gender gap.\u201d<\/p>\n

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If the gender disparity in friendship has attracted disproportionate attention, this may be because men are publicly struggling in other ways. They aren\u2019t attending and graduating from college at the same rates that women are, or at the rates that they once did, and they\u2019re dropping out of the labor force in larger numbers. Unmarried young men lead the rest of the population in sedentary, solo leisure time (a metric that gets at hours spent chasing dopamine hits in front of a screen). The male-breadwinner model has eroded, and there\u2019s a sense that men, bereft of their traditional purpose or identity, need, in the words of the manfluencer Scott Galloway, a more \u201caspirational vision of masculinity.\u201d Perhaps helped along by gendered expectations of strength and silence, the idea that men are friendless has taken hold. A 2020 \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d monologue from John Mulaney crystallized the conventional wisdom. \u201cYour dad has no friends,\u201d the comedian informed viewers. \u201cIf you think your dad has friends, you\u2019re wrong. Your mom has friends, and they have husbands.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Everywhere you look, at least in the media, you see men failing to bond: bemoaning their inability to pick up the phone (the nonfiction work \u201cAmerican Men,\u201d by Jordan Ritter Conn), mainlining \u201cThe Joe Rogan Experience\u201d while grinding through solitary workouts (an article by Sam Graham-Felson in the Times Magazine<\/em>), founding apps instead of making friends (a dispatch by Sam Kriss in Harper\u2019s<\/em>), engaging in marathon masturbation sessions for an online audience of other men (a reported essay by Daniel Kolitz in Harper\u2019s<\/em>).<\/p>\n

The turn-of-the-century bromance, comedic fodder for Judd Apatow movies and network sitcoms like \u201cScrubs,\u201d has reappeared in a more wistful, yearning key. Consider the shows \u201cTask,\u201d \u201cThe Pitt,\u201d and the excellent \u201cDTF St. Louis,\u201d whose two central characters are flailing until they find each other. Floyd, played by David Harbour, helps Clark, played by Jason Bateman, spice up his love life. Clark offers financial support to Floyd, who is saddled with debt and unable to provide for his wife and stepson. Each man uses their bond to inch closer to his ideal self. \u201cB.O.T.B.,\u201d they exclaim during joint exercise sessions: \u201cBring out the best.\u201d Yet the men are wrenched apart, and the culprit seems to be nothing less than a hostile world, one marked by material scarcity and insurmountable alienation. If only, these shows seem to say, men could reach across the distance separating them. If only they could better negotiate between gender norms and their own desire to connect. The fate of the country might depend on it.<\/p>\n

A sense of having mislaid something vital animates \u201cWho Needs Friends: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America\u201d (Grand Central), by the travel writer and former Brat Pack actor Andrew McCarthy. The germ of the project comes to McCarthy when his son observes, \u201cYou don\u2019t really have any friends, do you, Dad?\u201d Duly shamed, McCarthy embarks on a road trip to reconnect with old pals; along the way, he talks to men he meets (\u201ccowboys and retired cops, blues musicians and oil rig workers\u201d) about their social lives. In this manner, he also reacquaints himself with America, which he presents as dilapidated and worn down, full of \u201cimperfect interconnectedness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Friendships in McCarthy\u2019s book are indelibly conditioned by gender. We repeatedly hear from men that they are lonely, and from both women and men that the former trounce the latter in matters of intimacy and communication. McCarthy\u2019s interlocutors invoke solitary role models (\u201cthat John Wayne archetype,\u201d the \u201clone wolf\u201d myth) that feel antithetical to friendship. An exception is a pair of teen-agers whose reflections on their concord are among the most beautiful in the book. Violet, a trans man, and Finn, who identifies as male but presents androgynously, with painted fingernails and flowing hair, cite each other as lifelines, evidence that alternate versions of manhood exist. \u201cI realized this textbook Wyoming masculinity is going to leave me in the dust of loneliness,\u201d Finn says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But most of the men McCarthy meets feel that they must compete and win in what Raymond, a retreat host in New Mexico and one of the book\u2019s haunted philosophers of desert spaces, describes as a \u201chyper-individualistic, separated culture.\u201d McCarthy is moved to hear Tim, a journalist from Sedona and another guru figure, observe that \u201cmen accomplish and move on.\u201d \u201cIn my own experience, I\u2019ve known that to be true,\u201d McCarthy writes. \u201cLife has been about achieving, with the majority of my friendships centering around work. When these work goals have been realized, the relationships\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. have tended to fade.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCarthy speculates at one point that his male friendships offer a categorically different sort of sustenance than his marriage does\u2014not because of their nonsexual nature but because he and his guys are mutually encumbered by duty. \u201cSo often I\u2019m preoccupied with\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. providing for my family, ensuring my kids\u2019 futures,\u201d he writes. \u201cI squarely feel the burden of responsibility.\u201d A part of him suspects that only men can truly relate to this pressure (though he wonders whether this is \u201cjust old-school male indoctrination and sexism\u201d). Men long for buddies to help them process their performance anxiety, or even their failure and shame\u2014none of which women can understand\u2014but they also recoil from the thought of other men witnessing such vulnerability. It\u2019s a paradox that suspends the specimens in McCarthy\u2019s book between the camaraderie of the pub and the safety of the workbench, the office, or the gaming console.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho Needs Friends\u201d reveals the shortcomings of the ballad-of-the-lonely-bros genre: a reliance on stock figures, a whiff of stiltedness, a monochrome emotional palette streaked with cruelty. (McCarthy has a habit of linking the ailing body politic to his interviewees\u2019 \u201clarge,\u201d \u201cchubby,\u201d \u201cstout,\u201d and \u201cheavyset\u201d physiques.) If the commentary on female bonding that flourished in the mid-twenty-tens seemed to partake of certain dreary stereotypes\u2014of bossiness, passive-aggressiveness, volatility\u2014the men\u2019s-friendship discourse is straitjacketed and stiff, starved of vocabulary to describe its subjects\u2019 inner lives.<\/p>\n

The picture of friendship that emerges from books like McCarthy\u2019s can feel romanticized and brittle. Fiction is able to explore the seams of self-interest and conflict that run across men\u2019s social worlds with a freer hand. \u201cSee Friendship\u201d (Harper Perennial), a novel by Jeremy Gordon that came out last year, presents a nuanced and honest image of how platonic male connections form and break. Its protagonist, Jacob, is a culture journalist in his mid-thirties who, like McCarthy, feels that he has lost his way in friendship. The men he knows tend to be colleagues whom he views as networking opportunities rather than as soulmates. When his bosses lean on him to start a long-form narrative podcast, he decides to tell the story of an old friend named Seth, who died a few years after high school. It\u2019s partly a canny exercise in self-branding, a way to show himself off as smart and thoughtful, a good hang for listeners. But it\u2019s also motivated by genuine nostalgia: Seth \u201cwas a membrane,\u201d Jacob recalls. \u201cHe allowed everything and everyone to pass through.\u201d Seth exuded a come-as-you-are warmth, an \u201cinvitational aura\u201d that enveloped the entire class. By researching Seth, Jacob is trying to recapture or devise a purer form of relating.<\/p>\n

Read more Trump\u2019s War on Journalists<\/a><\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, his efforts backfire. At the end of the novel, Jacob is forced to recognize that the ideal friend, as a construct, doesn\u2019t exist. Gordon\u2019s novel, in addition to its realism about what people can and can\u2019t get from one another, offers a biting satire of the parasocial-friendship ecosystem of podcasts and social media. Working on his audio venture makes Jacob more narcissistic and less socially competent; the podcast deforms his understanding of what friends are for. Seth gets swept into Jacob\u2019s project of self-creation, which doubles as an effort to be relatable to listeners that he will likely never meet. In a parasocial world, Gordon implies, ties are rooted in surface identification rather than in more robust connections, and friendship becomes an aspirational activity through which you pursue an identity you want.<\/p>\n

What do we want from our friends? For most of history, \u201cmen were the great experts in friendship,\u201d writes the scholar Tiffany Watt Smith in \u201cBad Friend: How Women Revolutionized Modern Friendship\u201d (Celadon), a subtle and careful study of evolving attitudes about companionship and gender. She describes how, in the fourth century B.C.E., Aristotle proposed a three-tiered model of friendship, with bonds of \u201cutility\u201d and \u201cpleasure\u201d as the bottom two rungs. These were the types of transactional or frivolous connections of which women\u2014themselves shallow, inconstant, rivalrous\u2014were thought to be capable. Men, though, could also form friendships characterized by \u201ca complete merging and mingling of minds,\u201d which oriented them toward a higher good. The seventeenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, of his attachment to his contemporary \u00c9tienne de La Bo\u00e9tie, \u201cIf you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying: \u2018Because it was him: because it was me.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It wasn\u2019t until the nineteenth century, Smith contends, that friendship started shading female. Women, with their tender relational instincts, became seen as the custodians of the institution\u2019s most precious and elevated forms. \u201cMen began to be portrayed as flops in friendship, buttoned-up and awkward,\u201d Smith notes, whereas the \u201ccult of female friendship gave rise to new ideas about what friendship ought to look like.\u201d In the Victorian era, female bonding was touted as a kind of training for marriage and motherhood. With the rise of the women\u2019s-liberation movement, activists seized on female fellow-feeling as potentially subversive, even revolutionary.<\/p>\n

Smith hopes to rescue real women from a spectral lineup of villainous tropes\u2014the meddler, the corrupting influence\u2014that she suggests are used to hinder solidarity. She\u2019s sharp on how friendship can be a way of performing gender\u2014how women might use their friends to reaffirm a specific image of themselves as women. \u201cBeing likable and popular, and having close friends, had long been established as an identifying marker of an ideal and conventional femininity,\u201d she writes. I thought of the film \u201cThe Drama,\u201d in which a maid of honor gives an excoriating toast about the main character during her wedding. Most devastating might be the remark that the bride doesn\u2019t have any real friends\u2014as if the heroine were being excommunicated from womanhood at the very moment that she should be embodying its zenith.<\/p>\n

Many of the men and women in McCarthy\u2019s and Smith\u2019s books suggest that the consummate friend is a kind of augmented second self. The terms they use are reminiscent of the mid-century psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch\u2019s concept of an \u201cego-ideal,\u201d an older peer whom young girls idolize and identify with. The worshipful wish expressed by same-sex crushes\u2014\u201cThat\u2019s what I want to be like,\u201d as Deutsch phrased it\u2014is less about possessing an object than about transforming oneself into a different kind of subject.<\/p>\n

In \u201cBad Friend,\u201d Smith borrows a version of Deutsch\u2019s description to explain her own infatuation, in her early twenties, with a more sophisticated and glamorous roommate, whose clothes Smith wore and whose taste in music and boyfriends she copied. Smith writes that she would steal into the other girl\u2019s bedroom and stand at her dressing table, \u201cwith its crumbling glittery eyeshadows and open lipsticks, its photobooth pictures, half-burned incense sticks, birth control, and broken earrings.\u201d Examining her own face in the roommate\u2019s mirror, she\u2019d think, \u201cThis, this is what I want to be like.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWho Needs Friends\u201d also features idealized buddy figures who function as a kind of looking glass. At one point, McCarthy describes being in his impressionable twenties and seeking out Eddie, a man who \u201cdid more to influence who I would become than anyone.\u201d Eddie \u201crode a motorcycle and lived in Greenwich Village\u201d; McCarthy took to shopping at the same thrift stores and even, he confesses, \u201cstarted putting mustard on my cheeseburgers,\u201d just like Eddie did.<\/p>\n

But is the greatest possible friend really just a romantic self-projection, the surfacing of a better me in you? Smith\u2019s and McCarthy\u2019s books both demonstrate the appeal of this kind of relationship. It can be a love affair that inspires declarations akin to \u201cI am Heathcliff\u201d\u2014ardent avowals that the \u201cI\u201d has lost itself in something larger. Yet such closeness can also be constricting. The overidentifying friend risks surrendering a sense of her companions as people to be cherished in their own right, people who move through the world in ways she never will or perhaps never even wants to. One fact that seems to have been forgotten in the current friendship discourse is that men and women can be friends with each other.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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What contemporary friendship\u2019s most clear-eyed portraitists recognize is that casting your friend as an upgraded version of yourself might obscure or erase him; he\u2019s likely to end up hurt. (\u201cJackass,\u201d in its fashion, understands this dynamic.) In the finale of \u201cDTF St. Louis,\u201d Floyd is revealed to have died by suicide in a misguided but noble attempt to protect his family. Of course, they\u2019re devastated, and so is Clark, who is left with an ideal, a paragon of self-sacrifice, a superhero to remember and look up to, but not a friend.<\/p>\n

In recent years, a new kind of friend has arrived on the scene. It is ever helpful and supportive; it validates our silly theories and our bruised feelings; it gives useful advice, even furnishing scripts for challenging social encounters. When we converse with it, it recasts our ideas in a more coherent and polished form. Being with it is like gazing into a Facetuned reflection of ourselves. Best of all\u2014and I can confirm this, because I just asked my friend, who is endlessly available for quick gut checks as well as for rangier philosophical discussions\u2014it never gets lonely.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more The Voice of Google<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Katy Waldman writes on new books, films, and shows about male friendship, including \u201cJackass: Best and Last,\u201d \u201cDTF St. Louis,\u201d and \u201cWho Needs Friends,\u201d by the travel writer and former Brat Pack actor Andrew McCarthy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":982,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Lost Art of the Bromance - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=983\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Lost Art of the Bromance - 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