I was recently having lunch with two friends, one of them a man. On a nearby table were a group of five women. One was crying while the rest were comforting her, hugging her and murmuring what must have been words of comfort. It was clear that they had one mission and one mission only, to make a friend in distress feel better about whatever it was that had caused her so much pain.
By the time we were leaving the restaurant, the woman was no longer sobbing, and had calmed down enough to start eating the piece of cake that her friends had ordered for her. She would even smile from time to time to something one of them would say. Drawing from my friendships with fellow women, I knew that later that evening, every one of those four women would either call or text her to find out how she was doing or just to tell her something encouraging, to reassure her that all was all, and if need be, they would stage another intervention like the one they had on that day until she dealt with whatever it was that was weighing her down.
“Friendship between men and women is so different…” the man I was having lunch with commented after observing the fuss that the women were making over their friend.
First of all, he explained, most men wouldn’t take a friend in distress to a restaurant, they would take him to bar, and in way of comfort, they would pile him with alcohol, and when he showed signs of wanting to ‘open up’, they would pile him with even more alcohol to prevent that from happening. “Kunywa! Chapa stress,” they would urge him on, seemingly more interested on the football match showing.
The drinking would have either one or two effects – the alcohol would make the poor man’s pain more pronounced, or numb it for a while, but the outcome would be the same when he woke up in the morning – his problems would still be right there.
He added that the furthest direct consoling can go amongst men is a brief clasp on the shoulder or a slap on the back, accompanied by an off-hand comment such as, “That’s life bro…” or “Keep your head up bro…”. His explanation was that historically, men have never known how to deal with emotional stuff, and would rather ignore it, meaning that quite a number would feel at a loss if required to console a friend.
He blames socialisation, explaining that men of his generation were taught that a man was to be brave in the face of whatever situation he found himself in. That he was not to cry or show weakness, that he was to bear his pain stoically. He gave us the example of his father, his default role model from birth. The man showed no emotion when his entire herd of cattle was wiped off after an especially ruthless drought in the 80s, even though during that period his father’s drinking became heavier and he became more quarrelsome.
His father, he added, showed next to no emotion when his mother died, and when mourners visited to commiserate with him, he would murmur, “Ni maisha, tuseme nini?” This stoicism he observed with his father’s friends too, and his father’s younger brothers as well. He too, he told us, was like that, though he was trying to break the cycle with his pre-teenage sons by encouraging them to talk about the challenges they were experiencing.
He pointed out that this is the age of social media, and that there is so much out there with the potential to influence our children, therefore, it is important to know what’s going on in their lives even if that meant having to deal with their emotions.
We, (the other woman we were having lunch with and I) agreed with him, and just for laughs offered to be his bosom friends, the people he could always come to if he needed a shoulder to cry on. We promised not to judge, but I think the joke was lost on him because he looked so mortified, we were afraid that he would pass out. I got the feeling that he would still choose his hard-as-rock friends given a chance. Gentlemen, you cannot even begin to imagine how much better your lives would be if your friendships with other men were like ours.
