Men are trained to love their friends in a dialect of insults and silences.
We say “bro” and mean “I would carry you out of a burning building.” We say “you’re an idiot” and mean “I missed you.” We send a meme at 1 AM and mean “I am thinking about you and I hope your life is going okay,” but the meme does the talking because the talking is, for reasons none of us can fully explain, physically difficult.
My friendships run on this dialect. Insults as currency. Silence as comfort. A vocabulary of maybe forty words, all of them deniable.
A while back I convinced myself to saying the actual words.
“I love you, man.” “I’m proud of you.” “I’m glad you exist.”
The first attempts caused system errors. My friend looked at me like I’d handed him a fish. There was a pause where his whole face ran diagnostics: is this a bit? Is he dying? Did he lose a bet? Is he gay?
(to be fair, I would also suspect a bit. we built this.)
Then, after the diagnostics, something thawed. He said it back, quickly, like ripping off a bandage, and then we both went on about our day.
It gets easier. That’s the strange part. The words were never heavy; the lock was. Once it’s off, you realize how much was waiting behind it.
Here’s what I think the lock is made of.
Part of it is the training: boys learn early that tenderness between men is suspect, mockable, something to be laundered through competition or alcohol before it’s safe to display. So we develop workarounds. The punch on the shoulder (contact, but violent enough to deny). The shared activity (affection, but with a ball in front of it). The group chat (presence, but asynchronous and deniable).
The workarounds work, sort of. The love gets through, degraded, like a photo photocopied too many times. But something is lost in the copying, and what’s lost is precision. Your friend goes through a breakup and all you have is “you’ll be good, bro” when what the moment needs is “I know this gutted you and I’m here for the whole of it.”
He deserves the sentence. Not the meme.
The dark version of this, the one that actually motivates me: the eulogy.
I’ve sat through funerals where men spoke about the dead with a fluency they clearly never used while he was alive. The sentences were all there, finally: he was my brother, he carried me, I loved him. Beautiful sentences. Delivered to a box.
The eulogy audience can’t hear you. That’s the whole tragedy of the genre. Every sentence in it was available, for free, for decades, and we saved them for the one occasion where they do nothing.
Tell your friends you love them while they can still be embarrassed by it. The embarrassment is the proof of delivery.
I’m not saying retire the insults. The insults are load-bearing. “You’re an idiot” will always mean “I missed you,” and honestly there’s beauty in the compression. (also fuck that nigga, man)
I’m saying add the words. Keep the dialect, lose the censorship.
Love your friends loudly enough that they never have to guess at your funeral.
The guessing is what we’re actually afraid of. Not the words.
Just thinking about it I sat through so many funerals of friends, man, shi is tough and depressing, specially when it’s a case of suicide, gives me chills to this day, makes me wonder maybe if I was there to acknowledge their existence this could have been prevented………..but I guess I will never know)