The term ‘bromance’ may have just entered the Scrabble dictionary, but that doesn’t mean that all men are having them. There are endless cinematic bromance friendships to look up to, like Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch and Sundance, Terry and Bob in The Likely Lads, Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughan in The Wedding Crashers or Jonah Hill and Michael Cera in *Superbad. *But there are also times and reasons why sometimes you must operate as the Lone Wolf or Lone Gun. (But not The Lone Ranger as his name is inaccurate – he had a best mate, Tonto.)
I was recently pondering getting married, but the fact that I don’t currently have a stand-out contender for Best Man is one of the reasons I’ve erred against it. I’ve got good mates who I do different things with – go to football, play football, talk to online. But no-one you could say I was in a bromance with.
The definition of Best Mate for me would be someone who knows you very well, who you’ve known for years, who you’ve been through good and tough times with, who you like hanging out with, do hang out with, and whom you confide in. He’s the default person you want to hang out with given the opportunity: go to a gig, go on a long drive to a festival, go on holiday with, to a match or just sit around in a pub talking rubbish.
Another good definition is a friend you can spend hours with without saying anything, without it being a problem.
Right now though, I definitely don’t have one. Why? Well, one factor is that instead I’ve got a great girlfriend, a girlfriend I actually like hanging out with rather than just going through the motions of a relationship with. But I do have moments when I wish I had a best mate on hand. I recently had a fairly low-key night out with three guys I worked with years ago, and I haven’t spent so much time laughing in years. It really made me wish I could do that every week.
There are lots of reasons why male friendships drift apart. Work, geography, and ‘the other woman’ – ie girlfriends – have all played a part for me over the years. There’s been no falling-outs, but life just moves along. And when it does, I think men are quite relaxed about it happening. I do remember, though, being pretty depressed the day my London flatmate throughout my 20s, a former schoolmate I’d known for half my life, decided to go back to our hometown Leeds.
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He still lives at the other end of the M1, but we both have families now and you hand your weekends and holiday time over to the children once you have them. He’s never got into social media and that’s become the way everyone stays in touch nowadays. So you can know someone very well, but if you don’t see them more than once a year at Christmas, it sort of changes things.
When another very good mate went off to live in Thailand, I inherited his old flatmate who moved in with me and we made a very good pair. A game of rubbish tennis? No problem. Fancy a gig tonight? Yes. Sitting around talking shite and laughing a lot? Got a degree in that. If you characterised our friendship, I would say his appeal for me was he was funny, had great stories, no-nonsense opinions and was always up for doing something.
When my girlfriend moved in with us, it was like a friendship rota. He wouldn’t get into work until after the pub – roughly the same time she’d go to bed – so I always had the option of sitting up late and having a laugh while he ate his evening kebab out of the bag.
But when his own relationship developed and he and his girlfriend moved in together, I obviously saw a lot less of him. I like her and we get on fine, but they spend so much time doing activities – touring stately homes, flying birds of prey, hiring boats – we rarely see him any more.
It looks great when you see it all through Facebook – like they’ve won a lifetime’s supply of Red Letter Days – but it’s not the same as listening to him drunkenly remembering hiding Liam Gallagher in his bathroom while an irate Patsy Kensit was at his door looking for him.
Apart from joking with other mutual friends that he’s been kidnapped, there’s no real need to have in-depth discussions about how you feel about your mates. Women place so much faith in their friendships, which is the reason they seem to fall out more than guys do. Men know what each other are like, we have much less expectation of each other. They let you down at times and that can piss you off, but you know full well you’ve probably made someone else feel exactly the same.
The main thing is that a true dormant bromance can be re-activated the moment you bump into an old best mate – there’s no awkwardness. You just carry on exactly as it was years before. So long as you’ve never got off with his girlfriend, that is. Mind you, thinking about it, I did that at school and because I sheepishly coughed it up immediately, my best mate back then just laughed in disbelief, accepted it, and put it on the backburner to bring it up again to taunt me with in later life...
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Follow James on Twitter @jamesjamesbrown
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.