No poker, golf or trips for bromantically challenged
My thinking is that I'll take my best buddy on one of those "man-dates" to see that "I Love You, Man" movie, interview all the other guys in the theater and write an insightful column explaining the current fuss about "bromances."
But the only other male couple in the place is a father (I hope) with a 6-year-old boy. Seeing that guy just makes me grateful that at least I don't have to explain all the raunchy R-rated jokes to my movie companion.
My "I Love You, Man" experience explains why the highly rated, hilarious comedy about male friendships didn't do as well as hoped at the box office. It got hammered by "Knowing," another of those Nicolas Cage movies where the unlikely hero discovers something that changes our understanding of the world and spends the movie following clues that prove him right. "I Love You, Man" did hold off that Julia Roberts-as-a-spy movie, but its makers have to be wondering where has all the bromance gone.
Simple. All the heterosexual men who like hanging with other men had more manly pursuits. One of my buddies went with a male friend on a dirt bike trip through Mexico. Another friend vacationed with a bunch of guys to watch the World Baseball Classic. And tons of guys went to bars or buddies' houses to watch the NCAA basketball tourney, which has become almost a pilgrimage-like obligation for many men.
Me? When I say something about "the guys," I'm referring to my three sons - none of whom wanted to watch basketball with me. So my NCAA experience consists of filling out a bracket on The New York Times Web site. I wanted to issue a notice on Facebook (if I were a guy who put out notices on Facebook) after I correctly picked the first 24 games of the tourney and was tied for first place. Then I bombed and currently am in 4,933rd place, which is not the sort of thing a guy brags about to a buddy.
I'm not guileless about the reasons I am pretty much guy-less these days. I'm not good at keeping in touch. I don't like poker. I haven't played golf in years. And if I am going to spend time and money doing something fun, I'd rather spend it with my wife, my kids or my wife and kids.
In recent years when my friend Charlie and I made road trips to Detroit and St. Louis to watch the Cubs, we didn't even spend the night. Awake, sober and seeing no need to shell out money to spend a night in a cheap motel room with somebody who snores and isn't our wives, we made the five-hour drives home.
A wife trumps guys in my book.
Before I got married, I had guys. We'd play sports together, watch sports together, talk about sports together, go out together to meet women, not meet women together, go home separately and then regroup the next day or weekend to restart the cycle.
When I had guys, we might have gone to a movie about guys killing other guys or pursuing naked women, but we didn't go to movies about male friends. And when we did go to a movie - "Animal House" comes to mind - my one friend insisted that we leave an empty seat between him and me just so any potential girlfriends in the crowd would know we weren't gay.
When one of my male friends (married with a baby) asked me over to his home to play baseball on his video game system, I felt weird. Not because it seemed gay, but because it seemed childish.
So many of the guy things I enjoy seem childish now. Even though I did really enjoy myself this January at our annual winter football game in the snow, part of me thought about how stupid I'd feel if I broke, tore or dislocated something trying to beat a bunch of other middle-age men in football. If I had died playing football with my artificial hip and woefully out-of-shape body, my family would have killed me.
While we don't get the publicity that bromances do, I think there are a lot of guys like me - men who lost the guys thing shortly after we picked our groomsmen. Once the kids are gone, we might get our guys back. Our groomsmen might be pallbearers some day.
Or maybe we'll all get together as soon as Nicolas Cage makes a bromance flick.