When I think about new friendships with men, I often start by looking back at the most formative ones I've had. My high school friends.
When I think of them with fondness, I think about laughing until I think I might throw up. I think about silliness. I think about the way guys will do ridiculous, sometimes reckless, or disgusting things for a laugh from their buddies. I think about frantic nights inventing ridiculous games or staying up until the sun comes up, talking.
We started as a big group of friends. But eventually puberty gets involved, and things change. We're not just buddies. I'm now someone with tits. For some, the twinkle in their eye became something more sinister.
Some remained good guys. Some did not.
When someone talked about a sister, a new friend, or a new co-worker, the first question they would ask is "Is she hot?"
And that's what we were, we were first and foremost something to be fucked. Even though we were all sitting around as friends, the girls had a role to play, and we were always reminded of it.
Drinking alcohol around these types of guys is always a risk. No matter how friend-zoned you think you are, or how well established your "sibling-like" friendship is, they'll make a move. They'll chalk it up to the alcohol, but you can tell it's a question of opportunity. You're a specific category. Like a pet that will be eaten if things get desperate enough, or you know, if they get mildly horny.
When I was in college, I was in a new class, and I sat at a table with two guys having a conversation. They were talking about a comedy show. They talked about their families. Music. They talked about where they came from, their families, and their sisters. Nobody asked, "Is she hot?"
I remember standing on a subway platform with one of them and his inching towards me with an awkward twitch. When I looked at him inquisitively, he explained, "Can you take a step away from the subway ledge? It's making me nervous." How alien. Care. Concern. He was from a small town in New Brunswick, and he was kind and polite. He was a revelation. Every day, he showed me ways in which a man could be non-threatening. Every day we met as friends.
My other new friend was similar. He had a sister he was close with and a long-term girlfriend. He was friends with several girls. When he talked about them, he talked about fully realized people. People outside of their gender. He didn't put girls on a pedestal; he told stories of his sister shitting her pants and puking out car windows. A man who knows that women have bodies just as feral as a man's knows women.
We became good friends over my three-year degree. They became an antidote to years of poisoned memories. They were the antithesis of toxic masculinity. Decades later, one of them has two daughters, and I think often about what a gift he is to those girls.
For years, I would look back at high school memories and wonder what would have happened had I been a little drunker or if I'd not been careful. I was always careful.
My first relationship was with one of these guys, and it wasn't good. It soon became sordid and unhealthy. I became a dirty secret and was put aside when it suited him. I was convenient and easily controlled. I wasn't hot hot. But I was hot enough.
I woke up one day hating myself. All I had was shame. And when I turned to some of those guy friends, they laughed at me, because girls are silly. And if this one guy was being shitty, then they were all shitty, right?
My 20s were spent just hating myself. I have so much shame around how I was treated and what I was worth. I'm middle-aged now, and I look back at my youth and hate how much of it was spent just trying to survive. Their opinions cut me so deeply, but they were just such dicks. I wish I had just shaken it off and lived the life of a young person, meeting new people and trying things. But I didn't. I was scared of new people because it took so much energy to just survive the rejection and losses of the ones I'd met so far. Everything seemed like a risk. And when it takes so much time and energy to survive a period of your life, unnecessary risk is to be avoided.
So I avoided a lot of things. I only made friends slowly, in school or at work. For a while, it was only girls and queer folk. Slowly, my friendships grew or were pruned as adulthood and work laid claim to most of my time and energy.
But I can't quite shake memories of that time in my life. Randomly, one will pop into my brain, and I'll wish I could claw it out.
When RuPaul says, "If you can't love yourself, then how in the hell can you love somebody else?" I think about it. I love people. Surely, I must love myself? And I do, but only parts of myself. I'm kind, and I'm funny, and I'm organized, and I'm helpful. But the part that could be fuckable, I don't love. I still have a lot of shame and pain around her. I resent her, and I'm sad she never really existed. Not happily. Not standing on her own two feet.
How can decades of shame be healed? That's what I'm faced with now, now that I'm looking at it.
