Why We Need More Male Friendship Books

Photo by Papaioannou Kostas on Unsplash
I'm a sucker for friendship stories. If a book has a strong, core friendship that lasts throughout the story, it's a good chance you've hooked me as a reader. Some of my favorite stories are adventure stories where a group of friends help each other achieve an impossible feat or where the main character defeats their nemesis with the help of their friends.

Photo by Aman Shrivastava on Unsplash
But while good friendships make for good stories, we don't encourage male friendships to thrive beyond childhood, and we don't encourage physical affection between them to extend beyond puberty. We tend to sexualize their bonds instead, creating rifts and establishing an environment of toxic masculinity. We tell our boys to be boys, to stop crying, to stop feeling or showing emotion after they reach a certain age (an age arbitrarily chosen by parents or the community they're raised in, by the way). We teach our boys that if they still hug or kiss their male friends, they're acting like girls, or equate affection to a homosexual relationship.

By rejecting anything stereotypically feminine, men and boys are taught to reject an essential part of themselves, something that is to be valued. - Michael Carley, The Good Men Project

The truth is, we learn more about ourselves through the media than in any other way. Movies like Stand By Me, Goonies, and The Sandlot show us how boys can be friends, holding hands, hugging and even kissing on the cheek for comfort but soon as those boys grow up to be adults, their affection shifts. Their relationships are shown as distant while close.

So where are the books exploring adult male friendships that show men loving each other as they did when they were little? Why is it so difficult to show adult male friendships in genre fiction without adding a romantic component to their love? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for romance novels featuring same-sex pairings and don't ever want them to go away. I want more of them, in fact. Would love to see them on the shelves at Walmart and Target stores across America but that's a topic for another post. I want to find more of those stories and encourage storytellers to give us those great adventure stories where men have friendships that have lasted a lifetime; where they are affectionate with one another on page as adults.

We need more male friendship stories in adult genre fiction. What are some of your favorite books featuring adult male friendships?

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