male-bonding

Women eat ice-cream, men toast marshmallows.

When he turned and walked into the living room he knew instantly why it was that he hadn__ wanted to come here, and that he ought to get out as soon as he possibly could. There, staring him in the face, was everything he__ been deprived of for the last five years.

Nothing bonds two solitary individuals like a good shared drunk. This is a scientific fact. It__ important, even necessary for the long-term welfare of the planet to get good and shit-faced with your neighbor every now and then.

It also strikes me that male-to-male bonding can create a gender role conflict, as it challenges the myth of full independence. Heroism is an exception. In fact, heroism has a long tradition as part of manhood. Bonds formed through natural disaster or war are exceptions to the typical __elf-reliance_ rules. These are op-portunities for men to experience a type of connection with each other that is ordinarily prohibited by the __ules_ of manhood.

The author observes that the friendship of John Hay and Charles Francis Adams benefited from a physical distance that required correspondence, meaning that feelings only implied in person had to be explicitly expressed.