An old question

Friendship between men has been, for me, one of the most difficult feelings to understand. I have seen it in others, experienced it intensely, recognized it when it appeared, and known that I needed it, yet I have never managed to define its boundaries clearly. I can tell its story through a few people and a few events that have remained close in my memory; but when I try to explain it in general, I feel that part of its truth escapes me. That is where this text begins.

My friendships with women occupied an essential place in my life and gave me much to think about. Some became entangled with love or passion; others remained within the realm of mutual affection, admiration, or intellectual complicity. Even when they were complicated, I had a familiar vocabulary for them. I could speak of attraction, passion, tenderness, longing, closeness, or separation and, at times, even of sex. In my friendships with men, the feelings were not necessarily weaker, but the right words seemed fewer and less certain.

Closeness between two men can bring together admiration, solidarity, rivalry, identification, tenderness, and the need for support. As long as it remains unnamed, it is accepted without too many questions; when we try to describe it, embarrassment, the defensive joke, or fear of how it may be interpreted appears. It is not the feeling that is uncertain, but the vocabulary with which we try to express it.

What we call friendship

Aristotle distinguished, in simplified terms, friendship based on utility, friendship born of the pleasure of being together, and friendship based on valuing the other person, the latter being true friendship. His classification remains useful, but life does not place people into such neat compartments, especially because feelings evolve. A relationship may begin through neighbourhood, school, military service, a profession, or a shared passion and may become, without either person noticing the moment of change, a bond in which each wishes the other well without expecting any benefit in return.

With many of the men I have known, our relationship remained tied to the circumstance that had made the meeting possible. I had work colleagues with whom I worked well for years, people with whom I shared an interest, a journey, a period of professional life, or the pleasure of conversation. Such relationships can be sincere and important without becoming lifelong friendships. Friendship begins, perhaps, when the circumstance that gave rise to it is no longer enough to explain it.

A friend is not only someone whose company you enjoy, nor merely someone you can rely on in times of need. He is someone before whom you do not always have to appear strong or self-assured. He knows some of your weaknesses, perhaps even something of your ridiculous side, and does not use that knowledge against you. He does not absolve you of your mistakes, but neither does he reduce you to them. He offers you a form of recognition that family, love, or professional success cannot fully replace.

An indirect language

In my experience, friendship between men has expressed itself mainly through actions and gestures. It was built from time spent together, shared experiences, jokes repeated until they became a shared code, help offered without ceremony, and silences that required no explanation. Sometimes the mere fact that someone stayed in the room with you even after you had behaved unbearably, walked beside you regardless of how quickly or slowly you were moving, or answered your call was worth more than a declaration of affection.

Discretion in relationships between men has its own nobility. There is a form of care that does not advertise itself and a loyalty that does not need to be proclaimed. Yet the same indirect language can also become a limitation. Men often come to know what to do for a friend, but not how to tell him what he means to them. They can talk for hours about politics, work, women, illness, or death and still carefully avoid simple sentences such as: “I care about you,” “I enjoyed talking with you,” or “I needed you.”

Irony kept our relationships with other men free of pathos, just as it helped us endure difficult circumstances. At the same time, it sometimes became the curtain drawn over vulnerability. A pat on the shoulder, an affectionate insult, an invitation for coffee, or the apparently ordinary question “How are you?” carried feelings we were not prepared to express directly. Friendship between men is not devoid of emotion, but its emotion often speaks in a disguised dialect.

Admiration, tenderness, and shame

Two men may grow close because they resemble each other, but also because they are different. Sometimes one sees in the other what he himself would have wished to be: freer, calmer, more natural, more self-assured, or more at peace with his own nature. The friend then becomes a strange mirror. He shows us not only who we are, but also a possibility within us that has not yet been fulfilled.

Admiration may also contain a form of tenderness. The word makes many men uncomfortable because it seems reserved for love or for the relationship between parents and children. Yet there is tenderness in the way a friend spares you humiliation, bears with a weakness, keeps a confidence, or accompanies you when he can do nothing to help. It is one of the discreet forms that care between people can take.

In the education I had received, such closeness between men had no vocabulary of its own. Hence the question of whether its intensity had to be explained by something other than friendship. I have found no single explanation, and perhaps none exists. Human nature is not made of airtight compartments. Admiration, identification, the need for protection, the desire to be accepted, and the joy of closeness can coexist; it is precisely their mixture that gives each friendship its unique form.

Three formative friendships

When I try to give concrete substance to these reflections, I return to Mircea, Nicu, and Gabi. They appear here because, around each of them, memory has preserved a story that illuminates one age of my life. My bonds with them began in childhood and youth, during the years when my personality was still taking shape, and each of them contributed, in his own way, to that formation.

In childhood and youth, time seems unlimited, and closeness can take hold with a passion and availability that are difficult to recover later. A friend enters a territory of our life that is still unoccupied: he sees us uncertain, enthusiastic, vulnerable, and still undecided about the person we will become. That is why some friendships of youth remain connected not only with the person we knew, but also with the person we were becoming in his presence.

Mircea: continuity

Mircea was my oldest friend, the boy from across the street, raised in the same Bucharest neighbourhood and under the gaze of the same world. Ours was not a confessional friendship, and we did not tell each other our most hidden thoughts. I believe the reason was his great discretion, instilled by his upbringing in everything concerning relations with others. What bound us, however, was the duration of the friendship. Each preserved in the other the proof that the neighbourhood, those houses, our parents, and our youth had truly existed. He showed me that friendship is measured not only by the intensity of confidences, but also by the continuity of mutual recognition between equals. Mircea was not my confidant, but he remained my friend. Mircea’s story belongs on a separate page.

Nicu: trust

With Nicu I experienced a closer and more vulnerable friendship. He stood beside me before and after my father’s death, welcomed me into the world of his family, and accepted without irony the effusiveness of my youth, when I needed affection more than I knew how to admit. In his presence, I did not have to justify myself or conceal my anxiety. His friendship gave me what I would now call emotional security. My regret that I was not equally close to him during his final years is also part of the truth of that bond. Nicu’s story has its own place, together with the events and people that accompanied it.

Gabi: the freedom to confide

Gabi entered my life for only three months, during military service, but left a disproportionately strong mark. In our nightly conversations in the barracks dormitory, I discovered that we could speak about ourselves without the solemnity of declarations and without feeling judged. He always listened to me with kindness and, when appropriate, with irony. I admired his charm, his irony, and his freedom in making unexpected associations, as well as the jokes he stored in his memory like jewels to be offered to friends. In fact, I saw in him a freer version of myself, less burdened by prejudice. He showed me that duration is not the only measure of friendship: sometimes a few months can illuminate parts of us that entire years had failed to bring into view. Gabi’s story preserves this unrepeatable parenthesis of youth.

Seen together, these three friendships reveal three dimensions of my formative years: the shared memory of a life lived in the same space and time, trust in feelings, and self-discovery. Mircea preserved the continuity of my beginnings, Nicu gave me the security of closeness, and Gabi the freedom to confide.

Friendship in the face of time

Friendships between men are often strong in youth and harder to preserve in adult life. Work, marriage, children, changes of residence, and daily obligations reduce the time once available to them. We tell ourselves that a true friendship can withstand any interval and, for that very reason, sometimes leave it unnourished for too long. Trust may endure, but shared life grows thinner.

Friendships formed in adulthood begin from a different point. We meet as people already formed, each with his own past, family, convictions, and habits. Closeness develops more slowly and requires respect for a life that existed before us. It may have less impetuosity, but often more lucidity, greater tolerance, and a more exact understanding of the other person’s limits.

Emigration made this experience of friendship more painful for me. Distance did not erase friendships, but changed the form of their presence. Some survived in letters or rare conversations, others in a greeting exchanged with joy during a chance meeting, and still others only in memory. I discovered late that inner fidelity does not always compensate for concrete absence. We can carry someone within us and nevertheless fail to be beside him when he needs us.

In old age, friendship also becomes a living archive. Old friends know versions of us that none of those encountered later have ever seen. They remember our parents’ home, the fears and ambitions of the beginning, jokes that can no longer be explained, and journeys we planned but never made. When one of them dies, we lose not only a person; a witness to part of our own life also disappears.

More recent friends did not witness my beginnings, but they know the person I have become. With them I share the questions of the present, accumulated experience, the need for dialogue, and the fragility of age. They belong to another layer of life and another form of closeness.

Where the fine line lies

For a long time I believed that the difficult-to-confess line lay between friendship and a feeling of another kind. Today I see it in several places: between closeness and freedom, between tenderness and restraint, between the need for the other person and respect for his separate life. A friend must be able to come near without occupying you, support you without directing you, and know your weaknesses without taking away your dignity. A friendship becomes oppressive when it demands exclusivity, submission, or constant reassurance. It remains alive when the two can separate in order to live their own lives and meet again without demanding an account of every absence.

Perhaps it is precisely this combination of closeness and restraint that makes friendship between men so difficult to describe. It can be very deep without being demonstrative, tender without calling itself tenderness, faithful even when meetings grow rare. Yet the silence that protects it can also impoverish it. Sometimes a single word spoken at the right time would have been enough for a friend to know how much he meant to you.

Instead of a conclusion

As can be seen, I have not found a definition that can encompass all friendships between men, nor do I think I still need one. I know only that there are people without whom our inner biography would be poorer. They do not replace family or love, but offer us something else: recognition between equals, the freedom to be imperfect, and the feeling that we do not cross the world alone.

Friendship between men no longer seems to me an enigma that must be solved, but a bond whose forms must be recognized. It can mean shared memory, trust, the freedom to confide, help, admiration, or simply the act of remaining beside someone. None of these forms exhausts it.