Caroline O'Donoghue: There's a curious lack of cosiness in male friendships

If you can’t be vulnerable with your own peers, then how do you exorcise the fear and anxiety that builds up in your veins?

My friend Jen has been staying with us all this week. She lives alone, so bubbling has become a lifeline for her.

When we began the bubble, we did so under the impression that we were doing her a favour; the longer she stays, the more we realise that it’s her who is doing us one. Gavin and I are so thrilled to have another person in the house that we run to Jen like Jane and Michael Banks run to Mary Poppins. We want to show her things, tell her things, regale her with the stories that we’ve told one another far too many times.

Sometimes I am suddenly hit and utterly moved by the niceness of having another woman around. It has been years since I’ve lived with another woman, and usually my outlet is female-centric holidays twice a year. After this year of deprivation, having Jen around is almost too much to handle. Someone to watch Spiceworld: The Movie with!

Someone to do a Yoga with Adrienne with! Someone to have long, admiring chats about the moon with! (A sample discussion: “The moon is our ambassador,” she says, as we stand in the garden with our wine. "The moon is woman’s line manager in the sky.”) 

I have a handful of very close female friendships and all of them have one thing in common which is that we cannot stop touching each other.

We crawl into bed with one another and watch TV on a laptop. We link arms as we walk, like school girls. We pile cushions on one another’s legs and lie on the sofa for hours, lolling on our friend's thighs and warning the other person when they need to fart.

We are not just unafraid of vulnerability. We trade in it. Our conversations are brimming with the mess of life: the disappointments, the depressions, the yeast infections. This is how I like it. I am thirty and there is a war on. There is no such thing as Too Much Information. The new world is coming and I will not spend one minute of it sitting in a cocktail bar with someone I only mildly like having guarded conversations about nothing.

It was amid one of these many reveries about the beauty of female friendship that Gavin, listening to us both, glumly admitted that male friendships did not have the same tenor. Male friendships have much to offer: they have a lot of fun together, and there isn’t the same amount of emotional gardening and spiritual heavy lifting that intense female friendships often require. There’s generally less bitching, less picking apart of tone and meaning. But there’s also a curious lack of cosiness.

For most of the women I know, cosiness is everything. It’s the backbone. Even the wildest friendships I have, the ones from the old world that included dancing and ending up at strange places at strange hours, the plodding bass line was always: after this, let’s go home and get in our pyjamas and fall asleep in the same bed. Then, let’s wake up tomorrow, feeble and full of care for one another. Let’s watch Friends under a blanket on the sofa and vaguely spoon one another while we do so. My gay and non-gender conforming friends also do this. Straight cis men, it seems, are the only ones who aren’t availing of the perfectly free and endlessly therapeutic service of physical cosiness with one another.

This was the realisation that brought tears to Jen’s eyes. “Men don’t spoon?” she asked Gavin. “No,” he said. “Straight men don’t spoon.” Further: straight men don’t watch TV on a laptop in the same bed, nor do they link arms, nor do they usually cry on the phone to one another. I am generalising, of course, but this won’t be much of a surprise to anyone.

But still, the notion of friendship without the presence of softness is very bleak to me. “We also don’t ring each other when we’re about to do something,” Gavin adds. “You guys call each other, and you talk one another out of bad decisions. We skip that step. We just do the stupid thing and only tell our friends after the house of cards has come tumbling down.” Jen and I looked at one another, and realised at the same time that the lack of straight male cosiness is indirectly linked with almost all of the ills of the world. The moon above us burst into tears. When there is no cosy, there is no softness. And what’s softness but a by-word for vulnerability?

And if you can’t be vulnerable with your own peers, then how do you exorcise the fear and anxiety that builds up in your veins, as the weight of the world continues to bear down on you?

It was like a collage of the 21st century’s most toxic masculinity was unfolding around us. Revenge porn, online trolling, incel culture: are they all just symptoms of the real sickness, which is that straight men don’t get under the same blanket and spoon one another enough? A few years ago there was a big campaign for men to talk to one another more, one of the many attempts at curtailing the mental health crisis without actually spending any money on it. It feels like this attempt should be expanded to become the Campaign for Male Spooning.

My friend turns to my boyfriend, and puts both her hands on his shoulders. “Gavin,” she says. “As soon as this is all over, we’re depending on you to be the first foot soldier in the Campaign for Male Spooning. There’s a new world coming. You can be the Adam for straight male cosiness.” Gavin agreed, uneasily, and we all hugged to seal the deal.