Shoulder to Shoulder Friendships, Not Face to Face
What happens to a friendship once the activity that built it disappears?
Back when the kids were young, like many parents, I spent hours standing on cold, wet sports pitches watching them kick balls around. I stood shoulder to shoulder with a coterie of other Dads of all personality types. The ‘footy expert’ who screamed at the teenage umpires when he didn’t like their decision. The British expat soccer fan who couldn’t help but pass on endless advice to the team coach.
You would have thought we had formed a bond, forged over cold coffee and soggy shoes, each faithfully discharging our duties - umpire escort, half-time oranges, team shirt washing. As the kids got older, some parents seemed less keen and would text the day before asking if I could give little Johnny a lift to the game- weirdly, most often the away games where we had to drive for an hour to some remote suburb.
My partner and I separated seven years ago, which also coincided with our son gaining his driver’s licence and taking off to games each weekend without needing the Dad taxi. So ended my sports-watching career and, it turns out, my relationships with all those Dads and a few Mums. Not one contacted me ever again.
This is probably not a reflection on those individual men, but rather a statement about how many men form relationships in the first place.
The sociologist Geoffrey Greif has spent years interviewing hundreds of men about exactly this kind of bond, and he has a name for it.
“In the book we talk about, I talk about this being a shoulder-to-shoulder relationship.”
Greif’s research, gathered in his book Buddy System, found that women’s friendships tend to be face-to-face, built around long conversation and the deliberate sharing of what’s actually going on. Men’s friendships, he found, run side by side: doing something together, with the talking arriving as a by-product rather than the point of the exercise - we’ll exclude all that yelling men in lycra on bicycles seem fond of during group rides.
He’s careful to say one isn’t a worse version of the other, just a different way of relating.
“It’s rare you’ll hear men say, ‘Let’s get together and have a glass of wine at this great, new, intimate French restaurant that just opened up.’”
That’s the bind of a side-by-side friendship. The pitch gave us a reason to stand near each other for as long as we were both there. But it gave none of us a reason to ask actual questions, like how things were actually going. The sole focus was the reason for our presence: watching the kids play. And contributing copious amounts of inappropriate advice to players, officials and coaches!
Greif also found that these bonds don’t need constant contact to survive.
“You think of the men in war who share a foxhole with each other, and then 25 years later, one combatant will call the other former combatant and say, ‘Can you come and help me?’ Either friend would drop everything they’re doing, no questions asked, and go and help the other guy without necessarily needing to talk about it.”
It also explains the silence: untested bonds ask nothing of you most days.
But what happens when the common activity comes to an end, as it did for my need to go watch the kids play sports? A shoulder-to-shoulder friendship is built on a shared occasion, whether that’s weekend sport, a work project or a regular bicycle ride. When those end, it turns out that the connection was limited to the activity and being in close proximity.
Remove that, and the relationship likely struggles to survive, not because of any failing on the part of us Dads, but rather the simple essence of the original reason that brought us together was singular and lightweight.
I’m going to point out at this juncture that, having maybe sounded a little negative earlier about how the other Dads didn’t reach out after our shoulder-to-shoulder activities ended, there was another underlying, unrelated cause - I was no longer a couple and therefore no longer warranted to be invited to the almost exclusively couples-based social activities around the suburb. I’ll also confess I didn’t contact any of them - relationships flow both ways.
This isn’t some fixed limitation of being a man. The psychologist Niobe Way spent two decades interviewing teenage boys about their friendships and found a level of disclosure and tenderness that defied every assumption about what teenage boys are supposed to want from each other. Her argument was that boys don’t lose the capacity for that kind of closeness as they grow up. Crucially, and I am a reflection of this, they’re taught to put it away.
“We do not need to fix boys as much as we need to help boys remain confident in their knowledge of the social and emotional world.”
Many of us men suppress the very relationship skills we naturally learn in early life once we reach adulthood. A side-by-side relationship is valid for the duration of the shared interest, but we don’t explore how to deepen the relationship beyond the pitch. What if I had invested the smallest amount of time, picked one of the other Dads and sent a few messages, maybe suggested a beer at the pub? Not for any great heart-to-heart, but a chance to connect in a broader way. I regret not realising this was possible; it never occurred to me that those Dads could have become long-term friends.