In my last blog I described a movie party for I Love You, Man, that my wife and I held at our house with four diverse couples.  That blog recounted the attendees' relationships with their sons.  Here I want to talk about whether men need friends or whether men need more than one friend.  In the movie, Paul Rudd is, essentially, happy with no male friends until he overhears his future wife's friends expressing concern about his being too dependent on her unless he has friends.  Paul Rudd then forces himself to make a friend so he has a best man for his wedding.

The men at my movie party, mostly but not all highly educated, did not subscribe to the notion that they needed a lot of friends.  The youngest (in his 30s and an emigre from South Africa) is occasionally in touch with his closest friend yet feels he could pick up with him at the drop of a hat if they called each other.  He does not have a group of guys with whom he hangs out and is content to spend time with his wife and new son.  Another man (in his mid 50s) has one close friend, also.  His wife talked about her needing (and initially not getting) that close friend's approval when she and her husband first met.  Again, this is a one man friend guy.  A third man, in his late 50s, feels closer to his sons than to his older man friends.  Another man (one half of a gay couple and in his 40s) talked about the many man friends he had lost over the years from AIDS.  He implied he was sticking to one or two close man friends outside of his relationship with his partner.  None of these men are wired into large groups of men who they considered very close (must) friends. [Must friends, as I have written earlier, are a term from my book on male friendships, Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships, and refers to your closest friends - people you must call if there is a crisis or success in your life.]  Yet the movie implies, as Paul Rudd's character observes other men hanging out together, that friendships come in group sizes.  The men at my house are all successful and in loving relationships - they are not longing for intimacy - and they have only one or two close male friends.