I Love You Man: Men and Friendship

Seth and Evan.

Tucker and Dale.

Vin Tanner and Calvera.

Gordy Lachance and Chris Chambers.

Shelley and Keats.

What do these pairs have in common? If you don't know, wait a second. Permit me this digression.

I'd like to tell you about the park where I take my dog. It's related.

I really love my dog, and I really love my time with my dog, and there are definitely times when I love most of all being alone with my dog. However, there are also times when I like nothing more than running into the other guys at the dog park who also love their dogs.

It's not technically a park for off-leash dogs, so I suppose it's a tiny act of (masculine?) defiance to let our dogs run free there. Guys are pretty good about cleaning up the mess. You're more likely to step in dog doo on the Upper West Side than you are at this park. The dogs at the park are usually big (mine is a lab-mutt who weighs about 85 lbs and runs like a drunken zebra in the house, but in the park and the woods he's as graceful as a gazelle), and the dogs romp with abandon. There is all sorts of growling and wagging of tails. Occasionally there's a bit of humping, but not as often as you'd think. Mostly the dogs love to chase or be chased with sticks in their mouths.

Here's the thing. I really love the guys at the dark park. There's Cynthia and Sadie and Snowball and Corduroy and Jake, to name a few. Of course, those aren't the guys' names. Those are their dogs' names. I honestly don't know the names of the guys at the park. But we all know our dog's names, and we stand there under the naked winter Maple tree, some smoking, some sipping coffee, our hoodies pulled tight against the cold, and we smile and look at our dogs and then at the ground and then back at our dogs again, but we talk, man.

We interact.

Cynthia's dad has been sick but is getting better. Snowball's father can't even talk about the Patriots if they lose. Sadie's Pa won't let anybody discuss the limited lifespan of a German Shepherd,

"Don't even go there," he says, in between drags on his Marlboro. "I'll still be comin' here after she's gone, but it won't be the same."

We all need that park, maybe even more than our dogs.

Guys, as a rule, aren't all that good at telling each other how they feel (newsflash). There is data to support this, and this data helps me to understand why I like, despite my hairline, visiting my old-fashioned barber, and why I relish my dog and his park buddies, and why I feel warm and fuzzy whenever anyone who ever feels up for it is discussing Breaking Bad in a restaurant or a bar. It's why I love sports and action movies as much as chick flicks. (Find me the guy who doesn't like Love Actually.) Chalk it up to the fierce individualism of American Culture. Chalk it up to the way we admire Shane as he walks away from that kid at the end of the movie. Chalk it up to our deficient and lonely Y chromosome. Doesn't matter to me how we explain it, as long as we acknowledge it.

The research on all of this is pretty cool. In the November 2011 issue of the American Journal of Primatology, it is noted that male Bonnet Macaques (a kind of monkey) need time together to become friends. They don't just buddy up to any ol' Macaque, but when they do, they seek out their buddies in time of trouble or insecurity. In the 2009 issue of the journal Sports and Exercise, folks found that boys with good attachments to their parents made better dyadic (one-to-one friendships) with teammates in sporting events. That made the team stronger and the friendship more lasting. Thus, guys who are OK with their parents are also OK with wearing tights among each other in a football huddle, and these same guys tend to do less stupid things (another finding in the study) after the game. Finally, a chapter written by Dishon and Nelson from the University of Oregon in 2007 found that deviant talk among adolescent boys did not necessarily affect friendships among men, but did correlate to higher levels of adverse events in adulthood.

All that potty talk in movies? Well, the guys are still friends, they just grow up and do silly things with each other as adults. (Another movie: Old School)

So, given the data and the facts here, did you figure out the connections above?

To whom do all those paired names belong?

Well, we got Seth and Evan from Superbad; Tucker and Dale from Tucker and Dale versus Evil; Vin and Calvera from the Magnificent Seven; Gordy and Chris from Stand By Me; and of course the famous romantic poets Shelley and Keats.

These guys are tight, man. They'd fight wars for each other, and they'd risk it all for that brotherly love.

What does Shakespeare let Henry describe? "We few...we happy few...we band of brothers."

These movies and these stories bring tears, literally, to lots of guys' eyes. I know this because I have cried those tears myself and I have seen others cry them also.

Hell, we've been writing stories with these themes since the beginning of time, and there's no end to the movies we could name.

Peter Klaven and Sydney Fife.

We love them, man. And we know you do, too.

Schlozman's novel, The Zombie Autopsies, will be published in audio and paperback format in March.