Week 1 - Conscious Masculinity - The Value of Friendship

All right, well, here we are again. Another week in the Cadre sphere. It's been a good week. It's been a good week. Today's topic, right, we're on week one. So it's conscious masculinity. Happy February, everyone. Today's topic is about the value of friendship. And now there are lots of ways we could approach this. But I'll tell you what's got me thinking about it today. I've got a friend, he's got brain cancer. I'm watching him go through that, and I'm trying to be available and be of service to him.

I'm also watching him be surrounded by love and by friends. Now, this is a guy in the 12 step community. So men show up a little differently in the 12 step community than we tend to show up in the rest of society. Although I think that's changing with the younger generations. And all I mean by that is men are very isolated today. Men, the research is still showing that men, the vast majority of men, don't have one, one, one relationship that they can truly open up to and trust. Now, that's not my experience because again, of 12 step recovery.

I'm watching my friend with brain cancer and I'm watching all the men that have shown up. And then I was just doing some work up North California, Northern California, Sebastopol, in that area, which I've never been to. It's beautiful, even though it was raining a fair amount. And I spent time with a friend of mine who moved to California from Minnesota, just like I did. And I'm a musician. He's a musician. And he just gave his day to me to work on a song I wrote and to record it and to do that.

It was fun for him. And he said that's why he was doing it and it was fun for me, and that's why I did it. But we also had a wonderful exchange, a wonderful ability to kind of connect. And so one, I have a brain that tells me I'm not as connected as I am. I have a brain that tells me I'm not as liked as I am. It's all the fallout from growing up in an alcoholic home, but it's in there deep, right? It lodges in there. And it really obscures the truth of connection, the truth of friendship. And so I've been reflecting on that.

And interestingly enough, I'm sober 30 years. And a guy who helped me get sober that I lost touch with out of the blue. I was talking about him last week, actually. To us, to A friend. And out of the blue, he texts me. And he texts me a picture when I was definitely not sober. And. And it's just kind of like, wow, you know, when I thought of him last week, I could have texted him, but I didn't, so. Friendships can be fragile. As men, we are taught to do our friendships in a pretty superficial way.

We're not necessarily taught the skills necessary for really kind of maintaining friendships. A lot of guys, and I see this happen. It's happened with me. It's happened to me a lot. We don't know how to navigate conflict. So, like, hey, yeah, we're buddies. Hey, yeah, this is great. Hey, yeah, let's hang out. And then resentment starts to build or some kind of disconnection or some kind of frustration or something like this, or people start to just kind of individuate, as often happens in a friendship after the bromance or any of the bond, you know, where nobody can do anything wrong, just like other relationships.

And then it's like, boom. So many guys, they don't know what to do. They go dark. They just go dark. They don't know how to say, hey, man, you know, I value our friendship, but I've been having some difficulty in our communication, or I've just been feeling some frustration. We're not taught that. Women aren't taught that. You know, women, I think, can gravitate to it a little bit more because of how they're socialized and because of how they're encouraged to practice skills. But the truth is, so many of us just don't have that.

So, like, what is the value of friendship? I've got a friend and. Well, he's in my band and one of the drummers, and he. And he's. He's a normie. And he and his best friend, every weekend they do what's called a walkie talkie. They go for a walk and they just connect and they talk. And I'm pretty sure it's not superficial stuff. They're not just talking about the playoffs, you know, or the weather or the fires in California or politics, you know, But. But that's the distinction, right? That's the distinction for men today is like, do you have a friendship where you can truly connect?

I remember one time, many years ago, I was walking with a guy. He was a friend of mine. We were walking around one of the lakes in Minnetonka or in Minnesota, in the Twin Cities. Lake Nokomis, to be exact. And we're walking around. I'm opening up to him, I'm sharing all this stuff with him and were, you know, we're walking around and he's just kind of sharing, you know, kind of basic stuff, not really talking or anything. Well, it turns out that day he left to go on a trip and had an affair on his wife, who I also knew.

There was no conversation about his concern about that, his thinking about that maybe he had already decided that that's what he wanted to do. But in the world that I live in, like, that's the value of friendship. Checking stuff out before I do it, before I say something stupid to my wife or my daughter, before I do something stupid, before I blow something out of perspective. And, you know, so many of us have our attachment issues and we don't even know it, who don't even know what attachment is.

For those of you watching, I can't recommend enough learning about attachment, learning your attachment style, understanding the attachment style of your partner. And it's like, that's valuable information. I wish I had that information. Knowing my attachment style and my partner's attachment style when we first started dating, and especially when we were married, it would have helped me navigate some of the painful disconnection that happened so often, right? Because there's the push and pull, the constant push and pull of relationships.

But how to interpret that and how to understand it and how to better navigate it. Attachment theory and attachment lenses can help with that so, so much. But that's part of friendship. So, you know, if you're a guy and you're watching this, I don't have really any answers, per se. Like I said, I still have a voice in my head that tells me I don't have friends, and it's not true. But. But I have to be mindful of that. I have to be careful of that. And a lot of guys have those inner voices that they listen to that they're not going to share with anybody.

And those inner voices, they call a lot of the shots. A lot of the shots. So my hope is for those of us who have men in our lives who aren't as connected, maybe they're not in recovery or they don't have a men's group or something like that, is that we help them find a bridge, a bridge to connection, like genuine connection. And sometimes it's just like, the subtle things, right? I play volleyball and I just try to model at times a little bit more of an intimate relationship in other things that I do a little bit more of an intimate relationship.

Even in the band that I'm in once a year we we have a dinner and we kind of celebrate the the year that was and we anticipate the year ahead. And and in that I try to model a level of vulnerability and openness that's genuine for me not contrived but also for some of the other guys and the women frankly to see that. So those of us who have the skills we have an obligation I believe to model it. There are many, many lonely men out there and they don't even know it and they don't know what to do about it and they don't know how to talk about it.

I'm grateful that I've been given the skills to talk about it and I'm grateful I've been given the skills to take action that leads me toward greater connection rather than less so that's to me the value of friendship. It's one step at a time but it has great value. So wishing you all a very wonderful weekend and.