“I’m Becoming More Like Them”
By Jonathon Reed
About a year ago, Logan messaged me for help on an application to a new school. During our conversation, I found out that the school was in Florida instead of where he lived in California—he didn’t know for sure, but there was he chance he was moving. “I don’t know if I want to go or not,” he told me. “We would have a bigger house and stuff, but I would miss friends.”
“You love California,” I said. You love your friends and it might be hard to find the same level of connection you’ve built over the last few years, I didn’t say.
“I know,” he wrote back.
I waited for a few minutes, thinking about the balance between being hopeful and being real. I didn’t want to be overly cheerful, but I also didn’t want to bring him down. “Good things don’t really make up for good people,” I added.
“I know.”
Logan moved to Florida at the end of the summer. I’ll never know entirely what he left behind in California. I know that he had half a dozen friends on his street and the next, that on early mornings he would go to one of their houses for breakfast before bicycling together to school. I know that his grade at school held a lot of trust between themselves and cried at their graduation ceremony. I know that they were almost always together.
The new school isn’t the same. It’s a private school built for achievement, serving a highly ambitious student population and no single school district. It’s meant a lot of changes for Logan, with one of the most significant being the depth of his relationships with his peers. “They’re not as open or warm as the people in California,” he said on the podcast. “Like it’s not as…I don’t know how to say it. There’s more separation between people.”
Over the last few months, he’s also noticed changes within himself. While he still identifies the same strengths in himself that I do—his capacity for connection, his thoughtfulness and selflessness—he sees himself reflecting the attitudes and priorities of the people around him.
“I don’t know if it’s just high school or being in a new place, or new people or whatever it is, but I feel like I’m changing. Like, I can notice myself…my personality is different from when I left. I’m becoming more like the people that live here, more competitive in school, more—just not as, I don’t know. As generous and stuff like that. Maybe it’s because I don’t have my friends here to support me and be like…be here, but it also could just be that I’m getting older and all that. I don’t really know.” — Logan on the podcast
“I mean, I’ve never done this before,” he said, his voice going a little soft on the edges. “So I don’t know.”
Friendship has been an ongoing theme within this project; as they reflect on personal experiences, boys have steadily revealed the centrality of peer relationships in their lives. It wasn’t until my conversation with Logan, however, that I really started grappling with the contextual nature of friendship. It’s a lot easier to think about boys’ relationships in neutral spaces like mountain bike trails or bedrooms than in the complex social negotiations of hierarchical educational institutions.
When it comes to adolescent boys’ friendships, there’s a chance neutral ground isn’t so easy to come by.
To get a better understanding of boys’ relationships in schools, I spoke with Michael Reichert, a psychologist who has done extensive research and program development on boys’ relational qualities. “The stereotype is that boys aren’t particularly intimate with their friends,” he said on the podcast. “But research that has been done specifically on boys’ friendships actually tells us that many boys feel like they live and die on the quality of their most intimate connections.”
The value that Logan placed on his closest friendships in California was unmistakeable. Yet in navigating a more competitive and isolated school environment over the past year, he hasn’t rebuilt that level of connection. Maybe it takes time. Or maybe the combination of hierarchical norms of masculinity within a school that tacitly endorses competition has served as a one-two punch to his capacity for trusting relationships.
“In young people’s relationship cultures, the potential exists for creating spaces that afford boys the opportunity to be and become open towards interdependency and capable of inclusive compassion. However, hierarchically ordered peer cultures, dominant constructions of masculinity—and implicit subscription and endorsement of these hierarchies and constructions by education—together with other broader structures of gender make such an orientation a tricky thing to embed in one’s attitudes, practices, and personal ethos.” — Tuija Huuki
I’m not there, so I don’t really know. I do know, however, that schools can be places for the authentic development of close relationships between boys. Michael, for example, helps lead a peer counselling program in a private school not unlike Logan’s. He told me about a recent session in which a senior student with tears in his eyes spoke in front of a large group of his peers. “There was this active sense of the other boys in the room both really understanding what he was saying, and holding him while he allowed himself to ache and hurt.”
Peer counselling creates a space for boys to be emotionally vulnerable with each other. Vulnerability leads to connection.
This is valuable in and of itself, but also tangibly linked to boys’ well-being in the context of their resistance to masculine norms. In an article I wrote in October, I described a report in which boys who didn’t adhere to expectations of ‘toxic’ masculinity experienced lower rates of violence and risk-taking behaviours, more positive mental health and stronger relationships.
Researchers have found, however, that these positive outcomes happen particularly alongside trusting relationships.
Judy Chu, an expert on boys’ gender socialization, wrote a commentary in Psychology of Men & Masculinity in which she drew on other research to suggest that boys’ resistance to masculine norms only had a positive impact on their mental health when they were also supported by close friendships. “It was only when combined with having a close friendship,” she wrote, “that a boy’s explicit resistance could be protective.”
In reading this, I’m drawn back to Logan talking about noticing his personality changing in the absence of his close friends from California, and Michael describing the significance of boys’ friendships.
“If a boy has at least one friend who knows him and accepts him as he is, that boy is better armed to stave off peer pressure and the more toxic effects of conventional masculine norms. […] I’m always touched by the very intuitive way that boys understand what it means to be a brother to someone, to leave no one behind emotionally, to use the power of their relationships to hold each other up and help each other through difficult things.” — Michael on the podcast
Boys go through all kinds of difficult things. Moving across the country, for one thing, or going to a new school, or resisting the pressures to fit themselves into the conventional definitions of what a man should be. As parents, educators and mentors, we can be relational anchors in providing them with a sense that they are known and loved. We can also keep our eyes open to the contexts of our boys’ peer relationships and the structures that either limit or create space for vulnerability.
When I started this project, I didn’t really expect so many of boys’ stories to come back to friendship. I’ve heard from diverse boys who are deeply aware of themselves and the expectations of masculinity around them. We’ve talked about different topics from stereotypes to violence to mental health, but throughout all of these stories the important characters are most often the ones alongside them—their friends.
How do boys find belonging? How does a boy who moved to a new school find the depth of connection he so innately desires? How do educators help anchor boys to themselves and the kinds of men they want to be?
I don’t really expect to answer these questions anytime soon, but I do know that I’ve learned a lot by asking them. Listen to the episode on Simplecast or wherever you get your podcasts, and join the conversation.
Written by Next Gen Men Program Manager Jonathon Reed as part of Breaking the Boy Code. Also published on Medium.
Breaking the Boy Code is a feminism-aligned publication on masculinity on Medium, and a podcast on the inner lives of boys on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Spotify. Follow @boypodcast on Twitter and Facebook for podcast-related updates and masculinity-related news.