Most "Guy Friends" Are Just Failed Boyfriends in Disguise.

Mia Mann-Shafir
2 days ago
5 min read

Updated: 1 day ago

Come at 9 pm, we told them.

“Bet,” they replied, meaning, See you at 10:45 pm.

Nights with our “guy friends” – naturally, they were only ever nights – were fueled by the hometown mule, who delivered strawberry lemonade vodka straight to suburban parents’ homes, up-charging teenage daughters at a rate of 50%. With grins that bore full sets of milk teeth, we waved his Honda Sedan out of the driveway;

“You be safe tonight, girls!” he called out to my friends and I, as if he were three decades, and not three years, our senior.

Before the boys arrived, we broke open the Svedka. Mental clocks ticked. From 10 pm onwards, we actually watched the clock on the wall.

Their shoes, when they finally stepped over the threshold, were grey, hard to know whether they’d been born that way – grey – or if they’d once been white. Their socks, embroidered with black Nike swooshes, were similarly grey (these had undoubtedly once been white), but we didn’t care – they were here, they were here, here they were, the guys!

Is your mom home? One would ask, moving past us while we stayed planted by the door. You know we love Mrs. ——. They floated into the kitchen. We moved only so that we could watch what happened next, watch these boys hug our mothers, record it with our eyes so that we could watch it again later, soft smiling, just as good every time. The only ones more charmed than we were were some of our mothers — a fact I failed to see then, but comprehend now, to be quite distressing.

One night, one of the guy friends – I believe he is a police officer now – turned right, out of my friend’s (the host’s) living room, down the hall and past the bathroom, into the foyer. On the far side of the foyer was an air vent. When he reached said air vent, he unzipped his trousers and pissed into it.

They must’ve felt some discomfort, but his friends, our guy friends, understood how this performance worked to increase their special status, the special status afforded to seventeen-year-old boys who have the kind of friends that pee in girls’ vents, but don’t, themselves, pee in girls’ vents.

Together, we and these boys taught each other how to exist in the heterosexual world. Much of it was thrilling. Some nights, we played a special kind of Jenga, using a set of blocks on which we’d written in red, blue, and green Sharpie, “dares,” like, “Swap shirts with the person to your left.” As soccer players run around a field during a match, we mixed, we and the boys, nary forgetting — as the soccer players nary forget — that there were two teams (girls, and boys) and that each of us belonged, importantly, to one, or to the other.

The problem with all this wasn't just that they sometimes peed in our vents. It was that we mistook this little arrangement we had for friendship.

Last week, I sat on the floor of my friend's exercise room beside her as we pumped our triceps with 6-lb weights, making eye contact through the mirror as she told me about her dating life. She lives in a foreign city, and in this foreign city, she’s landed a solid pack of female friends. At night – always at night – she and these female friends go out with a group of men.

Dimly lit, sexy dinner clubs play host here, clubs whose names are their addresses spelt out in letters, - “ONE — STREET-.” Never, over the course of these long evenings, do the men and women lose sight of which team they are on. My friend’s team asks the questions, laughs at the jokes. The other team answers the questions, tells the jokes. But they rarely forget to hold a door open.

Deep friendships will not be born from these hangouts, she is sure, but even the romances that emerge from them are beset by the gendered dynamic. From the get-go, the girls in the pairings are bound strictly to the role of girl, the boys stuck playing boy — once roles like these are established, the chances of breaking free from them are low.

The period of (literal) co-education that I recall — wherein girls and boys educated each other in how to inhabit heterosexual adulthood — was never meant to last forever. We were supposed to take notes, then shed most of it and move on. Some of the people in my friend’s group – the ones at the swanky saloons in the foreign city – are in their last year, by Eurorail standards, of “youth” (27). They are grown, but remain stuck in these non-friendship friendships, stuck in this world where there is such a thing as “guy friends,” who are really not friends at all.

For no reason other than cosmic fortune, I ended up with a university friend group that is totally mixed-gender. The proposition of separating the gendered contingents of my friend group – for a girls' night, or a guys' trip – would be absurd. It's like proposing we divide ourselves into two groups where one is called, ties their shoes using the bunny ears method, and the other, ties their shoes using the wrap-around method.

Our rapports entail none of the restrained carefulness, no greater amount of self-awareness, than we’d exercise around members of only our same gender. My teen friends and I needed to know what time our guy friends would arrive, so that we could prepare ourselves, carry out the mental shifts required to go from just being to being girls. That’s hard for me to imagine now. Femininity, in the particular way I felt it had to be played for those adolescent guy friends, is hard to reconstruct, now that the guys whose company I’m used to are actually just my friends, who happen to be guys.

While true friendships with men radicalized both my platonic and inner life, they also transformed my romantic one. While my boyfriend and I retain a greater consciousness of each other's gender than my male friends and I do – insofar as gender feels tied to sexuality – very few elements of our relationship are organized by gender. When we get dressed in the morning, out of our shared closet, I know that he knows he doesn’t have to play boy. When we go out for dinner at night, and I can sit with my knee tucked up into my chest and eat every morsel of my meal (not leaving him “leftovers” I “can’t finish”), I know that I don’t have to play girl.

When a “friend” still feels like they need the modifier "guy,” probably what’s been built is not quite a friendship. And if adolescent, mixed gender relationships taught us how to play boy and girl, perhaps it's in adult ones where we learn to stop.