I Love You, Man
Last week, I was sick with a cold, so I scanned some streaming services in search of the sort of film that I could comfortably ignore while resting, since letting a movie play in the background would give me a sense of accomplishment that merely resting would not. I'd already re-stacked our coasters and folded blankets that I'd soon unfold, so I was running out of options for a productive sick day.
I settled on I Love You, Man, a late aughts buddy comedy starring Paul Rudd alongside Jason Segel, a combination that one decade later offers us a dim reminder of both the eternal (Rudd) and the ephemeral (Segel). The movie is not good, of course: It has a formulaic plot, a one-note conceit, cardboard characters, and a predictable ending.
Still, the movie resonated with me.
The opening several minutes seemed to mirror a moment in my life as well as a long-standing trend. Peter (played by Rudd) has just gotten engaged, and as he and his fiancée sketch out wedding plans, it becomes clear that Peter has no close male friends. Not only does he not have them on the verge of marriage, he seems never to have had any.
Last year, as Regina and I planned our wedding, we quickly scratched the idea of a wedding party despite Regina's close friendships that she's maintained since childhood—I didn't have anyone to provide balance in the form of a series of suits to accompany a parade of jewel-toned dresses. My few close friends were women, and the men I called friends were older or long-gone or never quite as close as it seems we could have been if circumstance had been different or, perhaps, if I had given it a bit more effort.
So, watching the movie, I was struck by the parallel lives that fictional Peter and I had lived—though my appearance has been more often (and inscrutably) compared to erstwhile Spider-Man Tobey Maguire than PEOPLE's Sexiest Man Alive 2021 Paul Rudd. Reflecting on Peter's predicament, I felt oddly sullen in the midst of a lighthearted movie that's meant to take the viewer on an amusing Vespa ride through a Californian Venice replete with fish tacos and basement covers of Rush jams.
Why didn't I have enduring friendships with other men? While I Love You, Man glossed over the raison d'être of Peter's apparent lack of masculinity or male connection, I felt compelled to reflect on my own life.
If virtue is found at the midpoint between two extremes, my estimation of my own masculinity would have been most clearly represented by a never-ending valley depicting absence rather than excess. Throughout my life, my defining features have variously been a bowl cut, a bone-thin frame, a love of hacky-sack, a gaming PC, and a desire to star in a musical. When I graduated high school, I was the only guy to receive (of my own volition) a customized "Senior Girls 2007" jersey.
As a teenager, the word "gay" entered my vocabulary: First as a barb, then as a question, and finally as a concern. Ironically, I found it easier to dismiss when people called me gay as an insult than when they framed it as a compassionate inquiry. "Well... it's just... how you dress... and what you like... and how you talk... and especially how you run. It's fine either way. I was just, you know, curious..."
On a trip to Washington, D.C. my senior year of high school, a student I met pulled me into a small circle of guys. "When did you know?" he asked. My face surely betrayed my confusion, so he elaborated. "When did you know that you were gay?" After explaining that I wasn't gay, he laughed, brushed my shoulder, and then with a sense of seriousness uttered a short sentence that's never left me: "You don't know you're gay yet. But you are." I didn't know if he was right, but after enough questioning from my friends over the past few years, I had begun to privately question myself.
This boy knew what it was to be gay, which I did not, so I gave credence to his conviction about my sexuality even as I broke the school trip rules and snuck onto the girls' floor of the hotel to snog a classmate who I knew felt more strongly for me than I did for her. It wasn't until many years later that I realized this fallen and sinful tendency toward concupiscence was a much greater threat to virtuous masculinity than my love of musical theatre or my effeminate gestures.
Lust began for me in 2003, when my friend Dario explained to me the features of girls that I ought to be paying attention to. Before, I had found myself captivated by eyes, but Dario instructed me in the art of a more downward-focused gaze that highlighted body parts I wasn't sure what to do with, but which suddenly seemed on fire with meaning—or at least desire.
Greed arrived several years later in my high school library, where a group of guys ran a poker ring between carrels holding works of Catholic theology and biographies of celebrated statesmen. We'd exchange hundreds of dollars each afternoon, and we stashed the cash and our chips on top of a shelf in the dim corner.
The other sins followed suit, as it were, and by my early twenties I was closer to converting to Catholicism than ever before but further from the faith than at any other point in my life. All of this to say: For much of my life, I had misestimated my masculinity. Because I had been so frequently called effeminate and gay, I assumed that a paucity of manliness was my curse. But perhaps as an overcorrection or simply as a result of my fallen nature, I had instead developed the sort of boorish tendencies that are now invariably referred to with the overarching label "toxic masculinity."
While there are many problems with toxic masculinity, perhaps the most potent is that alternatives are rarely illuminated by its critics. Instead, it seems that the existence of excess masculinity suggests that we ought to scrap the whole project of manhood instead of striving to moderate a natural spiritedness.
It seems to me that Christianity provides the moderating influence on manliness that modern society has found impossible to furnish. Since Christianity is not simply an ad hoc set of beliefs but instead an entirely different way of living, masculinity is reshaped along with everything else in the adoption of a Christ-centered life.
Previously vain-filled pride is recast as a commitment to developing a craft that inspires joy in others as well as oneself. The formerly arresting vice of lust is reformed as a perpetually renewed love and desire for one's wife. So, too, are the other vices peculiar to excess masculinity refined into virtue by the fire of faith. Naturally this is not to suggest that a Christian man is incapable of sin, but only that he is more keenly aware of his shortcomings and has a more suitable aim. How is a modern man who has been instructed in the foolishness of marriage, the preeminence of career, and the lack of spiritual or existential meaning to have any hope of conquering his passions?
When I think now about how few friends I've held onto, the reason is now apparent to me: Friendship always exists in a context, and my entire understanding has been changed and reformed again and again, until I finally settled on the conversion that took place in a moment and will take place for the rest of my life. The Catholic Church has afforded me a community that cherishes what is best in both men and women, helping me to grow in ways that I ought and shed what should never have made it this far.
I now have many close friends who are men. One is a secretly talented singer and patient listener who stayed at my house late into the night fiddling with a fussy Raspberry Pi; afterwards he went home to his wife and children, who are the constant focus of his life and his prayers. Another is an amply bearded musician who finds and celebrates the gifts of everyone he encounters; his two sons span the scale from exuberant to pensive, and he loves them both fervently.
A handful of us lift weights together; several others play music together; many play games together; all of us worship together. We are joined together by fraternal love—the enemy of toxic masculinity and a bond that helps grow what is best in men, namely a desire to care and provide for one's family, to protect, build up, and reshape the world in a way pleasing to God, and to always live in a spirit of sacrifice—that is, to try to live like Christ.