Masculinity is a drama not even Netflix can make.

I recently checked the brochure and couldn’t find anything on our wives or girlfriends having to be friends with each other. You see, just because we grew up together in Chingola or Chelstone or work together, it doesn’t call for the women in our lives to share recipes and skin care routines out of politeness to our lifelong friendship.

And there’s good reason for this. 

Men are not married or in a relationship with the same woman. Some are wives building generational wealth with their husbands. Others are just at the beginning of their careers. Some struggling to conceive. 

And then here come three or four friends, ushering the women in their lives to become besties all because ‘they should get to know each other’. That we should play happy couples.

There is a flawed logic in putting four adult women who know nothing about each other on a veranda and expecting them to click on a random Saturday afternoon in Ibex Hill.

The opposite is even more grim for men who get together because their wives or girlfriends went to the same boarding school. 

Netflix will pay good money to make a drama series of the forced conversations among men who do not share interests, politics, bank balances, educational background or preferences in women. 

It feels not only forced but is like a humiliation ritual to be a sociable and affable man. 

The immediate scanning of the vehicle you arrive in, where your children go to school, what you do, who you know, what you’re drinking. 

And while this is precisely the premise of masculinity – to see the world and make something worthwhile, it dresses up our varying degrees of success, failure, struggle, marriages, relationships, finances and even political views as a mere afternoon among men.

We struggle with this ritual simply because it mirrors us too sharply against the lives of men we did not seek out to befriend or associate with. Even in his mid thirties, a man will struggle to be mentored by the 60 year old husband of his wife’s best friend. He will have to swallow a gram of ego.

Men who congregate together out of shared interests have this rhythm and rhyme to their conversations. The ones who meet because their wives and partners have been friends since high school tend to skirt around reality. 

There is a veil of success that men will wear to protect their partners. It is to ensure that the post-meet up conversations do not revolve around how there’s no liquidity in the economy, that a 2006 Toyota is still a reliable vehicle or how jobs are hard to find for men these days. 

Men have to ensure that their partners’ friendship remains solid by presenting the best versions of themselves. This is the miniature of masculinity that the world does not get. 

We don’t do well with convenient masculinity.