I love television. Like games, I have wasted much of my life in pursuit of good entertainment at it began from a very young age.

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I grew up during the golden age of the male protagonists. The James Bond, Indiana Jones, Ethan Hunt archetypes. Men that could throw down, get drunk, get the girl and still have time to save the world. All these men on my TV were the same: the strong good guy who would do anything to save the day and they didn’t need anyone else’s help to do it. Sure, Bond had Q and Ethan Hunt had his team but during the crisis, it was the hero that stood on the precipice, holding the fate of the world in their hands. One thing none of these men had was friends, and I am not talking about people that show up in the second act to help the hero when he seems down and out, I mean equals that they could confide in. There was no scene in the Batman movies where Bruce Wayne talks to Alfred about the crippling trauma of his parents’ death or an episode of Dragon Ball Z where Goku comes to terms with being one of the last of his species. These men didn’t need any one. So, I thought, neither did I.

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Millions of men have grown up with this idea, that the real sign of manhood is to suck it up and get things done without burdening others and as a result we have grown up with a lack of emotional and mental support. Studies carried out in universities across America, Australia and New Zealand have shown that men do not place a high value on same-sex friendships and even avoid engaging in intimate same-sex friendships. Rather, men derive emotional and mental support from their opposite-sex relationships. Even when men do admit that having same-sex relationships is important there is an almost pathological resistance to the idea of sharing how much they care about each other. This makes sense since the common story arc for male protagonists in western TV and movies was to find or save a woman and through that experience have a sexual and sometimes emotional connection with them.

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The ‘will they, won’t they’ trope of most 90s sitcoms comes into play here quite effectively; where the male protagonist’s main goal is to find a compatible partner and by extension wholeness (usually with the girl that was right there all along). Think of Friends, Fraser, Boy Meets World, That 70s Show, How I Met Your Mother, Big Bang Theory, the list goes on and each series showed its male viewers one thing: the only person you can get emotional support from is your girlfriend. And all this does is instil a strong sense of loneliness in male viewers, especially those not in relationships with women.

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It is not a completely lost cause though, in the late 2000s there was a shift in television as we saw the rise of the anti-hero and, thankfully, the fully-fledged female protagonist. Another of these shifts has been in the representation of male characters in relation to one another. For example, one of my favourite shows, Community, has a very interesting cast of multi-racial and multi-cultural people that form a study group at a community college. Community is a very self-aware show that is constantly challenging sitcom tropes that have been around for decades. One of the ways it does this is through its portrayal of the friendship of two of its main characters, Troy and Abed. TV shows like Friends might have begun this shift towards a good portrayal of strong male friendships (the relationship between Joey and Chandler for example) but the show was held back by a sense of homophobia and fragile masculinity. Community was released in a more accepting space which allowed it to create a healthy male friendship between these two unlikely characters. Troy (an ex-high school football champion) and Abed (who has an undiagnosed psychological condition) form an intimately close friendship that carries them throughout the show. They move in together, and although the show does make some comedic pot-shots at them, it is always overcome by the genuineness of their relationship. They both grow as characters because of the relationship and at no point is it reduced to something sexual. For me this became a positive example of male same-sex friendships. Where both characters are allowed to express their bare emotions, challenge and care for each other. A friendship so wonderful that when it ended, because Troy left the show, it left the series feeling tangibly different.

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It is these types of healthy male friendships that I feel are lacking in society today. Men have no healthy way in which to have those conversations that go past the superficial stuff and get right down to the meat of life. Sharing the frenzy and fervour of the result of a soccer or rugby match might bring men closer through a shared experience but it does nothing for them emotionally. And what if there isn’t that shared experience? How will men engage in relationship with one another if they cannot connect on such a basic level? These are the questions that started to plague me in the later stages of my life, because I have experiences with both the superficial and genuine same-sex male friendships and all I can say is, it matters. It matters to have these relationships because it is how we build our masculinity. It allows us to work out our emotions with people who truly know us and share a deep intimate knowledge of our past. If men do not have a space where they can freely engage masculinity with other men, then what you get is a repressed and lonely man who is not equipped to properly deal with what life has to throw at him and so lashes out at others.