Dads Need Friends, Too

The vasectomy party was a turning point. My husband had recently befriended a local dad crew, and Jonah, a father of two girls who worked in renewable energy and surfed on the weekends, was due for his. Jonah accidentally scheduled his vasectomy for a day his wife was out of town, natch, so Chris, a perpetually-delighted pediatrician and father of two, would pick Jonah up from the hospital and usher him to a local beer garden. There would be balloons, and a cake adorned with the phrase “There's no I in vasectomy.” As a kind, outgoing and extremely likable man with a penchant for high silliness, this was right up my husband's alley, and he was thrilled to be included. I was thrilled too, though in the bittersweet way I have come to associate with moments where the stark contrast between his intimacies and mine are revealed. I was thrilled because my husband had finally found some friends.

Because of my reproductive system, and because of my gender’s tendency to be socialized for connection, I have, by the age of 40, participated in countless vasectomy-party-like rituals. I’ve driven friends to their abortions, even paid for one. I have helped many a stranger deal with a period mishap or a nip slip. My sisters held my hips and cleaned up my shit (literal) at my two births. This is what women do.

But years into a relationship with a feminist man, when I issued the ultimatum that he go to therapy or else, I quickly came to understand that it was more than that. After all, it wasn't just therapy that made me someone who could talk about my feelings, who could turn a relational problem over and over until I cracked it and bring it back to him with an answer.

It was thousands, maybe millions of hours of deep friendship.

Once I viewed my husband as someone who just needed some good friends, I couldn’t unsee this as the source of a wide-range of marital issues between men and women. When something was amiss in our partnerships — an imbalance in parenting duties or an intolerable level of defensiveness in conflict — we passed over and over these issues, like river stones, with our friends. We got commiseration, acknowledgement, and love. We got advice. Then we took these insights back to our marriages like offerings.

But what did our husbands do, how did they try to better understand themselves, much less us? Where were their men’s groups and rituals and book clubs? Who was comparing couples counseling notes, giving Enneagram quizzes, summarizing self-help books, with them?

After that first vasectomy party, my husband and the rest of the dads joined a weekly ski-lodge-themed beer club for the winter months, and I happily waved my him off after bedtime on Mondays, almost giddy with compersion — joy from witnessing my partner’s joy.

Was it a bit condescending, to make playdates for grown men? It felt tender to me.

The dads took the train to Sacramento to see a basketball game and bunk up overnight in a hotel room. They helped each other with solo parenting jags, and took care of logistics for all-family get-togethers without having to be asked by their wives.

When I waxed on about this to my girlfriends, they asked if their husbands could join. We had all found ourselves tethered, often with great joy, to cis, hetero men in a culture that encouraged them to suppress, compete, and eventually find a wife on which to unload whatever emotional baggage they had the tools to unearth. Was it a bit condescending, to make playdates for grown men? It felt tender to me. These women, like me, were rooting for their dudes in a world where dudes were isolated, and where most of us had, condescension aside, already gotten in our 10,000 hours.

Eight thousand of which were probably earned in my women's group, where we talked for hours about our relationships and desires and dysfunctions, and which was already rich with connection and meaning-making when I was invited by a neighbor to join. And later my writer's group, which was also really a women's group. It was my sisters, whom I talk to about things that my husband does not talk about with his brother. It was the women at the coffeeshop I had never met before, but with whom I struck up conversations. It was the endless content I read from other women, examining ourselves and the people around us. Until this group, my husband had many friends, but I couldn’t really point to ways they rallied around him as a father or a husband.

But the Vasectomy Club seemed to shine a light on his best qualities: community, tenderness, a deep capacity for care. These aspects were always there but often only demanded of him by the women in his life. When I wondered if this phenomenon was unique, a guy friend explained that his friendship circles with men have a huge influence on his tendency to be the kind of emotionally in-touch man many wives pine for. “If I am in a place with a few strong examples around me, I’m pretty motivated to be a little more thoughtful, a little less selfish,” he observed. “The flip side is that I’ve found myself going with the flow in more competitive, more stereotypically guy-style environments.” In other words, men can influence one another to be shitty. But they can also influence one another to be better.

Finding such circles is another issue altogether, one that more men are interested in than you’d think. Another guy friend of mine, an exception to the rule who had a few seemingly open, expanding relationships with other men, told me that when he moved to a new city, his best strategy for making the guy friends he felt he needed was to go up to other dads on the playground and say, “Hi, are you in therapy?”

I don’t know what the dads talk about when they're alone, or if they’re all in therapy, but the groupthink for good that Garrett describes does seem to be at work with my husband. Since he made some friends, he seems happier, clearer, more like he’s giving me his second draft of himself than asking me to make sense of the first. When he got his own vasectomy this year, his friends rallied around him with a “Balls Voyage” cake and a toy gun that only shot blanks. I strolled by their little get-together to give my regards, and then I went along my way.