Virginia Woolf famously noted how unusual it was to find accounts in literature of women being friends–not rivals, sisters, mother and daughter, etc., and not in their relationship to men, but friends with one another. Paging through a new novel by Mary Carmichael,
‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature.
So much of women’s lives had been obscured, and so much lost to literature, as we would have lost Julius Caesar and Hamlet and Prince Hal if writers had not seen the friendships between men as a worthy subject. (She goes into much more detail, and if you haven’t read “A Room of One’s Own,” do! It’s indispensable.)
Something just as troubling, or more, seems to be true in our time and place, not in literature but in real life, and it’s signaled by the trending term “bromance.” “Bromance” refers to a non-sexual, close relationship between unrelated men, as in “the thriving bromance between Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen,” who’ve clearly enjoyed spending lots of off-stage time together during their tour as co-stars in a couple of plays. “Brother,” “bro,” “romance”: get it?
In our culture, we don’t need a special name to describe the relationship between two women who love each other, love to spend time together, and are not romantically involved together nor seeking to be. We already have a term: friendship. What disturbs me about the embrace of the “bromance” term is the shunning of the obvious, available word.
Is there something so extraordinary about a close, loving, non-romantic relationship between men that we need a cute, arch term for it? Do men in our culture not feel comfortable calling each other friends? Is it difficult in real life, as it once was in literature for Chloe to like Olivia, for Patrick to like Ian?
Men, what’s your experience?
Sermons in Stones 
6 comments
Comments feed for this article
July 17, 2014 at 4:38 am
MmC.C. McQuain
I’m not particularly fond of the coined term, either, but I do believe it fills a void in the language. “Bromance” is a description of a relationship deeper than “mere” friendship. We need another word in English that denotes that particular degree of closeness.
And we do have a term for this as it pertains to women (which I find almost as distasteful): “besties”.
Yes, “besties” does sound childish. “Best friend,” however, is the way many mature women would refer to a special friend. Or “close” or “dear” friend, if “friend” sounds mere. But from my experience, the reason US men shy away from the term “friend” does not seem to be that it is insufficiently intimate, but that it is too intimate.
Ever since I noticed the term “bromance,” I’ve been listening for whether men describe other people as their friends. Compared with women, they very seldom do. That’s what made me wonder whether the concept was one to be referred to only rarely, or with a patina of jokiness (hence “bromance”). –AZM
LikeLike
July 18, 2014 at 11:01 am
Patrick Murfin
Hmmm. I wonder. In real life the women I know have deeper, longer lasting meaningful friendships with each other than do men. Men tend to have guys to hang around with. In pop culture there are women friends–think Lucy and Ethel, Kate and Allie, and all of the indefensible best friends of innumerable romantic comedies. On a more serious note there were, among other, the college friends who decide to open a school in Lilian Helman’s play the Children’s Hour–of course they were destroyed by an unsubstantiated charge of Lesbianism. Or the novel and film The Group by Helman’s bitter enemy and rival Mary McCarthy about a college sisterhood over time. Still, I was having a hard time coming up with more examples from serious literature–perhaps in Jane Austen. Then I recalled Larry McMurtry’s wonderful western novel Buffalo Girl which revolves around the long time close relationship between Calamity Jane and the madame Dora DuFram–a paean to faithfulness and loyalty.
LikeLike
July 18, 2014 at 11:17 am
Singing our faith, post-theism, creating new worlds, and more « uuworld.org : The Interdependent Web
[…] The Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern objects to the word “bromance.” […]
LikeLike
July 19, 2014 at 4:09 pm
NJirrevspeckay
I know that “bromance” is supposed to describe a non-sexual deeper relationship of affection between two men, but it often strikes me as a prophylactic term — I’m going to invoke the affection between us before you can infer or outright name homoerotic qualities. It’s awesome to acknowledge that there are relationships between men that go beyond hanging out — because it’s true and because it’s aspirational. But there’s enough of an edge that declares the affection devoid of sexual charge.
Heather at The Interdependent Web always captures the gist of what I write, so I think I wasn’t very clear in this post, because I really did not intend to knock the term itself, as she thinks, but rather to point out the cultural discomfort with friendship between men that the avoidance of the word “friend” suggests.
I like your analysis too, though. –AZM
LikeLike
July 21, 2014 at 10:41 pm
Paul Oakley
I grew up in an America where girls could hold hands and call each other their girlfriend but boys very quickly learned they they could not hold hands or call each other boyfriend (if only because of lingering Victorian ideas that “real” sexuality was for men not women). My youngest brother grew up in an America that was just becoming comfortable (or trying to be) with platonic friendships between persons of opposite sex but compensated linguistically by a boy or man referring to his friendgirl, because without that specificity, the assumption was that the relation was certainly based on sexual attraction. I was an exchange student in Germany, where for boys and men a Freund (m) was a significant non-romantic friend and a Freundin (f) was a woman or girl with whom one had a romantic relationship. Similarly for a woman, a Freund signified boyfriend not friend. I now live in an America where 80 year olds frequently can be heard refering to their 80 year old non-married significant other as their boyfriend or girlfriend or, to avoid that infantilism, as their honey or sweety or other such effort to convey something that our language has not yet managed. What I haven’t seen or experienced yet is a world that isn’t more screwed up than not when it comes to how we see our own and other people’s meaningful relationships. Bromance is in good company.
LikeLike
July 23, 2014 at 8:09 am
rebelwithalabelmaker
I’ve literally never heard a male use the term “bromance” about something in his own life… but it strikes me that others’ use of the term seems to differentiate between friendship and bromance… that for a guy a “friend” can mean many different flavours (the guy I play ultimate frisbee with, a guy I work with, yada yada) whereas bromance means something equivalent to a female best friend. (I’ve often differentiated between friend and best friend… although I have several best friends not organized hierarchically a la grade school… but I do find it meaningful to specify at times the more intimate friends in that way).
LikeLike