Hamlett’s essay focuses on a brand of masculinity that is highly westernized, and it doesn’t explore the many important differences between subcultures within western masculinity. However, as an exploration of how many women living in a patriarchal culture feel about their emotional burdens in relation to men, the essay is, in my opinion, required reading in general. And as a romance reader and writer who has long been drawn to friendship storylines, it also feels like required reading in specific. Is our genre—especially in its depiction of the happily ever after between cishet men and women—sometimes guilty of setting up heroines for a lifetime of being bankrupted by emotional gold diggers?
I suspect the answer is pretty complicated. After all, in Crusie’s Bet Me, Min isn’t the only one who has group of friends—Cal does, too. Moreover, the very structure of romance—especially the “low” or crisis moment, wherein our main characters are separated, seemingly lost to each other forever—often seems to force the kind of emotional intimacy between men that maybe doesn’t happen all that often in real life. I’ve read countless romance novels that feature a down-and-out hero revealing his heartbreak to another man, a man who ends up giving him the perspective and advice he needs to get moving—to apologize, or to forgive, or to find some kind of compromise that allows him to be with the woman he loves. Indeed, as I’ve written about on this site before, romances often seem to show men developing the kinds of emotional tools that we might wish they had in a culture that still valorizes a certain (disappointing) type of masculinity. Perhaps friendship—close, emotionally intimate friendship—is a tool that men are more likely to have in the pages of romance novels than they are in the actual days of our lives.
But even if we allow that emotional intimacy between men might be more prevalent in romance, I don’t think we should ignore the ways in which the genre still sometimes limits such expressions of intimacy. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, fellow romance readers: hero tells his buddy about his feelings. Buddy responds with earnest commiseration and advice.
Then one of them says, “Are we gonna paint each other’s nails now or something?”