I don’t think I ever got this “male bonding” thing.   I was on the basketball team, the track team and the tumbling team and I went with my high school buddy to theYM-YWHA to work out in the weight room, use the trampoline, swim and dive.
 

So, I have spent a lot of hours in sweaty locker rooms, sitting around in towels talking about…nothing much.  
 

“Did you see that pass?”
 

“What a shot!”
 

“You really deked him out” or “he really deked you out.”  
 

“They look like a bunch of wimps.”
 

“I wouldn’t to meet him alone in a dark alley.”
 

“Man, did you see the muscles on that guy.   He was built like a brick sh*t house.”
 

It was acceptable to express admiration for another male’s physique in this context because we were talking about who was likely to be a tough opponent.
 

Girls, like the guy with all the muscles, could also be “built like a brick sh*t house.”  When used about a girl, this same expression acquired another, more sexual connotation and had more to do with proportions than muscle size.   But these cases arose rarely and we quickly went back to the jargon of jocks dissecting the game and teasing each other over the faults and ineptitudes in our play.
 

The only other memorable expression that I recall from all of those hours of male bonding was one emitted by my buddy Sid, who when asked why he was spending so much time on a girl he constantly referred to as “chicken face”, made the following trenchant observation:  “She’s built like a brick sh*t house and you don’t f**k the face.”
 

As I moved up in high school, I found this whole interaction more and more boring.   I wanted to talk about the books I had read, the movies I had seen, my hopes and aspirations.   To my surprise, I found I could most easily talk about such things with girls and the occasional non-jock male who wasn’t equally interested in beer halls, pool, cars and rumbles.
 

This is what it says about me in my Grade 13 High School Year book:
 

“Rubin’s favourite pastime is talking on the phone to girls for hours. He also enjoys borrowing and lending homework.”

The second part of this was of course a tactic and strategy to achieve the first part of this.  The person who wrote this knew quite well what she was talking about since she was one of three girls I spent all my time with on the phone.

This love of talking about tastes, and learning about others has continued over time to push me into very long and involved conversations with first girls, then women.   It has been very hard for me to find very many males I can have this kind of semi-flirtatious but non-romantic interaction with.

So, while I can fake being one of the guys after those many years of hanging out with jocks, it’s not how I want to spend my time.

With females, the challenge is to keep the sex thing in its place, as an added spice to the talk but not the central focus of a relationship.  Otherwise, it’s very hard to stay friends – like Sally and Harry.  And I need that différence!