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Psychology Today, March-April 2006 Talk it Like a Man Men know how to fix it, even when what’s busted is a buddy's broken heart. By Bruce Kluger
called her “the harlot.” And most of my other male buddies advised me to go out and get laid. There’s no bonding quite like the male bonding that occurs when your wife runs off with a married man. The year was 1989, and my life had come to a head-snapping stop one hot summer evening. I’d returned home from work to discover a disturbing tableau: most of my wife’s belongings were gone from our one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. So was the cat. Later in the evening, the phone rang. “I need some time to think,” my wife said cryptically. “When are you coming home?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said, then quickly hung up. Eight distressing days later, I received a letter from her—postmark unknown—in which she declared her love for a married man who frequented the bar she tended in midtown. Six weeks shy of our second wedding anniversary, my marriage was over. I was in shock, of course, and spent the next several months trying to rebuild my life. I started seeing a therapist. I read self-help books. I dove headlong into a manic home renovation project, transforming my apartment from a love nest to a bachelor pad. I also received a lot of smart counsel from women. I shared. I listened carefully. I cried. And yet as grateful as I was to be escorted through this emotional minefield by my intuitive female A-team—my ex-girlfriend Sally, my divorced neighbor Lynne, even my Mom—it was the guys in my life who cut to the chase: “Take off for a long as you need to get your shit together,” said Barry, my boss at the magazine where I worked, “and come back only when you’re ready. Full pay.” “Where do you want to go?” offered another colleague, Michael, the V.P. of advertising sales. “Las Vegas? L.A.? Book your flight—I’ll put it on my department’s dime.” Women take care, men take charge is a maxim that has been applied to everything from family dynamics to board room politics; and in July of 1989, I instinctively took those words to heart, as I found myself gravitating more and more to my male friends whenever I felt stuck. Even though their problem-solving strategies were clearly not as touchy-feely as those of my female friends, at this moment in my life they satisfied a more pressing need in me: to feel like I was back in control. As a result, I was grateful, even relieved, that my guys seemed less interested in plumbing the back story of my matrimonial mayhem than they were in simply propping me up and sending me on my way. Untangling the knotty psychological underpinnings of any crisis takes a lot of work. But so does sanding a floor. And as often as I could, I called on my boys to help me do that kind of heavy lifting. Their company gave me comfort. What’s interesting is that men’s notorious fix-it mentality gets a bad rap, at least according to the myths espoused in Cosmo articles, which often recommend a kind of relationship-microanalysis that would leave even Dr. Phil collapsed in an exhausted heap. That’s why sometimes the best game plan is to quit rerunning clips from the previous season’s play, and just get back out onto the field. Meanwhile, the more I came to rely on men to help me recover, the more I discovered a hidden brotherhood that reached beyond my circle of friends. Cabbies, waiters, even the endless parade of workmen who now traipsed in and out of my apartment, all seemed eager to share their own stories, as if we were veterans of the same war. I enjoyed the availability and anonymity of this new corps of advisors—and let’s face it, commiseration is a wonderful thing. “You think you’ve got it bad?” said my Jamaican apartment painter after taking in my saga of heartbreak. “Wait’ll you hear what happened to me…” What I’ll never forget is that as he recounted a tale of domestic turmoil that made mine sound like an episode of The Brady Bunch, his toddler son—the product of the very same busted-up relationship he was describing—happily played among the paint cans on my living room floor. If this guy can make it through that ordeal with a child in tow, I thought to myself, surely I can do the same. For the first time since my wife had left me, I felt a glimmer of hope. But it was my friend, Dan, who would ultimately drive shotgun with me on the road to recovery. By startling coincidence, Dan’s wife had left him high and dry just a few weeks after my mine, so we formed what we called our Lonely Hearts Club. Every Thursday night we’d meet at an Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side for pasta and mutual sob stories. We’d share a few platitudinous insights from our latest shrink sessions, processing the past and arm-chair analyzing each other until our food arrived. That’s when we’d concentrate on the future—whether it was our ongoing race to see who was going to sleep with a new woman first, or our obsessive discussions about the second half of the baseball season. Women often remark that sex and sports are classic examples of men’s shallowness. But for Dan and me, both topics had one thing in common: They gave us something to look forward to. In the end, I suppose, we were tag-teaming against a common enemy—stagnation—and in the process letting each other know that we weren’t alone. Before long, the Lonely Hearts Club grew. Stu and Walt, both of whose marriages were in dire jeopardy, joined our regular get-togethers, routinely leaving us all slack- jawed with mind-blowing accounts of the abuse they suffered at home. Rarely did anyone offer prescriptive advice; rather, we all just listened. For me, the stories were a chilling reminder of the power of denial, and how turning a blind eye to the warning signs had led to the crash-and-burn of my own marriage. But we also laughed a lot, talked about women, and hugged each other when we said our goodbyes. Then after a few months, the club gradually started to disband. I met a woman. Dan moved to California. And Stu and Walt drifted off to begin the slow and sad process of ending their own marriages. It has been 16 years since the last meeting of the Lonely Hearts Club, and I’m happy to report that all four founding members are now married—three of us with children. And while I can’t say for sure that our respective happy endings are the direct result of any profound revelation that came out of our Lonely Heart roundtables, I can say that without the divine company of those special Boys of Summer, my journey would have been that much lonelier. |
