"Well, I'm Not Going to Get a Romantic Comedy!"

Recently, The New York Times featured an article on the weirdness that is the "man date" -- two straight guys hanging out. This past Saturday, without realizing it, I stumbled into an unscheduled man date complete with dinner and a movie. When I was in my basement as a teenager, drinking generic orange soda and playing video games, I did not spend much time thinking about the implications of just hanging out with a male friend. Many years later, after having been married and divorced, spending quality time alone with a male friend (that doesn't involve copious amounts of drinking beer or watching sports) leaves me feeling strangely ill at ease, despite the fact that in this case we spent most of the time talking about his interesting dating life (read: too many women, too little time).

After hanging out at my place for a bit, we decided to get something to eat. I asked where he wanted to go: "somewhere manly and greasy," he replied. This points out an important benefit to male/male bonding. Not dining with women allows you to indulge in appalling unhealthy cuisine. I, for example, cannot imagine myself wolfing down a chili dog with a women present -- that would be the food equivalent of dropping the "f-bomb." We ended up a local burger/taco joint, and my friend, feeling he had been underserved foodwise, ordered dessert. Our very cute waitress, Molly, recommended the fried hershey bar with ice cream mega dessert, and he jumped on it. (I had another beer.) The enormous dessert arrived with two spoons, and my friend looked at me and said: "We're not sharing; that would be TOO gay." I disagreed, believing that sharing ice cream in a place that has twenty beers on tap was mildly gay; sharing tiramisu in a French bistro with one fork would have pushed us into the capital city of the kingdom of gaydom. (Am I sounding homophobic now?)

We left dinner and went to Blockbuster to get a movie. Despite the age of video-on-demand, netflix, and video i-phones, the place was packed on a Saturday night. The place was filled with college kids and a few eligible looking single women. As we browsed the videos, I noticed that every movie we picked up had a picture of a guy with a gun on it. Pointing this out, my friend responded, "well, I'm not going to get a romantic comedy!" And so, I discovered a cardinal rule of the man date: you can watch a movie with a dude as long as it's filled with rude humor or gratuitous violence. I was fully on board with that. I became very conscious of what I was looking at because of the two thirty-ish women who were browsing beside me. We did that strange back and forth shuffle where you try not to linger too long in front a particular section. I reached down to the bottom shelf for Blades of Glory and managed to bang my head on the wire rack holding the videos. (The smack on the head reminded me that I have no hair on the top of my head -- I'm sporting "the sunroof" these days, hair on the sides and back but nothing on top.) Having made a spectacle of myself, my browsing was over for the evening. We rented Bruce Willis's Live Free or Die Hard, and there were many explosions, vicious deaths and ridiculous special effects. In the end, we agreed it was a great way to spend a Saturday night even if I didn't get to share the dessert.