Posts Tagged "men"

Guyside: ride like the…

Posted by on Jun 11, 2014 in Guyside | 0 comments

My partner in crime, Bob LeDrew just completed a two day ride to Niagara Falls and he’s out getting his legs back. He’ll be back in the Guyside saddle next Wednesday!

In the Bleachers - bl_c051007.jpg

 

 

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Guyside: “Engage” isn’t just for Captain Picard

Posted by on Mar 19, 2014 in aging, Boomer, Guyside, men | 1 comment

Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart may be appearing together in “Waiting for Godot” in New York, but even a Google search for their names will quickly give you the sense that they are great friends. (photo: BBC)

I had a feeling, but there’s data to support my gut: the demographic group with the smallest network of friends is… me. The adult, straight, white dude. I’m probably an outlier in that sense: I have a lot of people who I’m proud to call friends, some of whom are very close friends indeed.

But it appears that guys like me are in need of social engagement, and not just because we look weird sitting at the bar with a beer and a plate of chicken wings, alone. Actually, that sort of engagement — beer, food, a sporting event- – is often called “shoulder-to-shoulder” friendship. The counterpart to that is “face-to-face” friendship, and the big-brained folks who study such things suggest that women tend to have more face-to-face friends. F2F friends share more information about their lives, their emotions, and they derive more benefit from the friendship than do the friends who go to a concert or a movie together and may rarely talk about what’s happening in their lives.

I’ve come home from evenings out with a friend and had my partner ask “so, what’s new with George?” and be at a loss to tell her anything significant.

But the benefits of real friendship are as real as the friendship itself. A 2010 journal article makes the point that social isolation is one of the first things used to punish or torture, and that social engagement can halve the risk of death.

So let’s say you’re an aging guy, and you just don’t have friends you can realistically take from shoulder-to-shoulder to face-to-face. What to do?

Perhaps you should think about finding a volunteer activity. I tend to be a bit of an overachiever in this area; I say yes to way too many volunteer activities. Right now, for example, I’m on the production team for a major fundraising event for a choral festival, I’m raising money for a fundraising bicycle ride (BTW: DONATE!), I do a monthly radio piece on the history of folk music for a local community radio station, I’m part of a monthly ukulele get-together (you haven’t lived until you’ve been at a bar with 100 ukes!), I’m a sometime contributor to a local arts and culture web magazinemy partner and I do house concerts every month or so, I do this column, and I’m hatching a plan with friends to change the way chemotherapy drug costs are covered in my home province.  That’s probably too much. But not all of it happens all the time, and I can always practice that “saying no” thing I’ve heard so much about.

All of those things expose me to new people and deepen my relationships with people over time (I’ve been involved with the Show Tune Showdown for 8 years). And volunteer activities have their own beneficial effects. A Canadian government report details the many benefits of volunteering for seniors:

  • Building new relationships
  • Sense of contribution to the local community
  • Learning and practicing new skills that can be applied to other things
  • Learning about new subjects

Even though that report is focused on seniors, I think the benefits extend down to someone of my tender years — or yours.

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Guyside: Don’t sell friendship short

Posted by on Mar 5, 2014 in Guyside, health, general, men, musings | 3 comments

You know how we have little routines that we rely on in conversations? Someone brings up air travel and you have your little shpiel about it. Well, one of mine has always been that women’s relationships are like cats interacting with each other: much sizing up and marking of territory. I’ve also said that men’s friendships get formed like dogs’ — we sniff each other’s butts, then we figure out if the person in question is someone we want to play with.

Male friendship can sometimes be discounted, even by the friends themselves.

It might make a marginally funny line, but I’ve come to believe it sells both men and women short in the friendship department.

I currently don’t really have a “best friend.” There are guys that I’m close with, that I’ve been with through good times and bad times, but not a single person I’d tell people, “oh, you know ?Steve? Yeah, he’s my best friend.”

A few years ago, I had someone I considered a best friend. He and I had begun as colleagues, and had immediately gravitated to each other. My partner and his wife also got along, and we found ourselves as a foursome often, but we also were “guy friends”.

The friendship ended for a number of reasons that probably don’t really matter in this context, and anyway, I don’t think it would be right to go into them. The best way I can say it that I ended it because I was no longer comfortable with being his friend.

That was a few years ago, and since that time we’ve exchanged a few words and seen each other at a few events. It’s led to some awkwardness from time to time, probably on several people’s parts — we still share a number of friends.

And on Sunday night, we found each other at a large surprise party celebrating one of those friends’ 80th birthday, and my ex-friend found a moment to tell me that he missed the friendship. I found myself uncharacteristically incoherent, blabbed out a few loosely connected words, and made myself scarce. It was a very awkward moment for me.

I suspect that were I to reach out to reconnect, it might well be received well by my ex-friend. But even if I did, it might not work out. During the years of our ‘estrangement’, things have changed for me. As I said to someone this week, I feel as if the me he knew, who was his friend, isn’t there anymore. So even if I was willing to remake the friendship, it wouldn’t necessarily be the same friendship.

Another part of me thought about all this and wanted to dismiss the thought process itself as a bit much of a muchness, as too much rumination about a friendship. But I don’t agree with that. And I think that while it can be easy for men to think of our friendships as activity-based or transactional (hey, let’s go running, let’s go out for beers, let’s hit a concert), there’s something more to men’s friendships.

It’s easy to focus on our primary relationship — our wife, our partner, whatever the label is. I think it’s common for men to sometimes forget that there are benefits to ourselves and to the people we care about when we build stronger social bonds with other people, whether we have a best friend or a number of friends.

When it comes to emotional resilience, to mutual support, and to good psychological health, friendship is definitely NOT where you want to put all your eggs in one basket.

I miss what I had. But you can’t go back — or at least I can’t; better to build relationships that can be ones of mutual support and positive regard.

Photo: CC licenced by Flickr user Francesco Rachello

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Falling into the traps of masculine invulnerability – Guest post by Bob LeDrew

Posted by on Jun 21, 2013 in aging, men | 17 comments

I’ve been trying to recruit the guys to guest post on Flashfree ever since I started this blog. And my pleas have fallen on deaf ears, save for one or two brave souls. Speaking of brave souls, I am truly blessed to call fellow writer Bob Le Drew a friend. Not only is he extremely talented, but, his self awareness and ability to overcome the trappings of masculinity appear to have paid off. He has a few insights for the men in your lives that you might wish to share and, you may learn a thing or two as well. I did!

Show some love…

Human trace

I don’t like restaurant bathrooms with red walls. Once you’ve had bladder cancer, you tend to look closely at your urine stream, and those red walls give it a rosy hue that normally signifies nothing good.

I discovered something about myself seven years ago, when I first saw blood in my urine. I went to my clinic immediately, where my nurse practitioner saw me and  recommended urinalysis. The first round didn’t find anything. But when it recurred a few weeks later, we found findings concerning enough to go further, and I was a new citizen of Cancerland.

But I’m not, apparently, your typical male.There’s a significant body of research that shows men are less likely to seek out help for physical and psychological problems than are women. That can lead to serious consequences — as serious as death, when heart attack symptoms are ignored until the infarction is catastrophic.

So what’s WRONG with us, guys? I’ve got a couple of theories.

#1: When men are young, we’re invulnerable. I was somewhat immunized by that by losing a brother when I was 13 and he was 19. But in general, our attitude as teenagers and in our twenties is “What could happen to us?” unless we or someone we love are diagnosed with something serious. In my case, my dad had been diagnosed with bladder cancer a number of years before mine showed up (he went on to have five primary cancers and live with them for 20 years before dying just short of his 87th birthday). His experience, and his sharing of information with me, made me realize that I couldn’t just pass off the bloody pee as “nothing.”

#2: We cling to our youth and our invulnerability. When I ride my bike, I still want to push my body as hard as I can, and even though I don’t train as hard as I used to, my decreased ability to climb steep hills with speed and grace is an ongoing frustration. Same thing with staying up late and eating poorly. The lessons we teach ourselves in youth are hard to unlearn.

#3: Part of our self-esteem and self-worth is tied to not seeking help. In Stephen King’s novel Bag of Bones, hero Mike Noonan says he’s the kind of guy who’d drown silently rather than call out for help. Isn’t that true of so many of us as men?

Several years after my cancer experience, I found myself facing a serious depression. I denied that things were not going well for me psychologically. I didn’t seek help. Why would I, when “everything was fine.” And I continued to deny the reality of my depression until I hit a painful, damaging, and nasty wall. Our love for physical invulnerability is only matched by our firm belief that admitting we’re not coping well is the LAST thing a man should do.

The temptation to ignore or deny symptoms of depression or stress is one I continue to struggle with.

And of course, none of this addresses the issue of access to services. I live in Canada, and have ready access to free medical care, as well as group insurance that subsidizes the cost of dental, psychological, and other types of medical services. I can only guess that having to pay for medical services in tough economic times would make men even more likely to “tough it out” and save scarce resources for “more important” things.

I was lucky. Twice. My bladder cancer was “superficial” — a good thing. With some minor surgical fixes, I have been physically healthy for the last several years. And thanks to talk therapy, a supportive partner, treatment, and medication, I am able to manage my mental health pretty well.

So if you, like me, are closer to retirement age than high-school graduation, don’t fall victim to the traps of masculine invulnerability. Your body, your mind — and your loved ones — will thank you for it.

 

About Bob LeDrew

Bob LeDrew is principal consultant at Translucid Communications in Ottawa (Ontario, not Kansas). He’s been doing communications in one form or another since 1987, and in addition to his consulting work, teaches regularly at Algonquin College and Eliquo Training and Development. He’s also the creator of The Kingcast, a podcast dedicated to his favorite writer, Stephen King. He enjoys cycling, animation, whisky, and playing guitar. He usually only does a maximum of two of those at one time.

 

 

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Wednesday Bubble: For da guyz – midlife metamorphosis

Posted by on Aug 1, 2012 in aging | 0 comments

Equal opportunity blog? You bet. This post may have appeared a few years ago but it’s still as relevant today as then. You’re a man in midlife or approaching midlife. What are you yearning for? Now? Or then?

[Used with permission. Dan Collins. http://www.dancollinscartoons.com]

In Laura A. Munson’s poignant “Modern Love” post, ‘Those aren’t fighting words, dear”  she writes about the crisis of self that may seem familiar to many  in midlife who are watching or have watched their husbands or partners implode. In the post, (which I highly recommend if you’ve not read it) Laura writes:

And I saw what had been missing: pride. He’d lost pride in himself. Maybe that’s what happens when our egos take a hit in midlife and we realize we’re not as young and golden anymore. When life’s knocked us around. And our childhood myths reveal themselves to be just that. The truth feels like the biggest sucker-punch of them all: it’s not a spouse or land or a job or money that brings us happiness…

The premise that happiness comes from within is not a new one. However, the midlife spin on it can be a wake-up call of epic proportions, when we start reaching for a gold ring that actually resides out of sight. Yet, why are we yearning for what was rather than what is to beAren’t life’s many transitions, including the one that our partners and each of us are facing, movements into the next phase of productivity or change or growth, rather than a loss of self?

I’ve had many conversations with women who are facing or have faced situations that are similar to Laura’s. Overwhelmingly, they say that women tend to themselves a little at a time so that the crises never quite reach the precipice. That many women are able to deal with their physical and emotional changes incrementally so that the ultimate metamorphosis — who they are during and at the end of their lives — is not a monumental shock.

Dick Roth, in his wonderful book “No, It’s Not Hot in Here,’ devotes a chapter to men in midlfe. He says that men should repeatedly ask themselves three questions:

  • What won’t pass away when my youth does?
  • Who will I be after my career is over?
  • Who would I be if everything else was gone but my mind and feelings?

Referencing the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Roth adds that the protagonist’s lack of self-pity and ability to cherish his soul provided him with the foundation to overcome his physical confinement (the author, who was completely paralyzed by a stroke except for a single eyelid, was only able to communicate by blinking this one eye).

Cherish your soul. Sounds a lot simpler than it is. Or does it?

As much as we expect our partners to understand what we are going through as hormonal changes wreak havoc on our psyches and our bodies, we must also be willing to offer the reverse, to acknowledge the changes and struggles that our partners are going through, their self-confinement, and perhaps their inability to cherish or tap into their souls.

Midlife doesn’t have to be a four-letter word. What rings true for women, also rings true for men.

Seize it.

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