Two months ago, at the ripe-ish age of 27, I experienced my first "bro" breakup. My (now former) roommate and (equally former) close friend and I parted ways permanently and acrimoniously. Cops were involved. This happened to coincide with the death of my estranged father. Only one of these two events leaves me still reeling.
Neither I nor my former roommate — let's call him Mark — looks like the story that follows. We're soft-bodied plaid wearers and both known to be affable guys, one black, one Jewish. At our best, we traded offensive jokes that could launch a thousand think pieces. Mark enjoys trivia nights with his other friends; I'm a karaoke guy with mine. We regularly made pots of lentil soup or pasta together, content to be Netflix homebodies in the city that never sleeps. For a while, our biggest argument was debating the awfulness of Girls characters: Marnie vs. Mimi Rose.
"I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't moved in, Ben," he once said during a Game of Thrones marathon.
"You'd have been fine," I answered with a shrug.
"No," he said, eyes uncomfortably fixed on the TV, "I really wouldn't have been."
The point of male friendships might be that you never actually owe each other anything
Our roommateship began when Mark's fiancée ended their engagement, leaving him an emotional mess halfway through his last semester of graduate school with an empty second bedroom. The result of his heartbreak was an incredibly fast and open friendship. An hour into my moving in with him, he was crying on my shoulder about the trauma.
Male friendships are typically forged on an anvil of casualness. Laughter, beer, fist bump, repeat. In trying times, a "Dude, that's rough," may be extended and past instances of vulnerability shared, but rarely more. Real-time vulnerability is an altogether different matter. I've lived by this unspoken code and, at times, even inched away from male acquaintances that went against it by wanting to share too much, too quickly. And yet, despite being born out of Manhattan rental necessity, this friendship was different.
"I miss her so much...""Hey, is this a sore inside my butt crack?" "My family is poor, and I don't think I'll be the one to pull them out of it, even with two degrees..." "...Dude, why is there a sore inside your butt crack?" There was no posturing living with Mark. Co-dependent, precarious, whatever you might call it; there was something to be said for a space in which the XY chromosome did not keep these topics at bay, even when at full sobriety.
However exhausting it could occasionally get —to walk his dog every day, to cancel plans with other friends when he was feeling lonely, and write his essays for him when the dual act of school and heartbreak got to be too much for him — being openly needed fulfilled its own need for me. At Christmas, I received a text from him: You don't have to say it back but I want u to know ur my best friend. My shell broke. This guy would be a fixture in my life, I thought. My future children would call him "uncle" one day. This would not break.
And yet it did. Spectacularly. Mark and I will never speak to each other again. "I don't owe you anything," he wrote in one of his last communications to me. Mark might have been right. The point of male friendships might be that you never actually owe each other anything. This very essay might be too much analysis by virtue of us both being guys.
The breakup
The "bro"k-up was as sudden as it was vicious.
The night I learned my father had croaked (dads "die"; absentee fathers "croak") was the night of a prescheduled man date with Mark for which I had cleared my schedule. Good, I thought. On the couch with my best friend was a safe space to process the news about my dad. Mark was someone I could speak to without the judgment of relatives or less intimate acquaintances that might expect waterworks for a man I loved but did not particularly like and hadn't spoken to in years. I sipped my beer carefully, waiting for the right lull to broach the topic while a distracted Mark kept checking OkCupid on his phone. He was dating more aggressively now, on the hunt for his next girlfriend.
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A woman had given him a gold star and was up for drinks nearby. "Can I go?" he asked. "No," I snapped before immediately backtracking to "Sure," as forcing someone to stay and care about your feelings is unappealing. Mark seemed to consider his options: pushing me to share what was on my mind vs. spending the evening with what I imagined was a brunette holding a mustache on a stick, flanked by two carbon-copy besties. "Well, if you're upset, I'm going to go," Mark eventually said. "Fine. Go." A minute later, he was in the bathroom and the smell of Axe Chocolate filled the apartment as he got ready. Being on the other end of the equation — needing him — was new and overwhelming. I was raised as an only child, and I'm a Sagittarius, which I will assume means something independent and horseman-like.
Later that night, I wrote Mark an email. A good platform for open feelings as well as a few jabs. "You're thoughtless," it read. "I have to step back a bit. Let's just be roommates for a while. I have to expect less, dude."
"I can't live like that, Ben," he wrote back the next day, hurt. His date had been a bust; I existed again. The gist of his reply was a choice: stay and work on the friendship or leave. I was a subletter, and my name wasn't on the lease; such requests/ultimatums could be made.
I don't like corners. What might have otherwise been solved with a tub of ice cream and two spoons was now a "thing." I replied I could be out by the end of the month: a manipulative bluff to call his. The bluff, as it turns out, was a mistake.
An hour later, 1 am or so, he was pounding on my door, evicting me immediately for "abandoning him." An abusive parent growing up, three serious breakups, and still this was the nastiest fight of my life. "I don't give a sh*t that you're so f*cking poor," he screamed. "You're going to die alone," I replied, nonchalant and vicious, hands shaking as I texted a friend, asking to crash on his couch. These were emotional nut shots and we knew it, based on the vulnerabilities we both knew well.
I wrote Mark close to 50 emails/texts. I'm sorry, bro. I miss you, bud. Forgive me, dude.
Claiming I wasn't packing fast enough, Mark announced that he'd called the cops on me. This prompted me to call the police myself to explain the situation, only to find out that Mark hadn't in fact contacted them. This in turn led him to defiantly call them in order to save face. Fun fact, New Yorkers: if two people call the cops for the same address, a lot of cops show up. You expect two; you get seven. Neither of us, flabby beta males that we are, quite knew what to do when we opened the door. Accusations had to be made up on the fly. "The neighbors must love this," one unimpressed cop muttered. After hearing the story, half the squadron stayed with Mark at the door and the other half escorted me out of the building, offering me a ride to my friend's place.
The escalation was as surreal as it was out of sync with the memory of Mark and me on the couch, with his head on his dog's stomach and its snout resting on my lap, watching television. "The boys of apartment 4-G," I remember him saying, mid-yawn.
The next morning, as New York's latest snowstorm was underway, I returned to the apartment. Mark was at work. I hastily packed my things, leaving my keys behind. As I rode the bus back to my hometown for my father's funeral, I knew I might not have a home to get back to when I returned to New York. Good, I thought. Prick.
"This is what happens when men deal with their feelings"
The anger faded quickly, soon replaced by a well of regret as I returned to the city. Luckily, the Dead Dad card will earn you some leeway, and my support system of college friends came through. I never had a shortage of couches to crash on while looking for a new place. The girl I had started seeing flew in from California before even officially being my girlfriend. Still, a few blocks away, my best friend would not answer my texts or emails begging him for a phone call. The handwritten offer to grab a beer at the bar next to our apartment left at his door was declined. The thought of having hurt him that badly was a vise around my neck. I needed to tell him about my father's death — a fact he still did not know — and to apologize for channeling my not-quite-grief into those unfair emails. My furniture was still there, after all. There was still time.
Fancying herself a master of "friendship drama," one of my oldest friends, bless her heart, took it upon herself to pursue the crusade by contacting Mark behind my back. "This is what happens when men deal with their feelings," she sighed. I was a "Charlotte," Mark was a "Miranda": there was protocol in play. I do not know what their interaction consisted of, but she eventually forwarded me Mark's final word on the matter of my father's death, which she had disclosed. "I'm indifferent," he wrote. "Frankly," he added, "I'm weirded out that Ben has been treating this like a relationship or something."
I could not quite process this. Maybe something had been lost in translation. I was the one kicked out under a snowstorm for giving notice; if "victim" and "bully" had to be established, my line ought to be "I forgive you," not "I'm sorry." Where was my friend? The guy who'd shared his darkest thoughts with me? The one I was planning on moving to Brooklyn with next year so I could get my own dog, of which he already claimed himself the uncle? The one whom I'd forgiven the hole punched in my door when he was upset? Wasn't it my turn to get a pass?
(Nicholas Raymond/freestock.ca)
To say that I went "emotionally apesh*t" is to misunderstand the amount of primate defecation littering America's great zoos. I had an Eduardo-Saverin-learning-he'd-been-0.3%'d breakdown. A Paris-Geller-getting-rejected-from-Harvard breakdown. An Alexandra-Forrest-is-making-a-stew breakdown. An ex once wrote me an 800-word email in college. I remember being put off by this and deleting it halfway through the read. Over the following month, I wrote Mark close to 50 emails/texts. I'm sorry, bro. I miss you, bud. Forgive me, dude. Ending these raw pleas on bro, bud, dude, broseph, brosepehine, *glottal stop* made them easier to write.
No new apartment was good enough. No new roommate, no matter how friendly or compatible, was the right fit. My bowl of porridge was still the closet-size room on 110th and Amsterdam where my furniture still was and where I could mourn my dad with my friend once this hurdle was crossed. It wasn't too late; I had to try. I emailed a friend of his, his brother, his mother, all of whom I superficially knew. (Yes, this is the point at which you turn from your screen and wince, "Oh, honey.") "We were sh*theads to each other; let him know I'm sorry. I'm here." His roundabout reply eventually came, again impossibly detached. "I'm over what happened that nite. Your hyper-emotionality is stressing me out, it has not made me want to be around you," now emailed the guy who came into my room shirtless and teary-eyed at 6 am, rattled by a nightmare about his ex-fiancée he needed to talk out. "My dad died, dude," was still all I could think to reply, so I said nothing.
Unlike women, whose friendships allow for some tumultuousness, men's are defined by simplicity
My amazing girlfriend, listening to me rant about the situation, sympathetically said, "You sound like me after my first breakup. I was catatonic for like, three months." She was right. The rejection, anger, and sadness were almost identical to those I had felt as a brokenhearted 14-year-old, only now sans the Evanescence soundtrack. Were Mark and I both one point farther right on the Kinsey scale, this might have been an impasse with an easy, passionate resolution. Sadly, we weren't. These were the much murkier waters of two straight males, both emotionally unequipped for the journey back to where we were and only one of us apparently willing.
Unlike women, whose friendships allow for some tumultuousness and are subsequently made stronger by strife, men's are defined by blunt simplicity. It's either easy or it doesn't exist. We ride and die; apologizing and healing is not an option. "This is what happens when men deal with their feelings."
My shell is back
One of my two new roommates is currently in the kitchen, I think. Or in his room. The next time I will speak to him will be whenever. We occasionally drink together and will see the Entourage movie this weekend with a mixed group of friends and collectively try to buy into the dual illusion of Adrian Grenier playing an employed actor and the never-ending magical power of bro love. When one of us moves out, it will be with a 30-day notice and a handshake. It's simple, friendly, and polite — exactly what I was looking for last year.
"What's done is done," read one of Mark's last bits of communication to me. That was the closure, I now realize. My shell is back, reinforced, and I'm grateful for it. In time, Mark will turn into a New York City Roommate Horror Story. I'll only remember him as the guy who kicked me out at 1 am and was indifferent to my father's passing. I've already started telling that version of the story at parties. "What a selfish asshole!" people say. I'm sure other gatherings, two subway stops away, are hearing the "What a stalker!" version. Eventually, we will both believe our own tales. But tonight, I miss my dad and I miss my former best friend. Laughter, beer, fist bumps, repeat. Move on.
Ben Philippe is a fiction writer and occasional comedian who splits his time between New York City and Montreal. His writing has appeared in Gawker and the AV Club.
First Person is Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.
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