To all the fellas, who know me in RL or otherwise - if you have seen I Love You Man you would have gotten some idea that romance is not the only thing on a man’s mind.

Sometimes a bro just needs a bro, and in times like this I haven’t found many bros. Valentine’s Day was the usual routine of not feeling too fussed about it until after the fact, but it may be the case that I actually need contact with human people rather than just looking for romance right now.

Romance would be good too, but at the very minute I’m typing this I’m shaking my head at the sorry state of male interaction. I just came back from my friends place where we played a board game called Nexus Ops, which is what you would get if you crossed Starcraft for PC with Risk and elements of Warhammer 40,000 if it was more balanced and was a much more accessible board game you didn’t have to spend money on models and paints for.

Sadly I only get to see this friend of mine once a week, the rest of the week is so dull in terms of my social life schedule that I was motivated to buy a bus ticket just to see where it would take me. You heard me right. I bought a bus ticket just to see where it would take me. And so far it’s taken me to an art gallery to see an exhibition I was completely unaware it was on - and to Downtown where there’s a cinema and an electronics goods store I checked out only to find that they had loneliness marked down on sale for half off.

Normally, if Hollywood movies are to be believed (not the most credible source, but hey) a woman rarely finds herself in this dilemma compared to what men have to do to cope. You want to know why so many men bury themselves in video games and avoid their loved ones on occasion? There’s your answer, us men, you put two guys in a room together and it’s AWKWARD - we don’t know where to start with each other so we start yammering about video games with each other because it’s the only common bond a lot of men grew up with as a coping mechanism.

Video games don’t make people stupid, I’m just saying that it’s become something that rather it being a truly social activity like it used to be - online gaming really destroyed the essence of going to a mate’s house to play some GoldenEye 64 on a single CRT TV screen. Video games were never the actual problem here, the problem with video games isn’t the games themselves but the idea that for a lot of guys we’re more comfortable talking about that than actually recognising a man gotta vent a little - that he’s feeling low all of a sudden.

It’s not even the subliminal homophobia that does this either - men of my age group genuinely, in the most innocent sense of me phrasing it - do not know how to talk to other people of their own gender about emotional problems or issues that affect them directly. They would if they knew how - but many men find the concept of male interaction mystifying because we haven’t been equipped with the social norm of being able to talk to each other or ask people for help.

It’s a baffling dilemma, and it’s a problem that affects men of all stripes, orientations and races. Hell we don’t even know how to ask another man for help with a damn maths problem, that’s how bad it’s gotten!

I would like to be in a relationship with a woman right now, but I really have to ask myself if Tyler Durden was right (while acknowledging he was wrong about a whole lot of other things) about the idea that “Maybe another woman isn’t what we need?”. That statement shouldn’t be taken at face value to begin with either, because women still can help men in situations that their fellow dudes cannot assist under their current skill level.

I’m talking about the idea that men are really confused about what their emotional needs are, rather than their emotions in themselves. Men have emotions - we just have not been taught on any scholarly level what to do with them.