Anyone who gives you the party line about relationships between men being simpler than relations between women is giving you just that: a party line. Things are generally close to the surface with my female friends. When things are good their great and when it's on its on and we're all throwing furniture at each other and sending evil e-mails back and forth until we've gotten all the fight out of us. And then things are good again.

With my mail friends it has always been a bit different. Okay, a lot different, which explains why I don't have a best friend who's another guy. Here is the place to say this might be an American thing. I don't know how it goes in other countries. You can be friends with another guy who will not contact you for months at a time, or return you phone calls and after you've sort of gone on with your life hear that he regards you as "his best friend". You can watch all the Oprah you want, hoping to become an enlightened male only to learn that other males don't want an enlightened male for a friend. They do, but they don't. All your concern that was so attractive on one hand becomes threatening on the other. And God forbid he is actually concerned about you. Once one jackass I was friends with called me on the phone to complain that "I was in his head"-- whatever the hell that means! As if I had put myself in his head. Last year someone else who used to run up and hug me all the time (I got used to it after a while) wrote me a crazy letter screaming: DON'T LOVE ME !

Okay...

So now we come to... let's call him Kip. Kip is an usher at church-- not the Anglican one, but the dysfunction Roman Catholic one I attend on Sundays. And Kip has been waving at me smiling and nodding for nearly two years. Only I've met Kip, so that's getting weird and I wonder, what is it about ME that attracts the strange folks.

Then: it turns out that Kip, who lives in my home town once lived four hours away in my best friend from college's home town. In fact, they went to high school together. In fact, he tried to date her. So one Sunday she comes to visit and all three of us are looking at each other like, "Er... this is strange."

And Kip has not gotten any less strange. For a while now he has been working up the nerve to talk to me. I haven't really wanted to be bother. I would say "Hello" he would stammer a lot. And it hits me that in America at least, there are so many rules set down that many times not only do guys not know how to speak to girls they'd like to get to know, but they often have a hard time meeting each other.

Imagine a man actually wanting to know another man!

Forbid!