What is "Male Bonding," and How Does it Work?

It is my understanding that women form life-long bonds with each other over long periods of time by building trust, and by honing their relationships through a series of real-life tragedies and situations. It's just like you women to waste your time on such an inefficient system.

With men, we either hate each other or we don't. Right off the bat. If two guys get along immediately, they become friends, and can spend many an hour together getting drunk and making lewd comments towards women. If two guys hate each other, the only hope of those two guys ever truly getting along is by successful completion of the age-old process called "Male Bonding". Which, incidentally, also involves alcohol and lewd comments towards women, but on a much greater scale.

The concept of "Male Bonding" depends on the one constant in the universe; When two people are really drunk, and end up doing really stupid things together, the trauma of their shared experience will make them feel closer to each other. Allow me to give you a real-life example.

Most of my better friends are female (if you knew as much about men as I do, you wouldn't trust them either), but of my few male friends, one of them stands out. For the sake of this story, we'll call him "Jason".

Story Time

Jason is an asshole. I've always thought that, which is why for a long time I went out of my way to avoid him. Then something happened. Jason moved directly next-door to me. For a long time, we avoided each other. Then one day, under circumstances that I don't fully remember, Jason and I got drunk. Really drunk. Really, really drunk.

After that, the two of us spent several hours stumbling down the sidewalk of a busy street, while howling the words to a few drinking songs, and urinating into traffic. Then we drank more. Then we got into a fight over which "Teletubby" was "the gay one". This fight went from a heated argument, to an attempt at a fist-fight where both sides found out just how badly our hand-eye coordination was affected by the large amounts of whiskey we'd consumed.

The fight didn't last long. After about 3 minutes, we'd managed to do more damage to ourselves then to each other. At that point, we made peace by, of course, drinking more. Some time passed, and after a few more arguments, and a few more drinks, both of us ended up puking into a gutter. We've been good friends ever since.

The moral of this story? Men are stupid, but we are methodically stupid, and we are stupid in patterns that you can count on, dammit! And that, my friends, is the statement that best defines why "Male Bonding" works.