Sometimes, when you're at a loss for things to say at a party, it is fashionable to claim that friends are the new family. By this, people tend to mean that friends are those with whom you have an intimate and insuperable bond. And not, by contrast, that they're relentlessly on your back and insufferable hogs of the remote control.

Unfortunately, this claim is horsepoop. Friends are not the new family. Friendship is simply a self-interested understanding that can be blown apart by something as small as one sleeping with the other's partner. Friends are not nearly as important as family members, because if they were, there wouldn't be this current hoo-ha about the Bromance app.

The Bromance app is, for those currently in the dark, an app that facilitates bromance. A bromance is where two heterosexual men want to spend all their time together. The app allows you to enter your name and location, search for suitable bro activities – "ultimate frisbee" or "fishing" – and "hook up" with other bros who fancy a bit of the same. A bromance is the sort of relationship that, in its apparent intensity, one could legitimately compare with that of a family member. But yet critics believe that the bromance app is not really about encouraging intense friendships but about allowing men to have gay sex without admitting to anyone that they're gay.

The Daily Mail, for example, raised a thoroughly hetero eyebrow at the news: "Similar to Grindr, the well-known location-based app designed to allow gay men to find each other at crowded bars, Bromance attempts to help men meet other men with likeminded platonic plans."

That was as nothing, however, when compared to the comments posted on Bro Bible, a website dedicated to all things bro. Under the headline "We aggressively oppose the new 'bromance' app for the iPhone and Android", bro blogger J Camm wrote: "Despite claiming to be an app for straight men, this Bromance app is a 'men seeking men' app that will go down in the annals of all things gay – not that there's anything wrong with that." He then went on: "But in like 5 years I'm certain this app will be eligible for the Homosexual Hall of Fame."

The Homosexual Hall of Fame was not available for comment, largely because it doesn't exist. But the excitable nature of J Camm's remarks does cast a light on the flaws at the heart of a bro identity. If you want to put your efforts first and foremost into developing rich and sustaining relationships with your bros, then essentially you are looking for a partner. A search for a partner is usually at least partly informed by sexual desire. "Friends are new family"-ites, or bromantics, might suggest that you can have that intensity without the sex, but to denounce even the merest hint at the two kinds of relationships being related seems to be protesting just a little too much.

Of course, the term "bro" is American. On the Urban Dictionary it's defined as referring to "Obnoxious partying males who are often seen at college parties. They often wear a rugby shirt and a baseball cap. It is not uncommon for them to have spiked hair with frosted tips." In my experience, this kind of man is not someone who forms intense relationships with other men, but rather finds it difficult to form emotionally intimate bonds with anyone. And spotting someone at the gym, really doesn't count.

It is my belief that bromanticism is simply spin, a ruse whipped up by those with an interest in pushing male lifestyle products. The desire to bond around male stuff simply because it's perceived as masculine is almost antithetical to my experience of male relations. Enthusiastic commitment to anything is practically a no-go. The natural emotion is diffidence or, more accurately, lethargy. "Yeah, I would come along and celebrate you getting the all clear, but I've just got up and Football Focus is about to start". For all the furore around the Bromance app, I feel that the truth around a male bonding app might be a lot more mundane. It would certainly have to scale its sights down from fishing and frisbee. "Fanny around for a bit before heading to the pub" might just be the limit of it.

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