I’ve been reading a lot of historical stuff recently… and one thing which hit me was the extent to which Friendship was a part of a guy’s Life way back when.

And this wasn’t merely at the level of guys with whom you had a regular game of golf, but on whom you actually relied – quite often for your life.

The hand-to-hand fighting of the Ancient Greeks and the Roman Legions employed the back-to-back system whereby, because of

its physical nature, the other guy was actually covering 180° of your body; he ‘gave you his back’.

Not being a soldier myself I don’t know if the marines still have use for this – it seems very dated in today’s world of rapid gunfire….

…not to mention those flying things…..

…but thinking about this prompted me to take a looksee at what’s written in the ‘What Men Do’ Guide under the ‘Friendship’ heading, and ‘wow!’ this element of one-to-one bonding has played a helluva contribution in the past lives of others.

But today? Well, no. For most guys it doesn’t seem to rate overmuch; in fact for some, the Social Network sites seem to offer what they are happy to consider adequate under what they think of as a Friendship.

There was a piece in the ‘Times’ on April 10th that had a headline, ‘Friends are happier and laugh more without social networks’.

Well whadyaknow!

It prompted the immediate thought that common sense would seem

to be a lost (human) art these days. Do we really require research by Sam Roberts, senior lecturer at the University of Chester to undertake ‘a series of more than 300 interviews with ‘heavy users of Facebook’ to report that social media failed to cut the mustard against face to face meetings?

My biggest gripe though is that some university boffins are so out of touch with reality that they should be attempting to compare two human areas which were not actually comparable.

What is classifiable as ‘human’ via the internet is a measurable reality understood only by Thinking Man. Let’s say, they’re connections of the brain.

But real human contact activates Feeling Man and Sensing Man. They provide the instinctive response to the animal within us and the guys with whom we would Trust on patrol in the jungle….or on the battlefield.

The best you can ever achieve via social networks in knowledge – that commodity you acquire from formal education. But Friendship is based on inner knowledge, a visceral response in the guts which provides the true measure of Trust.