Seventeen—Geoffrey
What I haven’t said yet, and should, is that it’s funny. Not occasionally, not as relief from the serious parts. Consistently, warmly, sometimes helplessly funny.
Two men without clothes on trying to remember the words to a song, or arguing about something completely inconsequential, or one of them walking into a doorframe because he was looking somewhere else. Bodies are inherently comic. Men who have forgotten that about their bodies are men who have been taking them far too seriously for far too long.
Pleasure is a faster road to relaxation than any amount of careful processing. I’ve known that for thirty years of teaching men and the sessions confirm it every time. A man who is laughing is a man who has stopped monitoring himself. His shoulders drop. His voice changes. He takes up more space.
We might dance. Not formally, not as exercise, just because music is on and bodies want to move and there’s no one here to perform for so why not. Two naked men dancing badly in a living room is one of the more purely joyful things I can think of.
Or we move around each other—not choreographed, not therapeutic, just the natural physical looseness of people who have stopped being careful. A hand on a shoulder. Bumping into each other and laughing about it. The easy animal pleasure of being in a body that isn’t under surveillance.
From the outside, if you could see it, you might expect something solemn. Two men sitting in careful silence working through something heavy. And yes, the heavy things are there—the questions, the release, the long-held shame finally getting some air. But that’s not the texture of it.
The texture of it is warmth and noise and movement and laughter and the specific cheerfulness of men who have temporarily stopped pretending.
It’s the best fun. That’s not incidental to what this is. It might be the whole point.
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