The fine line between bromance and homosexuality.

Ok, well, I'll make my point a little more directly then, to explain exactly why I disagree.

I was one of only a few openly gay members of my fraternity in college. I had, and still have, quite a few relationships of the "bromantic" sort from there. There were also a few people with whom there was something else, that certain tension, and it wasn't due to a physical attraction (it never went anywhere with anyone from my fraternity). One of my friends from there, who is straight, is even now my best friend, and we have an extremely close relationship that some people could mistake for romantic, and we makes jokes, remarks, and even physical contact that could be percieved as flirtatious, but that extra factor isn't at all there, it's simply an extremely close friendship.

Though it never went anywhere with anyone in my fraternity, that same extra feeling, that tension, is the same thing that even now I can tell whether my friendship with someone is *just* a friendship or not.

I think perhaps that getting into the heads of one of those characters and showing that the tension isn't there during those jokes and even friendly flirtation would help make it clear in the mind of the reader that there's nothing there. The best way I can think of doing that is perhaps showing, at some point, those feelings, that tension, when he's thinking of a girl he likes (or his girlfriend or whatever), to draw a clear contrast between the two.

I agree that telling wouldn't be a bad option, but it might be hard to find the right phrasing. "They were good friends, but never had romantic feelings for each other" wouldn't quite cut it (hmm... and that particular example would actually make me think that they *were* gay, though perhaps not together).

 

No need to apologise at all..we all - quite naturally - tend to accord a privileged place to our own experience of things...(As an aside: an internet forum, peopled by writers! may not be the best place to get at the common experience of things ( a whoppingly outrageous generalisation! Oh yes!)

Thanks for your story..yet I'm bound to say that it provides rather more ammunition for my view of things than it does yours. You get on well with your friend but you don't have sex: a bromance (Lord, have mercy on me for saying that), not a romance...and the want of sex is that fine line between the two.

 

At the risk of sounding like I'm repeating myself (oh, who am I kidding?), the point I was making is that it's not *just* sex. From an outside perspective, especially to someone who doesn't know us well, maybe, but from a perspective inside the relationship, it's not a matter of just whether we have sex or not that differentiates our relationship from a romantic one. The line may be fine in absolute terms, but there is a world of difference between what I think and feel about him, and what I might think and feel about someone that I have the romantic potential with. It's that difference that I think could be captured from the inside of one of these character's heads.

(Ok, the installation I was waiting on is finally done, I can go to bed. I'm gonna hate myself at work tomorrow morning.)
(also, your parentheses are mismatched.... *twitch*)) << there's your missing one

 

Unbecoming pedantry is a sure sign of your need of rest..

The thread starter is solely interested in the interpretation of those looking in! His readers! In terms of the feeling of the participants: the thoughts of your friend on what he thinks constitute the fine line will be as interesting - if not rather more interesting than yours...

A bold question that I trust will not render you sleepless in Seattle: if your friend was gay would have had sex already?

 

Point is this is for a book he's not writing real people - the best characters have some root in a general stereotype (not saying they should be cliche). The characters that try to hard to be realistic generally are flat.

He needs to inject some of the associations with a bromance or it won't feel real to many readers.

 

And perhaps showing some of the internal perspective can help the outside observers understand the dynamics of the relationship. Isn't that what's so great about getting into a character's head in the first place?

To answer your question: It's very hard to answer hypotheticals like that, because our relationship would likely have evolved differently. I don't know what would have happened, although, from a more practical level, I don't think we would have developed as deep of a relationship (for me to explain this, you would pretty much have to know the whole history of how we met and everything, I just don't see things working out the same way under those different circumstances). The best answer I can probably give would be to the question of if I found out he was gay now, and the answer to that is certainly not. Our relationship isn't like that, and the necessary dynamics for that to happen just don't exist. Would the possibity exist in the future? Well, relationships are dynamic, so I can't say no for sure, but, I still doubt it.

(yay 100 posts, now sleep.)

 

Indeed. Thanks for your considered thoughts and honesty...The experience I'm referring to here involves - in my early 20s - living with a gay couple in West London and from time to time joining them for larks in Soho etc etc ...so you might begin to understand the source of my rather breezy outlook..

 

Hehe All my boyfriends bar two are now happilly maried to OTHER men One of the two I am married to and the other is Mormon.

I have had an impressive record for picking up gay men since my teens Probably why so many of my characters are.

 

C'mon, man; Sam, a bromosexual? Shame on you.

 

What fine line? There's a really big difference between friendship and a romantic relationship. If one of your friends sees romances everywhere, that's their major malfunction and they should stop reading Twilight.

 

The difference between romance and good friendship apart from sex and snogging is ?

 

For many people there isn't a big difference between romance and friendship, no matter what your sexual preferences is. You might go trough infatuation phrases in a friendship, you might fall in love with someone you're not sexually attracted too. You might be sexually attracted to and sexually playing around with a friend without romantic feelings or considering him/her a lover. There might be a lot of vibrating tension in the air even if it just a friendship. You might worship a friend as well as some one you in love with.

... But.

For the purpose of this story and the problem the thread started got i think it might be enough to get across that the guys isn't sexually attracted to each other.

 

If you're writing bromance, most female / gay readers WILL slash it. No matter what.

People slash Don Carlos and Rodrigo. Cassius and Brutus. Ishmael and Queequeg (ok, they DID sleep together).

 

Bromance: I think it's a homophobic term.

Plato wrote about close male friendship, later called Platonic Love, which came to be considered the highest form of love due to the lack of exchange it entails. Whoever invented the term "bromance" was obviously made uncomfortable by the strong male emotions and loyalty found in friendship and needed to downgrade the love. I think's that pretty disgusting.

Everything does not boil down to genitals folks.

 

I disagree. Perhaps it was originally coined with that meaning (I don't know its origins), but that doesn't mean it still carries that meaning broadly today.

Not only am I not offended by it, my friends and I use it all the time. We actually use it to *emphasize* those feelings of love and loyalty -- it's not just a friendship, it's a bromance. (I also don't think I've ever heard it used completely seriously even once, but just because it's being used as a joke doesn't mean we use the joke to downplay the love in that kind of relationship.)

Maybe it has certain connotations to you, but as far as I know, its widely accepted meaning and usage isn't offensive.

 

I will counter your "I don't think so" with my:

I don't think so.

 

Just look at the usage here in the forums. After a bunch of people posted using the word, with nobody getting offended, you are the only one who thought it was offensive. I think the usage speaks for itself. Maybe in your circle, it's offensive, but I've never heard it regarded as an offensive word, and it doesn't seem to be in here, so I'm not going to buy that it's an inherently offensive word. That only leaves intent, and, folks here are obviously not intending to use it in an offensive way.

It's not at all offensive to me, so I'll give the word the Gay Stamp of Approval (TM pending, and of no official significance to the forum) for use in this forum. If several other gay members are offended by it, I'll reconsider my position.

Sorry, but I think you have burden of proof in this case.

 

Sure, I have an explanation and you don't.

Meanwhile, I could easily find a racist forum and find a bunch of negative words and confront the posters on them. They would then provide the same rationale you did, which is that everyone is doing it.

The fact is that "bromance" is a term invented by someone who was uncomfortable with genuine close friendship and had to insert some kind of seedy sexuality into it, in an attempt to shut down friendship. It's gross.

That's easily seen by just dissecting the word.

 

No it's not, and I see absolutely no proof of your "fact". You're making a claim based on your own interpretation of the word, and assuming that yours is the only correct way of thinking about it. When was the last time you were convinced by someone using that kind of logic?

Uh huh, and your analogy completely falls apart when you consider all the variables:
What if you had a black guy, or a hispanic guy, or an eastern Asian (or whatever group the word supposedly insults) on that board, saying that the word in question *wasn't* offensive? Would you still insist it was?
I'm not saying that "everyone else is doing it"; anyone who's ever seen an after-school special knows better than that. I'm telling you, as a member of the class that you think the word insults, that it does not in fact, insult me. How many people use it doesn't change this fact one way or the other.

 

I suspect I'd have a hard time being bros with the type of person who'd take issue with the word "bromance".

 

The term "fact" the way I used it as a figure of speech.

Meanwhile, check out the thread title.

 

Believe it or not, I have read the thread title. In fact, it was, surprisingly, the very first thing I read on this thread.

Now you should go and read the thread content, and you might see that the "fine line" isn't referring to the fact that there's not a huge difference, but rather to the fact that from an observer's perspective, it may be hard to tell the two apart. I can tell you that this is entirely true. I've been asked numerous times when out with straight friends that were, indeed, just friends, whether we were "together".

(FYI, in case you don't see it, I added more to my previous post while you were writing your response.)

Edit:
I asked a gay friend his opinion of the word. He also said it's not offensive, and he gave this definition for it, which, I think, explains very well why I think it's actually showing more comfort with intimacy rather than less, like you are saying: "straight guys who hang out 24/7 and aren't afraid to be mildly intimate such as sleeping in the same bed or picking an eyelash off the other's face".

 

An offensive word not because of what it denotes but because it is so horribly twee.

 

This is true I couldn't imagine it except in semi-jest. Real men at home with their masculinity have solid friendships not bromances

I tend to use it for a couple of blokes when one is heroworshipping the other.

 

I emended that for you, darling.