As I choked on my first bite of a Snickers bar and looked around for someone to help me inside the Psych A building, I realized I was going to die alone.
Even though I managed to perform the Heimlich maneuver on myself, the thought of dying alone forced me to reassess my life; I was bro-less despite attending Stony Brook University for nearly two years.
Unfortunately for me and my fellow men, we tend to have fewer friends and intimate friendships with each other than women do according to a 2000 study by the University of Missouri, but this lack of male friendship has not gone unnoticed.
In order to help bros find other bros, many apps have come along to help the bro-less. The latest of these innovators is WolfPack, a location-based app that takes your interests into account and finds other bros in your area with the same interests.
I knew WolfPack had the capabilities to help me find the bros I longed for, and it would alert me with howls every time I acquired a new wolf. Soon my pack had grown to 22 wolves, six of which I separated into a pack named “Seawolves.” I decided to use WolfPack’s Events feature to call my bros out for a game of pickup basketball, but no one came.
That’s when I discovered that WolfPack is an app heavily used by Californians and lacks a strong East Coast presence. Where California hosts events like the Cherry Blossom Festival and Coachella, the only event I could find near me was “Goat Hunting with the Wolves” in Pittsburgh, PA. The creator of this event never replied to my “Is this real” comment.
I felt alone in my pack until one bro messaged me: an Australian wolf going by the name of Craig. He informed me of the horrors of drifting apart from your bros, or mates as he calls them. Australia seems to have an even weaker WolfPack presence, but Craig is searching for the bros he lost or is currently losing, including a bro who tried hitting on his wife.
After experiencing several crashes on the app, I realized that WolfPack was a lost cause. So instead of relying on future technology to help me out, I went back to the past.
Br-Ocean’s Not Quite 11.
In my senior year of high school I made a movie with my bros entitled “Quest for Bodacious” as a class assignment, and those guys were the best bros a guy could ask for. Even though I had not seen them in over half a year, I needed them to be my bros again.
Because I am not George Clooney, I could not get the whole crew back together but I managed to meet up with two of them who went by the bro-names Big Meany and Lil’ Def. It was not a good testament to our friendship that I almost got lost finding Big Meany’s house, or that Lil’ Def arrived an hour late because he was getting high with another bro.
Setbacks aside, my bros and I managed to reconnect as we argued and yelled in a McDonald’s drive thru where we eventually settled on three McFlurries, the only desert a true bro should have.
As we feasted on the deliciously frozen snack, we traded tales of our shenanigans and misfortunes. Big Meany took the crown for his story about the mailman who stole his bike as he chased after the thief in his pajamas when he was six years old.
After arriving at a park near Lil’ Def’s home, we found two teenagers playing soccer, and Big Meany surprised me as he helped a young bro with his goal shots.
Big Meany and the young bro, whose name I intensified as James because of the number 10 Fly Emirates jersey he wore, bonded as they kicked the ball into the goal and I knew that Bro-seiden, the Greek god of bros, smiled upon them.
Love Thy Bros, No Homo.
I knew that Big Meany and James’s bromance could not last, for the Male Deficit Model, a theory that explains why guys suck at friendship, states that mentor friends will not last. Not only are mentor friendships destined to fail, but so are activity friendships that are based on a singular interest or activity, which meant that the soccer ball that bonded Big Meany and James was purely superficial. I realize now that Bro-siden was merely toying with their lives in the same manner as his brethren of Olympus did in the times of old.
Although WolfPack’s design of using interests instead of activities to find bros has the potential to be a good workaround for the Male Deficit Model, it suffers from the negative connotations society places on men who look for other men. The app was even described to me as “Tinder for men.”
The idea of a bro desiring to meet a bro being gay may be the source of male friendship’s problem. According to the University of Missouri study, homophobia and masculine self-identity were one of the biggest contributors to why men have so few real friends. WolfPack may have the right idea even though it’s plagued with crashes, but as Craig put it, “it will grow.”
Despite Craig’s prediction, I needed a bro now in order to save me from death itself. According to a study by Brigham Young University, strong friendships can increase your likelihood of surviving various situations throughout your life by 50 percent, situations like choking on a Snickers bar.
For this very reason I was glad to hear that Big Meany got accepted into Stony Brook University, which meant that I would no longer be bro-less. As I dropped him off that day, I no longer sang along with Rob Thomas on the radio as he sang, “I don’t wanna be lonely no more,” because I would no longer be alone again.
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