Andrew McCarthy

And they were amazing.

They'd been friends for 60 years, and they were so intimate and so close to each other.

They'd see each other multiple times a week for 60 years, and they'd been right there with each other their whole way through life, and that seemed so alien to me.

I never had that kind of tight connection with someone, and I thought my life would have been so different had I had that kind of connection.

person who knew everything about me next to me like that.

And it's different than a spouse.

And I found them and their accessibility to each other and their openness and their sense of intimacy without being threatened in any way.

They said to me, Lou and Bobby were their name, and they go, yeah, we started saying I love you to each other recently.

And he said, you know, I say I love you to my wife, to my kids.

Why can't I tell my best bud that I love him?

And then Bobby kind of said, yeah, we haven't graduated to goodnight kiss yet.

But, you know, but like they're aware that that sort of fear of intimacy that men have, like these guys just didn't have that.

They knew who they were and they knew what their relationship was and how valuable it was in their lives.

And to see that was just...

I hate to say inspirational, but it was.

I asked what their life would have been like without the other, and they said, I can't even conceive what my life would have been like without him.

And that's an amazing kind of thing, you know?

And on the other hand, I met guys who had no friends at all, you know, in that kind of isolation.

You know, but those two guys I met in Lawrence and Steve in Austin, they said something to me that really stuck with me.

They just said, look, this isn't a big deal.