I’m Not A Bar Fight Kinda Guy. Thankfully.

“I’m having a bad morning,” I told Gini. “Can I have an emergency cuddle?”

“Sure,” she said, then took me into the bedroom and hugged me for ten minutes.

And it occurs to me that this would be an alien experience for a lot of dudes, thanks to a dumb-ass Tweet the other day which read:

“I don’t know one guy, including myself, who wasn’t in a bar fight.

“Not a single one.”

Which is almost certainly bravado, because as a TV host you’d have to have met at least one guy who had never been in a bar fight – I suspect this is a lot like all those moes who go, “I’ve never met a gay person!” when the answer is actually “They didn’t talk to you about it.”

But I’m willing to admit that duderino here probably chooses to hang with friends who get into bar fights. Which… isn’t really a good look, to my opinion. I know lots of folks who can fight really well, but in my experience the schmucks who get into barfights are usually the hotheads who can’t argue well. Barfights are usually, “I can’t win through logic, so out comes the punching.”

(And also nobody says that “being in a barfight” means “you’ve been good in a barfight.” Having a lot of friends who’ve been bouncers, I can tell you that there’s a staggering number of barfights that don’t end well for the participants.)

What I’m willing to bet, though, is that to a proud-of-barfightin’ kinda dude, the idea that “cuddles on demand” or even “acknowledging today’s sorta rough” would be an utterly alien experience to them. They’d wrap themselves tight in machismo until they exploded, treating feelings as this alien influence they gotta get out of their system by lifting weights or banging someone new or otherwise demonstrating their alpha wolf capabilities.

But having seen barfight dudes making it in the real world, they’re often way more concerned with looking good than being good, and implode at some point when it turns out their lives aren’t as satisfying as they need it to be – which, given the barfight lifestyle includes copious amounts of praise from other barfight men, often degrades into a weird clusterhug of damaged dudes convincing themselves that the world is out to get them when the truth is that they’re out punching the world in the face and getting punched back.

Which often gets contorted into the truly weird concept that a Man is defined by the amount of damage he can endure, leading into this self-destructive spiral where you keep flinging yourself into challenges designed to crumple your ego and then give yourself an award for enduring something painful that you didn’t have to do. Then you start thinking less of other men who quite rightfully looked at the river of broken glass and rubbing alcohol and said, “Why the fuck would I want to swim in that?”

I dunno, man. As someone who’s been called all sorts of names for being emotional, I suspect the “emergency cuddle” aspect would not go over well with that crowd.

But on the other hand, I have a wife who’ll cuddle me. And the courage to admit when things aren’t perfect. And the strength to keep going even when the day’s kinda shitacular.

I mean, both me and loves-the-barfightin’ dude probably keep going in the face of adversity. Which is good. But I get cuddles, and they get kicked in the nuts.

To each their own, man. But I’ll be over here with the cuddles.

It’s a lot nicer. You should try it.