Whether it’s Friendship Day or any ordinary day, I’ve noticed girls have everything figured out: cards, gifts or some elaborate plan they’ve clearly put thought into. And no doubt it feels and looks just amazing.

But wait, are we boys not friends too? Don’t we get our own day? Except we’re not exactly known for the card-making, gift-wrapping, blushing-about-it kind of friendship. Maybe it’s because, throughout our lives, we’ve been taught that feelings, matching bracelets, etc., are not “boy things.” We’re told to be tough, to not make a big deal out of things, so even celebrating a friend gets skipped.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have best friends. We do. Some since pre-nursery, some who fight with us and make up in five minutes, some who cover for us when we forget our homework. It just doesn’t show up in cute gestures like a card or a bracelet; it’s more of a punch on the shoulder or a shove on the road.

Most of the time, you’ve read the girl version of friendship, here’s ours.

Girls seem to have Friendship Day all figured out with cards, gifts and heartfelt messages. But what about boys? We celebrate friendship too, just in ways that look completely different

Asking the experts (my friend)

I asked my friend Ahad about the importance of Friendship Day and whether we should celebrate it, and he replied, “Bro, Friendship Day is not for us.”

I said, “Why not?” We have been best friends since grade three, and we have shared lunch boxes for years. I know his Wi-Fi password; he knows mine. If that’s not friendship, then I don’t know what is. He just shrugged and went back to scrolling on his phone. And I got my answer.

See… boys don’t do the whole card and gift thing, not because we don’t have friends, but because if I gave Ahad a handmade card that said “to my bestest friend,” he would probably make fun of me for the rest of my life.

This kind of stuff comes across as creepy for boys; it’s embarrassing to the point that I can’t even imagine it. I mean, why should I give a card or a friendship mug when we are literally in and out of each other’s houses every single day, when I already know his lunch order by heart and he knows mine, when we have lived through the same boring lectures of teachers, the same failed exams, the same embarrassing moments that we swore never to bring up again (but obviously still bring up, every chance we get). What’s a card going to add to that? No… we literally don’t need a card!

Our friendship works differently. It’s more like, he copies my homework, I copy his during a test, we take turns getting yelled at by the same teacher, and somehow that is enough satisfaction to know we’ve got each other’s backs.

Fighting and making up

You all know that we boys fight a lot, argue a lot and often for no reason, but the good thing is we make up in like four minutes, no joke.

One day, one of my friends and I had a full-blown argument over whose turn it was to bring the football. We didn’t talk for a whole recess, which for us was basically a decade, and then in the next period, we were talking about the homework we didn’t do, same panic, same frustration.

That’s it. That’s the apology. No one said, “I’m sorry for what I said.” We just looked at each other with stupid faces while the teacher scolded us.

For girls, this scenario is probably unbelievable and they’ll never get it; the truth is, we can’t explain it either; it just works that way.

The nicknames nobody asked for

Girls call each other by cute nicknames, like ‘pretty eyes,’ ‘Cherry,’ ‘Barbie,’ either given by their families or their friends, and they love being called that. But when it comes to us boys, we never call each other by our actual names or cute names ever!

Ahad is ‘bhai,’ Hamza is ‘chapri’ for reasons I do not remember anymore, and Zain is now being called ‘scooter’ after he fell off his bicycle once in front of everyone. This might sound mean or rude, but it’s the opposite; the meaner the nickname, the tighter the friendship — that’s just the rule for us. If we didn’t like you, you’d just be called by your name. By the way, we don’t expect anyone to call us decent names either, and if someone does, that’s suspicious.

We don’t have a rule book, but we still have rules

Being boys, it’s always about being tough; we don’t admit we miss someone, that we care, that we’re hurt or that we’ll be there whenever they need us. Everything is there; we just don’t say it.

My friends and I would do genuinely insane things to avoid admitting a friendship mattered to us. Somebody could be dealing with something serious, like arguments with parents, feeling left out, or just having a rough week and the most emotional support they get is “Let’s go out,” or “Let’s watch a movie.” Those sentences actually work like a hug.

I always thought this was just my group of friends, but soon found out that a psychologist named Niobe Way spent decades interviewing teenage boys about their friendships, and found that boys aged 12, 13 and 14 talk about their best friends with real intensity. Not “he’s a cool dude,” but “I’d be lost without him” levels of sincerity. But as they got older, that closeness started to disappear.

Somewhere along the way, admitting it felt embarrassing, like being close to a friend meant you weren’t independent, or worse, that you weren’t “normal.”

A point worth mentioning here: when my grandfather passed away, none of my friends knew what to say. They just sat beside me. We hardly spoke. Looking back, that probably meant more than any speech could have. Because their presence said it all.

So basically, it won’t be wrong to admit that we boys don’t get less emotional as we get older. It’s just that we get better at hiding our emotions.

Same language, different words

Nobody talks about boys and Friendship Day because everyone assumes we just don’t need to say things out loud. Instead of “Can you do this for me?” we say, “Arey yaar, bhai nahi hai?” roughly meaning, “Aren’t we bros?” Same thing, different words. Instead of a hug, it’s a half-hug, a pat on the back or a playful punch, our own way of saying we care without actually saying it.

Interestingly, the way we show up is also different. Girls plan surprises; we just turn up at each other’s houses because we are bored. Girls write paragraphs on Instagram; we tag each other in a meme and call it a tribute.

Let’s actually celebrate this one

While Friendship Day is celebrated around the world on July 30th, let’s admit something: boys’ friendship rarely gets talked about, and that doesn’t mean we’re not friends. Our friendships are just as real; we just express them differently. No cards, no presents and no surprises; instead, it’s a punch, a push and getting roasted in the group chat, and that says everything a card never could.

Published in Dawn, Young World, July 25th, 2026