What do you want to do for your birthday? It’s a simple question that, for many men, does not have an easy answer.
When asked recently over Slack about how they like to celebrate their birthdays, a group of six GQ editors quickly launched into an animated conversation about their anxieties over party planning.
“It’s tough to be like, ‘Fellas, come celebrate me,’” wrote GQ Sports director Sam Schube.
“I’ve definitely done the secret birthday party, where it’s just like, ‘Come over and watch a game.’ And then maybe someone realizes it’s my birthday,” style editor Yang-Yi Goh admitted.
“Yeah, I’ve suffered from background-character syndrome since puberty,” watch editor Cam Wolf posted in the chat. “I don’t think I’ve had a birthday hang with the boys since I was like 13, when I went to Baja Fresh and then bowling.”
Associate senior editor Frazier Tharpe volunteered that “I plan my own,” but appended an “LMAO”—seemingly an admission that a man inviting people to his own birthday party generally isn’t done.
It’s not just GQ editors who feel this way. “I feel like there’s something in the male, straight culture where making a big deal of your birthday is almost self-indulgent and even a bit cringe past your early 20s,” Sean, a 31-year-old from Brooklyn, tells GQ. “Asking friends to join me for a ‘birthday weekend’ would have made me feel weird, even though I’d probably have a great time.”
To women like me, this ambivalence is incomprehensible. Why not take the opportunity to spend time with friends? Why not seize joy in the rare moments it is offered to us? But on TikTok, Reddit, and among girlfriends in heterosexual relationships, it’s a truism: Men are often weird about their birthdays.
Like many of the more serious issues that men struggle with, one root may be the gender roles that many of them are raised with. “I think there is a lot of socialization that we go through, consciously or not, that we shouldn’t be burdensome and that we will provide for others but try not to take,” 28-year-old Liam Dee, who lives in the UK, says.
Sean’s father and grandfather never “took effort to plan their birthday from what I remember, and most didn’t have a party unless it was some celebration of a decade,” he says. “In all of those instances, it was planned by their wives.”
For the women talking online about men’s fear of birthdays, this is a common complaint: That the initiative to throw them parties—and the planning that it necessitates—falls on the wives and girlfriends. “He has always insisted that he hates birthdays and thinks it’s embarrassing to make a big deal out of your birthday,” Teresa, a 24-year-old from Oregon, says of her boyfriend. For his most recent birthday, she threw him a party for the first time in five years. “He still insists it was his best birthday ever,” she says. “Which is so sad because he does want to be celebrated and clearly appreciated the effort—he just pretends to not want the attention.”
