Harry Styles: Male Friendship Is About Telling Your Friends You Just Cried

Josh St. Clair

August 26, 2019 9:25 PM

Former One Direction teen pop sensation, current 25-year-old pop sensation, fashion icon, and formidable screen actor Harry Styles recently sat down for some Real Talk with Rolling Stone . Styles and writer Rob Sheffield spent time this summer eating tuna salad, taking wheatgrass shots that went down like battery acid, and car-pool karaoke-ing to Old Town Road. (They also may or may not have taken magic mushrooms, a creative strategy one-part Beatles pow-wow, one-part Ken Kesey LSD test that Styles adopted while writing his new album.) All in all: a pretty great summer.

Harry Styles on the Importance of Male Friendship

In between bites and drives around California, though, Styles spoke to Sheffield about some recent heartbreaks and the relationships hes come to value as the antidote to all those woes: friendships. Im discovering how much better it makes me feel to be open with friends, Styles said. Male friends in particular.

Despite the very real difficulty of making same-sex friends , Styles has never been in want of male companionship. He spent much of his young life on tour with his four male bandmates, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik, and Liam Paynea male clan that has inspired just the sort of sexual speculation and parody expected with a successful boy band. Yet it may be precisely those jokes that dissuade men from having meaningful discussions with one another. (Studies, in fact, suggest these same-sex teen friendships are essential for later romantic satisfactionwith partners of any sex.) And while he was on tour, Styles said he had a lot of anxiety he wanted to talk about. While I was in the band, I was constantly scared I might sing a wrong note, he told Sheffield. I felt so much weight in terms of not getting things wrong.

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Speaking with his friends about these issues has become easier, and Styles said that doing so has been a kind of therapy. As he put it: Feeling that vulnerability, rather than holding everything in.

The latter seems to be a consequence of yesterdays thinking.

I feel pretty lucky to have a group of friends who are guys who would talk about their emotions and be really open, Styles said. My friends dad said to me, You guys are so much better at it than we are. I never had friends I could really talk to. Its good that you guys have each other because you talk about real shit. We just didnt.

Its not always the easiest to go in a room and say, I made a mistake and it made me feel like this, and then I cried a bunch. But that moment where you really let yourself be in that zone of being vulnerable, you reach this feeling of openness.

One Direction split up in August 2015, but even though the bandmates went their separate ways, Styles says the friendships have persisted; theyd all gone through the same crazy and anxiety-inducing experiences together. And since then, Styles has developed his own group of mates who he can seek out for emotional council. Along with meditation, Styles sees these conversations as essential for his mental well-being. Its part of being more open and talking with friends, he said. Its not always the easiest to go in a room and say, I made a mistake and it made me feel like this, and then I cried a bunch. But that moment where you really let yourself be in that zone of being vulnerable, you reach this feeling of openness. Thats when you feel like, Oh, Im fucking living, man.

Where Styles hasnt been able to articulate his anxiety or sadness in conversation, hes channeled those emotions into song. His new album, he tells Sheffield, [is] all about having sex and feeling sad, which may the perfect secret Truth of rockstar fame. Thankfully, Styles has begun to find the antidote to that sadnessnot just having friends or talking with friends but also collaborating and creating something with friends. With or without magic mushrooms.

Josh St. Clair