Membership has benefits when you belong to Mike’s Carport Fitness Center, which has only two members: Big Al and myself.

We’ve lifted weights here for years. When we started, the goal was to build strength that would help us catch more waves when we went surfing. Now, in midlife, we just want to slow down our physical deterioration.

But sometimes we abandon all those reps for Membership Appreciation Night. We’ll sit down on my lanai for a cold drink and a cigar. Sometimes you just have to engage in a chest-thumping, belching bout of manliness.

Lasting friendships are built this way, at least for men.

There’s no real logic to male friendships. And no need for rules. We’ll share tall tales about our lives, lament lost opportunities and lodge complaints about spouses, siblings and children. Or we’ll just talk about sports.

I discussed this with a woman, an old married friend I have known for years. She said married men don’t really have their own friends as much as they have shared friends. Their wives do, too.

“I think that we start off with friends before marriage, we bring a few to the table, if the spouse likes them we remain close to them,” she told me. “If the spouse doesn’t, then we’re distant friends or not friends at all.”

That got me thinking. The men we once trusted with our secrets are replaced by the women we marry.

I know only a handful of men I consider good friends, and I’ve known all of them for decades, some even since we were boys. Some are friends I see regularly and others just a few times a year. I never put their friendships in different categories.

Those relationships might seem implausible to some. How can I sit down with a friend I haven’t seen in months (or longer) and pick up where our last conversation ended? Maybe this is only possible because men don’t have deep discussions.

I posed this question to my friend, who admitted to having these discussions with her husband.

“These are superficial relationships, but I think that’s what men like,” she said. “They have close relationships with their spouses, not with friends.”

I never looked at friendships that way. I simply liked our easygoing conversations.

When a former college roommate attended a recent barbecue at my house, he regaled my guests with stories about our time in the University of Hawaii’s Hale Noelani apartments: the time he got busted for using a fake parking pass that he made and the time I borrowed his X-Acto knife to cut a plantar’s wart off the bottom of my foot.

We’ve seen each other through the years but not regularly — and that never felt like a barrier. Our friendship is grounded in history. Nothing wrong with that.

Friendships require maintenance, and most married men don’t have time for that. So if I don’t see an old friend regularly, we don’t let the passage of time get in the way.

At the most recent Membership Appreciation Night, Big Al and I drank scotch. We talked about the future as much as the past.

And before the night was done, we blew smoke at the sky and offered a toast to friendship.

Reach Mike Gordon at 529-4803 or email mgordon@staradvertiser.com.