It was only after a crisis hit their friendship group that Luke and his male friends began to feel comfortable discussing real emotions openly between them.

A keen footballer who had been to an all-boys school, Luke had noticed that “from the ages of around 14 to 17, a lot of my friends, we all never really showed a lot of emotion to each other [or issues with] a deeper meaning”.

But after the tragic and unexpected death of a boy in their year group who died in his sleep of an aneurysm, the mates began to share more of their real feelings. “A lot of us came around to the fact, during that time, that opening up to each other was perfectly healthy and normal,” says Luke, who is now 18.

Until then, they had been at least in part influenced by expectations that boys conform with understood

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