LILACS NEED MATES

My father tried to get a lilac tree going in our yard, and this particular lilac tree never grew, never died, never had blooms.  How disappointing! We wanted this tree because we had seen and smelled the glorious blooms of other trees in other yards.  Then one day someone told us that the tree would not bloom because it did not have a mate nearby enough.  We came to understand that with lilacs there are "males" and "females" (which we had, I do not know) and that they needed to be close by each other for one of them to bloom.