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Comment by stavrianos | Hacker News Reader

less "why" and more "how". Which is a shame, because "why" would be interesting.

The sexist-yet-probably-true answer: because women are emotionally weak creatures who get upset over minor things and feel the need to share. Men are better at stoically shrugging off the minor problems of life.

Also, men are better at nonverbal communication. If a friend has good news or bad news it's sufficient for me to say "Hey, congrats!" or "Bummer, that sucks dude", and we both know exactly where we stand. There's no need to spend several thousand words on agreeing with each other on exactly how good or bad the news is.

edit: Also, men and women find different things interesting. Women are far more interested in "feelings" and "relationships" as complicated objects worthy of discussion, whereas men see them as simple things unworthy of too much brainpower and would much rather think about "things" or "ideas". This explains why groups of men and groups of women will choose to talk about the things they find interesting, and why many man-woman conversations are doomed to be deathly boring to one partner or the other.

I must respectfully beg to differ.

Few the women I know are "emotionally weak." They do tend to be less stoic than men, but that is very different from weak, and I suspect that is at least partially cultural. I do think men are more stoic about dealing with minor problems in life (in general), but that has to do with how they express it, not how well they actually deal with it.

I also tend to find that men, in general, are less wordy, especially about emotional topic, but I think that is less about men being better at nonverbal communication. In fact, I find in general, the women I know are stronger in that area. The difference is that women tend to spend a lot of words agreeing as a cultural means of bonding, where men don't. This doesn't mean they do it for communication, they do it for affirmation of the relationship.

I will agree that, in general, women are more interested in feelings and relationships then men, but not because these are simple things or unimportant, or even that most men see them that way. It is simply a difference of focus. For instance, I do not find medicine "a simple thing unworthy of too much brainpower", I rather find that it is outside my domain and I let doctors worry about that while I worry about normalization and effecient storage structures...

Emotional weakness is probably too general of a term. Two things seem to be true: men are better at pushing aside their emotions to achieve their goals, and women are better at not making irrational decisions based on things like egoism and vengeance.

I prefer not dealing with emotions because I think my emotions are generated by things and ideas. So, it seems quicker to achieve a good emotional state through talking about things and ideas than emotions.

I'm curious about how generalizable the male:female difference in "how" friendships differ is along that dimension, because the men featured in the article are unlike many men I know.

Yeah, I'm also curious if there's any research on how these things vary. I assume it's not the case that 100% of male-male friendships are like X, and 100% of female-female friendships are like Y. But how close is it to that? If we assume that a description like this one accurately covers a "typical" male-male friendship (not necessarily true, but granting for the sake of argument), are roughly 90% of male-male friendships similar to that, or more like 50%, or what? In short: the distributions are as interesting to me as the median points.

Yes, "why" would be extremely interesting!

It would appear that the research on the subject is somewhat spotty and often gets misinterpreted, sometimes at the source.

I found a book on amazon the other day called Pink Brain, Blue Brain by neuroscientist Lise Elliot, which is next up on my reading list.

http://www.amazon.com/Pink-Brain-Blue-Differences-Troublesom...

One study I read about described a situation where the researchers bundled the same baby up and told some people that it was a boy and others that it was a girl. The people who thought it was a girl tended to comfort the baby when it got fussy, and the people who thought it was a boy tended to try to distract it.[1] Subtle, but I can imagine that there are other ways that we train girls to be more 'face to face'.

[1] from http://www.amazon.com/Failing-At-Fairness-Schools-Cheat/dp/0... --marred by some selection bias in the data they used, but very interesting nonetheless.

That's because distraction is a more effective pain reducer for men than for women. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17951004

Interesting! I wonder if people know this instinctively, or we just sort of pattern match in the background and pick up on it.

Causation could go either way. Comfort may work best when it comes in a familiar form.

I think "why" is largely rooted in the fact that women have babies (well, around 90% of them do, and some that don't adopt) and once you have a baby you need social support in a way a man does not. You either need a spouse making the lion's share of the money or you need family to turn to if there is no man around. Even in a worst case (or perhaps best case) scenario, you need daycare providers if nothing else. This reality seems to influence female behavior even before most women have children and definitely influences it afterwards, even if the woman was relatively independent and can-do prior to that. Social influence is primarily about catering to people's egos and emotions. So I think the fact that women need other people to help raise their kids tends to make them more attuned to the emotional stuff and make it loom larger in their eyes than it typically does for men.

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