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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

> some research showing that friendship for women is basically with whatever other women you’re around the most. If you’re a woman and want more friends, you probably need to get a new job. Or make a long-term commitment to showing up to the same place where other women are also committed to showing up (AA meetings, church, sports team, etc). Or just be friends with the wifes of your husband’s friends.

I replaced "men" with "women" and it still feels true. Think this is just in general how humans build friendships with each other. Maybe also add "making an effort to hang out with your already existing friends friends"

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Not really. It’s possible for women to say, “I love your earrings,” and be best friends ten minutes later. I dare you to try that as a man.

Not sure if this is a joke, but it's neither as easy you believe it to be for women, or as hard you think it is for men.

No, it does not work like that. I can say "I love your earrings" and have nice friendly idle conversation about bullshit. It takes waaay more to get a friend you can really talk with or open up.

The equivalent is a guy saying something about soccer and the two having nice idle chat about match or something. Not a friend, but conversation happened.

Not earrings, but I’ve done it with clothing, hairstyles, jewelry, etc. and it’s brought out us being friends. I don’t think it’s that uncommon between men.

At the same time, I’ve met women that haven’t made as many friends with other women, and find it hard to do so. I don’t know if it’s so clear-cut like that.

Or perhaps men and women are innately different after hundreds of thousands of generations of sexually dimorphic evolution, and this affects the manner in which they socialize?

It seems we've brainwashed an entire generation into believing that all differences in male and female are purely social constructs - which is total nonsense.

My experience has been that men and women have far more things in common than we have things in difference. There are of course differences between men and women, but I think that if I had a rigid belief that how men and women socialize was this large, unbreachable, genetically determined gulf, I would have lost out on a lot of really great friendships and relationships.

We don't think much about evolution or biological determinism on so many other subjects - for example, we were hunter-gatherers for most of our history, but we don't seem to discuss that very much in our post-agriculture society, or think that it limits us from building civilizations the way we do today. So why say on this subject that we are biologically limited in this specific way?

I'm not saying that there is no difference between men or women at all, you're jumping to conclusions here, way too quickly.

From my point of view, this particular social behavior doesn't seem to differ too much though, but I would agree with you that there are other behaviors/attributes that are very different between men or women.

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