Sex Differences in Friendship Preferences
sciencedirect.com
sciencedirect.com
I have many acquaintances, I’m not shy or socially awkward. E.g. When I was running a business I would often go to business networking events alone, start conversations with people, establish a rapport and spend hours chatting, but all those interactions have essentially left me with one good friend.
I’ve often found it easier to establish friendships with women, but (being straight) they get complicated. Either I develop feelings, or they do, or there’s a suspicion from someone’s parter about the real nature of our relationship. It’s just too problematic.
I think the female “model” of friendships outlined in the abstract just makes more sense to me. “emotional support, intimacy, and useful social information” is what I want from a friendship.
I suspect there are other men in this position and that the dominant male “model” of friendship that we have (and which is outlined in this article) is more cultural than biological. But I have no proof. What do you think?
Same here. Maybe you, like me, have none of the characteristics the fine article mentions?
> (men) value same-sex friends who are physically formidable, possess high status, possess wealth, and afford access to potential mates.
I have 3 male friends who are extremely close types. And others I would say are very close types. However, they are not particularly wealthy, afford me no access to potential mates, and are definitely not what anyone would term "physically formidable". (Maybe one is? If you only look at his height and ignore his freakishly gangly frame.) Point is, I was willing to initiate friendships with them 25 years ago or whatever despite them checking none of the boxes I should have been looking for. (According to the study).
I wonder if most men are simply unwilling to do that? Maybe most men actually do look for those things, and will never consider friendships with any man who doesn't have them? There is a concept in dating called "settling". I wonder if most men are "unwilling to settle"?
So, you're right, it is possible the commenter has none of those things, but it's equally possible that the commenter has all of those things, and simply wants to be around the rest of the "cool kids"?
I would even tone down signalling the qualities mentioned in TFA to avoid attracting into relationships the people who are looking for gain. It would be dangerous to build your life on these.
Also, When Harry Met Sally was right. Men and women can't be friends. Eventually the sex gets in the way. Speaking for my self, men tend to confuse all closeness with romantic intimacy. I've never seen even explicitly sex buddies work either, sooner or later someone gets jealous or serious.
I have at least half a dozen close woman friends, all of whom I have or have had “romantic thoughts” about, but for various reasons have either not tried, or tried and been rebuffed but stayed close friends with.
One example, a girl I met in ‘99 (I still remember the day) and fell head over heels in lust with. She had a boyfriend, so that was out of the question. In the next 15 or so years we were never in a position where both of us were single at the same time. That situation happened about 5 years back, and we ended up in a drunken flirty conversation, where we both agreed that we weren’t going to do this, because we both valued the friendship too highly to risk losing it over a hookup. (Neither of us have great track records of staying friends with exes…)
Others had/got boyfriends/partners/spouses, and while all of them involved awkwardness and sometimes outright distrust, I totally understand and acknowledge that’s a normal human reaction to a girl having very close guy friends they’ve known a lot longer than “new boyfriend”. You need to earn trust in those situations, and all you have to do is behave like a rational and respectful human being. It can take a long time though, the girl from the example above got married, it took 3 or 4 years before her husband go ok enough with our friendship that we can go out together alone. And that’s Ok, I reckon I’d have acted exactly the same were the positions reversed.
I’ve always found this “blocker” interesting. I’m that way too but many, many men and women do not treat a significant other (on either side) as some kind of natural and impenetrable barrier to pursuing the object of their lust. Sometimes it goes nowhere, sometimes it blows up, sometimes it gets them what they (both) want.
I’m sure there’s a lot of cultural variation, but for myself, I think when I was younger this was way more about a lack of confidence than it was about morality. And now that I’m older I’m pretty sure it’s 99% “don’t want the hassle.”
Perhaps the behavior came before the movies, but I'm skeptical because it seems to be the natural behavior to avoid pursuing people in relationships (it will probably cause emotional trauma for the person in a relationship, as it would be natural to feel guilty about cheating, though I indirectly know of a person in a relationship who seemed to have felt no guilt about cheating at all).
When I think of my friends who treat monogamy as situation-dependent, I think that’s more normal in Europe than the US, but I haven’t made a study of it or anything.
If they'll cheat with you, they'll cheat on you.
I don't need that sort of complication or grief in my life. And I respect myself too much to be the sort of guy who cheats on his girlfriends, or the sort of guy who cheats with someone else's girlfriend. It's probably cost me some hookups, it has never cost me a relationship I'd regret, because who wants a relationship with that kind of person?
Having said that, I'd also never let someone having a SO be something that stops me from working at kindling a friendship. For me at least, while finding a "life partner/soul mate" is an extremely worthwhile objective, making good friends is a more important thing for me than hooking up with every available (or unavailable) woman possible. So I'll still pursue a friendship, just being rational enough to think with my head not my dick, and keep the "lust" in check.
You don’t want the complication, but you also think of yourself as a better person if you don’t cross that line.
But I’m not at all sure that the people who do cross it are any less self-respecting. In the case of my friends who I know have done so, I kind of doubt they would have lived better lives had they been more monogamous from say their 20s to mid 40s. It’s not like they were trying to hurt anyone. It’s not like they didn’t have good relationships. And compared to myself, I look at their less sentimental, more realistic view of sex and love as possibly healthier.
If someone cheats on you and you never find out, does it mean anything?
I'm curious: what exactly they imagined would happen as a result of their actions? Or did they just prefer not to think about it?
I get that. It's just that their idea of what's "respectable" and mine differ. That's not to say either of us are right or wrong, but I stand by my version of respect and self-respect amongst the people I chose to spend timer with and I will judge them and the people they cheat with accordingly. If they've got a circle of friends who share their views, they won't give a flying fuck about my judgement of them.
In my view, and amongst my friends, cheating is a demonstration of untrustworthiness. The same as stealing. It doesn't matter to me if you've stolen from me or from someone else, if I know you've stolen at all, I know I can't trust you not to steal from me or my friends. If you're happy to fuck around with someone else's wife or girlfriend, you'll probably be happy to do the same with mine if it suits you. We will not be friends. You will, at very best, become an acquaintance that I do not trust.
> If someone cheats on you and you never find out, does it mean anything?
Yeah. It means they lie to you and are untrustworthy, just you don't know about it yet. Maybe you'll never find out about that specific instance of cheating, but you still have someone you should have been able to trust who'll break that trust and lie to you in your life, and these attitudes will eventually reveal that, even if you never find out she fucked the best man at your wedding (or whatever). Thats what I meant when I said "I don't need that sort of complication or grief in my life."
(I will add though, that this was not nearly as strongly a developed outlook on life in my 20s, and I will cut some slack for "kids being kids", but if you're still fucking around on your girlfriend/wife in your 40's, you will be judged harshly and very firmly moved from "a friend" to "an untrustworthy acquaintance that I probably need to warn other actual friends about" in my life.)
It is possible that some men or women cannot be just friends with the opposite sex, but I have at least one counterfactual for the universal claim.
Maybe some people need to impose this sort of restriction on themselves, in the same way that a recovering drug addict shouldn't keep drugs in the house if they have any hope of not relapsing. People should do what's healthy for them. And for such a person, perhaps it's alien to consider that others don't suffer such a temptation.
The idea that temptation out of a relationship can be celebrated is reinforced by Hollywood movies. There's a lot of celebrated cheating in both classic and modern popular films like Casablanca, The Lady Vanishes, The Notebook, and Sleepless in Seattle.
Your view is admirable and I hope to share it, but popular movies are a strong force for people taking the opposite view as it normalizes the behavior of leaving a committed relationship for other people.
From my experience and observation, I would say that it is possible for _some_ men and women to be friends, but it is not the rule rather the exception.
Obviously that wouldn't work And it always led me back to things I had a general and natural interest. Which ultimately led to more natural relationships.
It can be done if you just text, never meet, rarely speak.
It’s pretty rare for me to not know if I’m gonna hook up with a woman in The first 6-12 months of knowing her. By then I’ve either raised the idea, or at least had the “if we were both single…” conversation and got a pretty good idea if they’re open to the idea of considering it later if the situation allows.
(Having said that, I’m in the older end of the demographic here, and I know for sure I didn’t have this worked out when I was in my 20s and still had teenaged hormones rushing around my brain…)
I have MANY female friends who have been in my life for decades and I have zero sexual attraction to them (and likewise they have zero sexual attraction to me). I have no idea why people perpetuate this stereotype that women and men cannot be friends. It's entirely possible to separate the people who you want to be friends with and the people you are sexually attracted to. Obviously, the women who I am sexually attracted to I don't attempt to be good friends with for fear of risking my long term relationship.
You may be at one extreme of a spectrum. I have certainly known men with higher libidos than me and I find a great many of my female frinds and acquaintances attractive
> (and likewise they have zero sexual attraction to me).
That nothing has ever happened is extremely weak evidence of this if you're as committed to the idea that sex is as important to you as you write.
> I have no idea why people perpetuate this stereotype that women and men cannot be friends.
Because they're from cultures where it isn't or because their personal experince suggests it isn't.
> It's entirely possible to separate the people who you want to be friends with and the people you are sexually attracted to.
This suggests a level of control over feelings that normal people do not posess, not being around people you are attracted to, or very low libido.
> Obviously, the women who I am sexually attracted to I don't attempt to be good friends with for fear of risking my long term relationship.
This completely cuts against everything you wrote above about how it's possible to separate friendship and attraction to the appropriate sex(es).
Having a high libido does not translate into wanting to have sex with your close friends.
> I have certainly known men with higher libidos than me and I find a great many of my female frinds and acquaintances attractive
> level of control over feelings that normal people do not posess
Normal is only normal within a culture. I've yet to see any evidence that this is biologically inherent to human beings.
> This completely cuts against everything you wrote above about how it's possible to separate friendship and attraction to the appropriate sex(es).
Given that the original claim is
> When Harry Met Sally was right. Men and women can't be friends. Eventually the sex gets in the way.
I don't see how this contradicts anything. The original claim is that sex will inevitably get in the way. The person you're replying to is claiming that there are women that they will not inevitably become sexually attracted to.
But fundamentally, friendship (getting along, having similar tastes and views, etc.) can be viewed almost orthogonal to sexual attractiveness. So there is a group of people who are both friend material and sex partner material. You have to deliberately suppress your natural feelings of having a friendship AND having a sexual relationship, and make a choice due to fear of social norms. You might be able to do that, but the desire is still there. That's why there is no real friendship for a lot of people because it is hard to ignore the sexual desire. A moment, a spark can lead to a night of romance between two close friends who are sexually attracted to each other. And this whole friendship thing could collapse.
The idea of a sexual relationship with her is just gross, though, in the “I’m screwing my sister” sort of way.
But hey, that's just me! I recognize other people have different types of marriages and don't judge them or consider their relationships toxic.
The above situation could certainly lead to tempestuous arguments, though!
But given this
> The idea of a sexual relationship with her is just gross, though, in the “I’m screwing my sister” sort of way.
There is no temptation
In any in-between scenario, you don't know your partner well enough to judge and should probably break up immediately on those grounds alone. Imagine not knowing your life partner well enough to know if they will have extra-marital sex? Inconceivable to me.
Many people recognize this pattern. There are countless stories, novels, books, movies, tv shows on it. People writing from personal experience. If you truly value your monogamous marriage then you'll avoid letting that tension build in the first place. That doesn't mean you'll never go out with a friend of the opposite sex. But you will avoid doing it too much. O course many people aren't even aware of this pattern so they let the tension build and then lose their marriage.
You can fully trust your partner. And your partner can trust themselves. That doesn't mean if they put themselves in that situation over and over that nothing will come of it. Further, you have no idea what the other person's intensions are, and even if the other person's intensions are platonic, they'll have the same tensions building.
I’d even go as far to say as people that can be tempted this way do not have as strong relationships as they think they do.
Do you really believe most people would stay faithful? At best, they might break up before starting a relationship with the person they're spending all the time with but it's highly unlikely at some point they wouldn't start something one way or another.
If you get that example then everything else is just a matter of degree. If my spouse wants to see an old friend of the opposite sex a few times a year I'm not going to worry. But, if they are talking to them daily, which is what the post above was about, then IMO, something is wrong with our relationship and I should be worried.
If the mars example doesn't work for you then my gut says just wait a few years and a few examples will come. Of course maybe you just know special types of people I've never met.
Yes.
You're asking me to believe that most people will betray their principles, commitments, vows, etc when it becomes convenient.
I have no evidence that that is the case.
If anything, there are numerous examples in literature of people staying faithful for years apart.
My hypothesis on this is that this belief that people will cheat is projection on the part of people that would.
> But, if they are talking to them daily, which is what the post above was about, then IMO, something is wrong with our relationship and I should be worried.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. In that scenario, there is nothing wrong with your relationship. But yet you say there is.
> Of course maybe you just know special types of people I've never met.
Right back at y'all.
The GP stated: > go to each other for advice and emotional support
The way I intended my marriage vows, this would violate “forsaking all others”. I go to my wife for emotional support, not someone outside the marriage. I would consider doing otherwise “cheating” at the same scale as a sexual relationship.
I think this is true when men have one close female friend, but if you have three or four, not so much.
From the other direction, I haven't found it to be true at all in my personal experience; when it's happened, it was clear that the women began the friendship intending for it to develop as a courtship, and I just didn't notice until it became blatant.
I have often found it easier to make friends with women that I've found too young or too old for me. Of course there has been sexual attraction, but you'd have to learn to cope with that to function as a human, anyway.
And yes, in a few cases, women I've only wanted as friends have misinterpreted my intentions ...
This has not been my experience as a 30 something male. I have female friends who are "good looking" in some societal sense but for whom there has been zero attraction for over a decade, so far as I can tell they feel similarly. Perhaps the reason this is my experience is that I find making male friends fairly easy, and my relationships with my male friends tend to be close and emotionally vulnerable (indeed, this seems to be why it is easy for me to make friends).
Might be true for you, but this is not true in general.
It’s also mono-normative. For poly people this isn’t a problem at all. If you develop feelings, why would that be bad?
They're open to sex outside of a monogamous couple, but instigating that without consent of all existing partners in the relationship is still problematic. They either have open pre agreed consent to sleep with anybody and everybody, or there's an agreed consent negotiation process on a case by case basis. Sleeping with other people without consent of the partner(s) is still cheating.
(I'll also note that "developing feelings" isn't a problem, at least not for me. You have feelings, and you have intellect, and feeling do not drive behaviour, intellect does. I have deep and lustful feelings for Kate Bush. My girlfriend knows this. She totally understands why and how I'm so head over heels in love with her (or, more realistically, in love with her public persona). Those feelings in no way diminish my feelings for my girlfriend, and even given the opportunity to act on those feelings I would not. In that vanishingly small chance I ever got to meet Kate socially, I'd do my very best to kindle a friendship with her. But I would not leave my girlfriend to "take a shot at her", or cheat on may girlfriend with her no matter how much opportunity I had to do so.)
And it's probably not a massive offset in the bell curves; your examples would not be in conflict.
I find it pretty weird to suggest you can’t have an overtly platonic relationship with someone. I’m a straight male, tall, relatively attractive, and on the wealthier side of my social circles. I’m married.
It’s very easy to behave in such a way that it’s clear I have no romantic interest in other women. I have never once felt that a woman failed to understand this and behave in kind.
I’m not buying that the poster behaves in a way consistent with just looking for friendship at all. Especially with the comment that partners get suspicious.
My current partner regularly has sleep overs with her best friend where they rug up on the couch and watch movies late at night. They share the bed when my partner hosts. And its not exactly something strange I haven't seen before.
Physical touch is huge to me when it comes to feeling close to someone so when I think of women's more emotionally supportive and intimate relationships these are all the the things I think of. Maybe it's different for you. But I've seen lesbians express frustration at how it can be difficult to tell if someones interested because of it, with some relationship origin stories being that they were both having late night movie dates with their 'straight' friend, wishing the other was gay too.
The fundamental mistake straight men make is that they value the potential of a romantic relationship above the likelihood of a meaningful friendship.
Have I missed out on a potential relationship? Probably… but if that’s the price to pay for these friendships I have instead then I’d pay it over and over again.
Treat women as people and not prospects and it’s trivial to be friends with women. If you want to date, go on a dating app or a dating event or something dating specific. Let women choose to be romantic prospects.
Unfortunately, this is only something you learn after having a romantic relationship so there is the "chicken or egg" problem.
I've been in several long term committed relationships. I still randomly get feelings for female friends of mine. I don't think it has to do with anything the poster above is saying. It just can happen regardless.
Do you mean you find yourself lusting after your friends? If so, you should think about why that is and why you allow it to control your relationships, because lust as a catalyst for the compromise of a friendship is terrible for all involved.
Your life will improve substantially when you begin to treat all friendships, regardless of gender, as distinct, complex and meaningful relationships.
I have a similar experience when attending more professional environments. However, I think it's easier to create relationships marked more by friendly intent — rather than professional advantages — when working with people outside of your industry, especially in non-profit contexts. In these contexts, as there are less/no immediate professional advantages, you are likely staying in touch due to liking their personality.
>I think the female “model” of friendships outlined in the abstract just makes more sense to me. “emotional support, intimacy, and useful social information” is what I want from a friendship. I suspect there are other men in this position and that the dominant male “model” of friendship that we have (and which is outlined in this article) is more cultural than biological. But I have no proof.
I have no problems having a friendly but tactful relationship with other men who are competitive, but I would idly prefer a close friendship with a guy similar to the friendships I experienced in elementary/middle/high school due to spending lots of time with the same people. I really missed that kind of relationship when I was in university.
However, I've shifted expectations to only expect a "best friend"-like relationship (where I can let my guard down and act like myself) with a romantic partner. I just don't think most people in my bubble are willing to set aside the time and energy to nurture and maintain close friendships (e.g. meeting up with someone just to hang out or grab dinner) in other contexts.
On the other hand, for men, finding yourself a "band of brothers is "your job". If anything the cultural defect that we don't tell men that it's up to you to create your own band, and that we don't give them the tools to do so (note my examples are almost all "men forced together by happenstance"). There is a cottage industry of male support groups that is starting to address this that's getting really popular, if you want a rec, I'm doing one starting mid-next-month, I trust the pod leader, he's my housemate, and really good at this. Contact info in my bio
As for the sex differences, I suspect both men and women need approximately the same amount of emotional support, just that in our culture, men undershoot how much they think they need (often by a factor of infinity) and women overshoot.
There are probably some men like you describe but your lack of success finding what you're looking for speaks to the likelihood the standard model for male friendships closer to accurate and more prevalent..and dare I say natural.
Depending on what you actually mean by "intimacy", here's a relevant comment I made on another thread about difficulty finding friendships for men:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28969047
copying below:
"True friendship comes mostly from shared struggle. Think sports teams, military, small teams at work, even childhood friends and the experience growing up.
It is hard to establish anything meaningful of a connection with casual interactions, and expecting to just "party/play hard" with people you don't really know is putting the cart before the horse. First you must work hard together.
I'd suggest joining a Crossfit gym or similar. I've had great success meeting people within the context of group workouts. It has regular class schedules, and provides a way to ease into social interactions at your own pace as you'll be around the same people regularly. Often this leads to opportunities to do things together outside of the classes.
Additionally, there are likely individuals with similar disinterest in the common activities you mentioned in you CS classes. Finding opportunities to work with someone on class assignments, studying or projects together would fall in the "shared struggle" category."
I got raised by my mother alone. My father left when I was 5 and even before, he was at work all day anyway. Then I got a step dad when I was 13, but most of my formative years I was raised by my mother alone. I imagine that's one reason for this problem.
I only have interest in female friends and basically went all polyamory because of that. This way the feelings problem isn't a problem anymore.
I had the experience that many people would somehow value me as a good friend of them, but I only see them only as an acquaintance.
The other stuff you mention, social information ("tells me when someone says something negative about me") has basically no consistent difference between the sexes.
And to answer your question I definitely think there is some biology involved. Like most of this stuff, cultural builds on that and creates even more structure.
So many people on HN have the attitude that making friends at work is something to actively avoid but there's another way to look at it. You're going to be spending 40hrs a week, ~2000hrs a year with these people. If you make them friends that's 2000 hours a year or more spending time with friends. If you don't make them friends well, then ... I can only guess that ~2000hrs a year is less enjoyable that it could be.
Yes, some of those relationships are shallow. I have coworkers who I really seemed to hit it off with at work but once I left we stop contacting each other. OTOH, My 4 closest friends are x-coworkers. I was best man at one's wedding and attended the 3 others.
I often consider if I should give up a FAAMG salary to be in a small 10 person company where they are all friends, we share our lives outside work too, but I get paid 1/5th to 1/6th what I make now. I know 50+ people living that life and they seem pretty dang happy. That doesn't mean you can't have both but for some reason I get the impression it's easier at smaller companies or at least smaller groups.
I'd often imagined this was the kind of environment that existed in places like Bell Labs.
Despite treating females exactly the same, more often than not they mistakenly assume I'm romantically interested in them. When I was a teenager I was often taken aback by their negative reactions to my messages. I'd copy-paste the offending my message to a male, or have the same conversation with a male, and the men always reacted positively. It was quite puzzling.
I wonder if their point is not that our society doesn't generally agree that the "collaborative" aspects of friendship are better than the "competitive" benefits, but that despite this, we still behave as we do. I wonder if we'd see the same results if this study had been done in a more matriarchal culture than the US.
Networking events are not a good place to make meaningful relationships, period. People are going in hopes to further their careers in one way or another so the interactions are somewhat superficial on the social level.
I don't want friendships that revolve around emotional support and intimacy; I want friendships that revolve around exploring and trying new things together. In my experience, friendships revolving around emotional support also demand that you need a certain amount of support and that you support the other person in the same way, and despite having a vagina, I'm not good at emotional support. Emotional friendships, in my experience, turn my emotions into a social display instead of just letting me feel them.
Men are also better at letting my main emotion be anger/annoyance. Women always want me to be sad or upset about things, but I'm more of a 'swear-filled rant and then work on something unrelated' type of person.
So I'd agree that it's cultural as well as biological. Either that or we're biological outliers (which would also make sense).
Where's the element of PLAY in this? What about FUN? When you mention "my whole life" - does that include when you were South Park age (5th grade?)
For me, it's all improv and it's a fun game. I seek out the opportunities to play it. It's "yes, and" as you pass the ball back and forth in conversation.
Some do better with this than others. For some, conversation might be totally a status game or some other motive involved. For most people, it's good to simply excuse yourself and move on. I'll often LARP along, but subtly parody the situation, to grind down the seriousness.
In bars, I can "take the piss" or "bust your balls" with the best of them. If you haven't heard those terms, it's basically banter, but with different terms for people from different regions. Again, it's all improv and adaptation to the person / group.
I find that groups are the best, but they are hard to find. You can't just form a group, and they won't last forever. It's a bit of a spontaneous thing. But once you find a good one, it's better than any individual friendship. Maybe the bonds are strengthened by a sense of shared comraderies within a group that you don't get from an individual friendship.
In any case, you have to get out in a search for some shared fun.
I've had some success in tweaking the female model to male friends, but it takes a lot of work on my part. I call male friends on the phone, which is something most Americans do not do. We either talk work, hobbies, or joke around, maybe 10% of tehse conversations would qualify as more intimate. Those, and they are many, who can't or won't talk on the phone I tend to drift away from, or only see occasionally.
I feel similarly, but I classify "life" as a project. And a very important one. I have friends with whom I can discuss various ways how to make our lives better (e.g. how to take care of health, how to learn, how to get rich, how to help others, how to live meaningfully).
I can see that people like me might try to cling onto any sort of positive opportunity for a relationship outside family - and in that process, absolutely destroy whatever potential was there.
I guess what I'm saying is that relationships can get weird fast. Boundaries must be understood either implicitly or explicitly for a plutonic relationship to flourish.
I'm drinking a 12-pack of beer as I type this, alone. Been doing this for over a decade. I don't like drinking with others. This is normal for me. I don't like most people, because most people come off as either asshole or idiot. I'm self aware enough to realize that I too will at times be either an asshole or idiot to someone else. As much as I try not to be.
Unlike yourself, I haven't really tried to make friends, but that is mostly because it feels like a dead on arrival concept to me.
This is exactly my experience here. This is the reason why as a man, I instinctively find female friends more trustworthy. When I experience a problem in life, female friends help me a lot more than my male friends do.
The retention rate is also different. A lot more of the female friends I made earlier in my life remained as friends than male friends I made.
That being said, I think the best way to deal with being friendzoned is to be honest about one's feelings and end the friendship. No use in being around people if it makes one bitter.
Friendzone is not something mean a girl do to you. It is her not wanting to date you. Don't pretend friendship if you are not actually interested in friendship.
Most of the people I bet I could rely on happen to be women (met in writing/graphic design groups at university), but I wonder if these will last as I get older and people get into relationships.
It's less easy to hang out with a woman one-on-one without it seeming like a date (for a man who is heterosexual). It can also cause jealousy on either side to stay close after pairing up with a romantic partner.
I suppose it depends on how one defines a "friend" based on closeness. It's likely I'll keep in touch and maintain a friendly relationship with these people as we all grow older (as acquaintance-friends), though I doubt I'll ever reach the level of "close friends," for any woman besides a romantic partner.
Men tend to value skill more than any of the above claimed. Even if that skill is farting twice as hard or designing rockets or always looking fresh AF or too good at Elder scrolls or having an incredible lay up.
As a male in my 30s, I just realized that every single close friend I had throughout my life is simply a person who made me laugh, and I made them laugh. A shared sense of humor, that’s literally all it is.
And it’s not like my friendships are/were shallow or anything, I have friends who I will gladly give a kidney to and I’m sure they’ll do the same for me. But I think humor was really the foundation of it all.
In my opinion a multi-center study is needed. I believe other parts of the world have different values in friendships.
I agree with you. My best friend was poor (not anymore, he is a MD now) and had nothing.
That being said, I agree with the person you are replying to. Differences in friendship preferences by men and women could be highly variable in different cultures, so one shouldn't read too much into a study that looks exclusively at US participants.
This is just a "post child" for the replication crisis.
It doesn't look at region, nation, socio-economic group, gender identity and so forth. It also doesn't look at actual friendships but friendship-preferences expressed on in survey (which I might speculate would be more influenced by social expectations than actual friendships but the point is "we don't know").
And then it add "evolutionary" to give a nice feel...
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C45&q=Sex...
ScienceDirect paywalls papers unless you arrive via Google Scholar.
Edit: this only works if you're logged in to a Google account.
In contrast, female friends - plenty, from good acquaintances to close friends, with some female friendships lasting for decades.
With friends as opposed to buddies I mean the kind of friends I can talk to about anything, share my feelings, ponder about life, relationships, people. And that kind of friendships are also something that you can latch onto again and again even if you had a gap of a few years in between. Friendships are anchored deeper, being less dependent on the circumstances at each moment in life. I wouldn't mind having male friendships too but it has just never panned out as easily as with women, really.
I guess that is because women are grown to being more open about sharing that sort of internal psychological and emotional scenery while men often aren't. But the thing is that we all have that side inside of us and it's screaming to be heard. So I'm very much lucky in having been able to start, enjoy, and maintain friendships with women -- even through my early romantic interests with other women and later my marriage with my wife. I would have been a sad, lone person without them.
Study 1 is across college-aged kids who are willing to participate in a psych study (in exchange for partial course credit or a lottery entry for a $40 gift card, IE they're psych students). Unclear why you'd generalize a study run across a single college, within a group of students who self-selected into your course, and draw conclusions about all men and women. In addition, you're asking people what they prefer in their friends; not measuring it.
Study 2 isn't controlling for variance in the underlying traits between the genders. All it shows is that if your best friend is male, they're likely to have different traits than if they're female. It does not show that you picked male/female friends because of those traits. So for example, when they find "men's same-sex best friends were more likely to possess qualities of physical strength", what they've discovered is not that men look for physically strong friends, but that men are usually stronger than women.
Study 3 is across people working on Mechanical Turk. That already skews your sample. It asks participants to weight the relative aspects of what they look for in a friend. But this relies on the participant being aware of what they look for. If someone thinks that they don't need emotional comfort from friends, they'll say so, but it doesn't mean that it's true.
tl;dr: This study is methodologically flawed, and the conclusions it draws are mostly to be splashy and show up in random articles. It'll be shared because people resonate with its conclusion and not because it contains robust evidence of its conclusion.
On the other hand my wife seems to get friends this way: go to party > meet person > coffee date > boom. friends.
for me, arranging a 'friend' date with no goal other than to get acquainted seems awkward. Too intimate, whether with a man or a woman.
What things they are skilled at, do they take initiative, how do others respond to them? Basically, are they going to be a valuable member of the group or not. It's a benign hazing ritual to test the quality of the man.
There are definitely people I've met who will try to talk shop, but it becomes immediately apparent that they are just trying to BS their way through everything.
What would gay men prefer? What about lesbians? What about non-binary folks?
Maybe not “physically formidable”, but being fit/looking after yourself.
Maybe not “high wealth”, but financially responsible and not ostentatious.
“High status” is a self mindset. I’m not sure what this paper’s definition of it is.
“Access to potential mates” sounds overly reductive but having some friends makes one a more attractive and interesting person in general.
“Emotional support” in willingness to listen, empathize, and not be a narcissist.
“Intimacy” in trustworthiness and dependability.
“Useful social information” but don’t be a gossip.
this makes me think of that fact "the average person's (sex) partner has had more partners"
Maybe it holds true for friends. the average person's friend has more friends. Although friendships are different than a count of sex. partners. you can only have so many on going friendships. If it's true then the ratio is probably lower.
Also not to nitpick but non-binary has absolutely nothing to do with being gay or lesbian. It's not the "third" option. You can be gay and non-binary.
You can access the full HTML by clicking the link here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C45&q=Sex...
Edit: this only works if you're logged in to a Google account.
It's not a great solution anyway, a far cry from open access. But I feel like any hole in a research paywall should be public knowledge, however small and clunky it maybe.
With posts like these though, I don’t think we should over analyse the validity of the results. Instead we should ask ourselves if it rings true for each of us personally and then reconsider our friendships. Maybe we need to be better friends to some people.
> From Study 1: "Participants (N = 213, 109 women) were recruited from a small Northeastern college in exchange for partial course credit or a lottery entry for a $40 gift card. Of these participants, 190 (95 women) completed all focal variables and were included in further analyses. Sample size was determined by the number of participants researchers were able to recruit over the course of one semester. Sensitivity analyses indicated we have 0.80 power to detect an effect size of partial η2 = 0.076 for focal predictions. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 23 (M = 19.82 years, SD = 1.31). The majority of participants identified as White (75%), 14% identified as Asian, 4% as Hispanic/Latino, and 3% as Black."
> From Study 2: "U.S. Participants (N = 306, 141 women) were recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk and received $1.00 compensation. Given our shift from ‘ideal’ to actual friends, we anticipated a reduction in the effect size of our predicted sex differences and aimed to recruit a 50% larger sample than that of Study 1. Sensitivity analyses indicated that our sample size allowed us to detect effect sizes of partial η2 = 0.003 with 0.80 power. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 84 (M = 35.22, SD = 11.29) and primarily identified as White (74%) or Black (9%)."
> From Study 3: "U.S. Participants (N = 250; 97 women) were recruited through TurkPrime and received $1.00 for completing the study. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 70 (M = 34.43, SD = 9.88). Sensitivity analysis indicated that we were able to detect small effects (f < 0.10) with 0.80 power assuming 0.5 correlation between measures. The majority of participants identified as White (70%), 11% identified as Black, 7% as Asian, 6% as Hispanic/Latinx, 2% as multi-racial, 1% as American Indian, and 1% as Pacific Islander."
The thing that stands out to me is that a group of people thought it'd be appropriate to classify all or most men and women based on a specific college and Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Do you think this is the be all and end all of the topic? Some researchers had an idea to test and did a study and tried to get as random a sample of people as they could that might be representative of the population. Or even a sub group of people. They got some results and published. If the results are interesting enough, they will try and do a better study.
The fact that your experience is different doesn't refute the study either. It's statistical. They aren't saying the 100% of all friendships are like X. I dare say it's also obvious that a sociological study has limitations and pointing them out isn't interesting.
However, I posted the details from the study's design for the readers of Hacker News, who might assume that the study is generalizable to the broader U.S. population, especially since only the abstract is available for most users who see the link.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C45&q=Sex...
Edit: this only works if you're logged in to a Google account.
From Study 1: "Participants (N = 213, 109 women) were recruited from a small Northeastern college in exchange for partial course credit or a lottery entry for a $40 gift card. Of these participants, 190 (95 women) completed all focal variables and were included in further analyses. Sample size was determined by the number of participants researchers were able to recruit over the course of one semester. Sensitivity analyses indicated we have 0.80 power to detect an effect size of partial η2 = 0.076 for focal predictions. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 23 (M = 19.82 years, SD = 1.31). The majority of participants identified as White (75%), 14% identified as Asian, 4% as Hispanic/Latino, and 3% as Black."
From Study 2: "U.S. Participants (N = 306, 141 women) were recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk and received $1.00 compensation. Given our shift from ‘ideal’ to actual friends, we anticipated a reduction in the effect size of our predicted sex differences and aimed to recruit a 50% larger sample than that of Study 1. Sensitivity analyses indicated that our sample size allowed us to detect effect sizes of partial η2 = 0.003 with 0.80 power. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 84 (M = 35.22, SD = 11.29) and primarily identified as White (74%) or Black (9%)."
From Study 3: "U.S. Participants (N = 250; 97 women) were recruited through TurkPrime and received $1.00 for completing the study. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 70 (M = 34.43, SD = 9.88). Sensitivity analysis indicated that we were able to detect small effects (f < 0.10) with 0.80 power assuming 0.5 correlation between measures. The majority of participants identified as White (70%), 11% identified as Black, 7% as Asian, 6% as Hispanic/Latinx, 2% as multi-racial, 1% as American Indian, and 1% as Pacific Islander."
I hope that a user with more research experience than me can chime in. In the meantime, it looks like the study's conclusions mainly apply to:
-Undergraduate students in a specific American university located in the Northeast and
-People accepting paid jobs on Mechanical Turk.
For Study 1, I specifically think that one's views on friendship are shaped by the people around them (so the views of undergraduates on friendship in a small Northeastern college might be different than a large state school in Texas or California). Views on friendship may also change after graduating university (where it's harder to make friends), and may also be different than views from people who have never attended (e.g. people in small towns in a trade or who have spent a career enlisted in the military).
For Studies 2-3 (this is likely where my reasoning is shakiest), I hypothesize that people on Mechanical Turk represent a small subset of the U.S. population, and most have specific shared beliefs (that motivate them to trade time doing fairly simple tasks for money). It's possible that some people are on Mechanical Turk for fun or specifically to learn more about research by participating in online studies, but I hypothesize that this is a negligible part of the population.
In short, I'm not convinced that the study's design makes its conclusions applicable to most women and men in the United States population.
Your point that views on friendship may change over time is a strong criticism. The criticism of the Turk selection is weak as written. How does spending time on Turk relate to friendship preferences?
Therefore, a sample of men who do not need to worry about money (and thus do not feel a want to use Mechanical Turk) may not feel a need to choose friends based on their usefulness to their financial or social status, and instead prefer male friends who are trustworthy and provide a higher level of emotional support.
My hunch is backed up by this segment of a review paper from 2017 [0]: "Further, half of the MTurkers are employed part-time or unemployed. This is consistent with past findings (e.g., Ross et al., 2010; Behrend et al., 2011). A population of unemployed or underemployed participants offers a potentially interesting sampling opportunity for research questions related to job search behavior, underemployment, and unemployment (Roulin, 2015). At the same time, this could explain why MTurkers have a lower income on average as compared to nationally representative samples.
"Taken together, our conclusions echo the conclusions of other researchers (cf., Behrend et al., 2011; Buhrmester et al., 2011; Berinsky et al., 2012; Casler et al., 2013; Brandon et al., 2014; Woo et al., 2015): MTurk samples are not representations of the general population."
[0] From "Systems Perspective of Amazon Mechanical Turk for Organizational Research: Review and Recommendations" published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01359
Despite the paper's conclusion sounding nice, like a horoscope, the evidence seems more anecdote than data.
I'd call it a "just so" story. When everyone likes the conclusion, they tend to banish their skepticism.
Academic language for gossip?
Which is what most gossip is at root. It has always been useful in that sense. It lets you know, at root, who to stay away from, and who might be good to take a closer look at.
Friendship is quite complicated and high maintenance. You really don't have the luxury to choose who to make friends with, their attributes, whom to keep long term, and how responsive they'll be. It mostly just happens based on those around you, neighborhood, school, family friends, university, work...
Barf. What kind of misanthrope thinks like this. I don’t believe for a minute that this is how typical men think.
As a guy, I don't make time to hang out with other guys who are woefully out of shape / hideously ugly, broke, and with no Game(tm). Those people are not Force Multipliers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplication ), so why would I allocate my most precious resource, my time, to them?
It's not like the study actually brought in their friends and examined whether those preferences have anything to do with reality.
The article is about ideal preferences. Exercising those preferences, often towards objectively-superior utility characteristics, is not misanthropic.
That line of thought would make about as much sense as saying "all lesbians are inherently misandrist". Choosing A over B does not imply any hatred of {B}, or of {A+B} in general.
If you would judge other people by such shallow standards, you should assume they are judging you by the same standards.
And: therefore you and they are not friends, you are merely using them as a social climber. If your relationship with all your friends is based on their utility to advance your status, you don’t actually have any friends.
Funny. I'd say the same applies for you. The whole point of the article is that men and women have different value systems in how they evaluate interpersonal relationships, and your contribution to this discussion has only been: "While I put forth no evidence to the contrary, their conclusion is wrong....and any men who utilize such a value system are bad human beings." It's the same sort of overbearing, arrogant, intrusive shaming language used by religious conservatives in opposition to gay marriage.
>>>you should assume they are judging you by the same standards
I would absolutely assume that my friends are holding me accountable to the same standards to which I hold them. And if they didn't, then I wouldn't trust them as true friends. They should be able to share hard truths ("Hey, you are failing yourself right now") and also be willing to offer assistance to get me back on my path.
>>>If your relationship with all your friends is based on their utility to advance your status, you don’t actually have any friends.
What are the metrics underpinning your assessment of friendship? In order to achieve a status of !friend, there would need to be failure modes for evaluation of actions to drive that conclusion. What are those failure modes? And which of my friends have you evaluated against these metrics to support your assertion? We all know the answer to that: NONE.
Men are under no obligations to evaluate their friendships using YOUR mental model, and possessing a working model that is different from yours does not inherently make them misanthropes out of touch with reality. The level of uncomprehending arrogance needed to come into a discussion with that as a leading talking point is astounding.
> Across three studies (N = 745) with U.S. participants
All this tells us is there's a trend in heterosexual friendships in the US. If they ran this study in multiple countries with different cultures they'd get different results.
> Indeed, a fruitful avenue for future research would be to examine friendship preferences across cultures.
Susceptible? Where do you think stereotypes come from ?