Looks like a (new?) bit.ly feature (pasting the long url into bit.ly gives the same domain); I'm guessing this is related to the Branded Short Domain feature of Bitly Brand Tools?
Semi sexist, greatly generalizing title. The sample used for the study covers only fraction of the entire data set so making this conclusion is very bold.
"this is how men are, this is how women are, this is how black people are, this is how gay people are..." it's a harmful way of thinking about the world
Acknowledging and cataloging real observed differences between men and women is fine. That's just science. What's not OK is shaming men for behaviors that are not better or worse than women, but just different.
The HN guidelines call for changing titles that are misleading or linkbait, and we do that all the time. But I can't think of a better one here. I guess we'll leave it as is.
Maybe something closer to the title of the paper that started this discussion 30 years ago: Sex Differences in Same-Sex Friendship.[1] The paper itself is much more informative, although drier reading. It's also more engage-able. One can criticize the sample (US college students), methodology, or even the statistics. No doubt there are follow-up studies that confirm some bits of the paper and discredit others. I find that sort of discussion much more productive than the anecdotes and opinions that the Men's Journal post will likely spark.
I feel this, my chat group I've had with friends from work for the last year just went dead. We bonded strongly at work, in work, and when work didn't connect us we disconnected. This year I made more effort than ever to make friends, but it just hasn't stuck yet. I'm not giving up though.
People at work aren't necessarily your friends, rather they are people forced to "cohabitate" together. Makes sense to keep it friendly, but don't expect it to last much longer than a year or two past your resignation.
Similarly, I've always liked to keep in touch with friends, see how they are doing, etc. When I was younger I expected others were the same, but no. Most people have their own friends and family and while you'll get a hi and smile from them if you bump into them at the grocery, they won't put any effort into keeping in touch.
I notice as people get older they tend to isolate themselves, dare I say on purpose. For example I have school friends from 20 years ago who don't even want to be friends on facebook, which is about as close to zero effort you can manage. No, I don't post much, treat others well, and keep it light.
I disagree. Three of my best friends were former co-workers. We happened to be new-ish to the city back then, in our 20s, going out, bars/clubs, etc, yet sharing a lot of other common career goals as well as personal ones.
If you hang out with co-workers on non work related (or sponsored activities), a lot, there is a greater chance for you to become friends on the long term after you moved on to different jobs.
They key is to have other common interests that are not related to work, and hang outside work related activities.
I have not bonded strongly with my coworkers. Well, maybe one of them. I know if I wanted to go beyond being coworkers, I'd have to go beyond it -- that is, hanging out, outside the context of work.
People at work aren't necessarily your friends, and it makes sense to be friendly, even if you're not friends.
But it doesn't follow at all that you can't make friends at work, even that it can't be a good environment for doing so. On the other hand, it also doesn't follow that such friend-making come out of nothing, or that it's easy - which I guess is really the subject of the article.
I was surprised at how my work "friends" group fell apart. We would meet every few weeks at a sports bar. Everyone seemed so close I thought we would all be friends at least a year or two, but it fell apart after just three months.
This article implies that living a long life should be the ultimate driving goal behind our actions.
What's wrong with "convenience", "mentor", or "activity" friendships? They sound perfectly logical and reasonable to me. Just because these kind of friendships might not contribute as much to longevity doesn't make them wrong.
I didn't take away from my reading, that those friendships weren't valuable, but that there could be another stronger connection category that could be made which would be valuable as well.
Health, happiness, & longevity are known to be intermixed. The way I read the article, increased longevity is a more measurable proxy for health & happiness.
The problem with "convenience", "mentor", or "activity" friendships, as the article later explains, is that they tend to rapidly go away when the convenience, mentorship or particular activity ceases.
If you want a long-term friendship, then you'd need to push those relationships beyond the convenience/mentorship/activity to have more than that single tie that may randomly disappear.
I don't buy it. What stresses me out the most are groups of people jabbering about nothing in particular. Give me a hammock and a nice book and I'm good to go. No elevated cortisol and whatnot.
Yeah this is clearly a American issue. It's certainly not true in Asian/South Asian countries, sure we lose touch with friends but whenever we meet there is an instant and unmistakable bond.
When I moved to the US, I couldn't understand why Americans were so "distant". I don't have the same friendships with them as I do with others. Sad but true.
Anecdotally, I've noticed this when I'm in America. Everyone is normally outwardly very friendly, but there's always the feeling that they don't give a shit about the encounter you're having and they're only even talking to you out of some perverse sense of politeness.
It was even more strange for me because often our conversations would be relatively honest and about somewhat personal topics (not just the weather, what cities we'd been to etc) which, in my experience, you only broach when you really want to discuss such things and feel a connection with a person, but, apart from a few people there was still always that feeling that people were just being polite and basically waiting for you to excuse them. YMMV.
I bet they'd recognize you if you were perceived as someone potentially "useful" to them. I noticed the friendships here are often centered around very pragmatic sense of utility.
Same happened when I had interviews for American companies. They were so excited about everything and overly enthusiastic I can't help but thing I'm being interviewed by psychos.
In the United States this is considered a "normal" amount of politeness. In some other cultures it is considered weird and fake. Some Americans go abroad and complain everyone was "rude" to them not realizing the cultural differences.
If everyone is your friend then no-one is. I wouldn't say curt and standoffish, but it's good to keep a certain amount of distance and formality with people you're not actually friends with so that you both know where you stand.
Unless friendliness is an expected social signal, and there's a separate signal, known to the local culture, but not to you, that says, "I'm being nice but we aren't actually friends".
You're right. Strangers are outwardly friendly for no apparent reason.
Politeness norms. For whatever reason, in the US, there's a certain base line expectation of cheeriness. Especially in service staff like waiters or flight attendants. ("Hi, welcome to McTuckey's. My name's Megan and I'll be taking care of you tonight.")
This really bothers me. I don't care if someone is "cheery" as long as they just do their job. People justify tipping service personnel (bar tenders, waitstaff) over them getting a fair salary because if they didn't tip "how would I get good service? There's no incentive without a tip." I believe some people believe "good service" means fakely cheery while to me it is "you brought me my food." If you aren't faking a smile and elevating your voice you are being "rude."
That's how I see it, though I've also learned there is value in just chit chatting.
In my mind, those folks are classified as "acquaintances", not friends. These are folks you might be friendly to, but if you are not willing to, say, take them to the hospital because they are injured, or take them in because they are on the run and someone is after them, are they really friends?
I think part of this is bad translation, at least that's the case with Polish-English translation. Word "friend" is usually translated as "przyjaciel", but it really should be translated as "znajomy" or at most "kumpel", and "przyjaciel" should be translation of "best f*ing friend".
You couldn't possible have 20 "przyjaciel"s and spend enough time with them to keep the relationship alive. Same with BFFs. You can easily have 50 "kumpel"s and same with friends.
Keeping this mistranslation in mind I think European (or at least Polish) culture isn't much different from American regarding friendship.
As an American living in France, one difference that I really notice is politeness.
In the US, people are casually friendly, but not always polite. In France, politeness manifests as respectful words and actions, consistently. It doesn't hurt that formal politeness is part of the French culture. It's 'hi, how are you?' vs 'good day, sir', because most of the time the 'how are you' is not really a question, but an expression of friendliness.
There is also a fairly clear boundary between acquaintances, friends, and 'BFFs' in France. That boundary is not always clear in the US. It's not as formal as in Germany, where there is a sort of ceremony when two people want to recognize a stronger friendship. In France people (in my social circle, anyway) just switch from formal ('vous') to familiar ('tu'). I've been told that some people have a little discussion about it before switching, but I've never seen that.
I'm from Venezuela and I must tell you that every male guy I know has very close friends. We're more outgoing and trustworthy and we've always attributed this to the fact that we're from the caribean and as such very warm. I've made acquaintances with americans and europeans alike and the difference I have noticed is that the time it takes you to share trust with other Venezuelans (also colombians and people from caribean islands) is several orders of magnitude shorter. You can meet someone and a week later you'll be interacting like you've known each other for years. I've read this elsewhere before as well, It's not a rare opinion.
Some people say we're past the "social fad". I think that we're just at the tip of the iceberg, and this article hints at some of the problems that we could solve.
Many of my male friendships do seem to resonate around convenience (i.e. we help each other) or activities.
If you take that away...I'm unsure what the depth is.
This could just be me though.
I do have friendships with females who are nothing like me, which are more around just...fun/chatting/hanging out.
But either way, friendships do take work/effort - and sometimes you need to push that along a bit, and think gee, I haven't seen "XYZ" in a while, let's organise a catchup.
I find what matters most in my friendships is being on the same page in terms of mindset, because then anything is enjoyable. I'm a social guy, I have lots of "friends", but I really only have three TRUE friends. I called my buddy up (one of the three) that I haven't seen for 2 years, nothing was awkward, talked for a few hours like nothing happened, all because we never changed who we were.
All three of my friends have completely different stances on various topics, topics that usually divide people, in terms of subjects like religion and politics. The thing is, even though we don't agree on much of anything really, we take pleasure in endlessly bantering between one another and "fighting" our opinions. At the end of the day though, nobody is hurt. You always end up learning something new, or exploring some other outlook.
The key is to be friends with mentally strong people. Friends that are open to whatever, whenever.
I hate being friends with people who have defined things that they like, or don't like, for no real reason. My friends and I's take on life is that the only thing that truly matters are relationships, everything else is mainly either a vehicle for fun, or to support yourself, so doing things isn't a struggle because nobody holds any personal or cultural bias against anything.
We like exploring things just by virtue of curiosity and it's nearly always a fun experience.
Just plain old hanging out like as if we were kids.
It really resonates with me too at a personal level but at the same time it's quite surprising if this is indeed so widespread across men.
I'm an extreme introvert with few, if any, close friends and relationships or a strong desire for such, and it has always befuddled me how smooth and effortless many friendships look from the outside. The whole concept of "hanging out" without some common ground or a common activity or goal in mind is almost foreign to me. I can "hang out" with a friend I haven't seen for ages to catch up with what's been going on with each other but I can't see how this is sustainable on a weekly basis or more.
Age is also a big factor. It seems that most friendships go back to childhood, teenage or college years. The older you get, the harder is to make new relationships that go past the plain acquaintance stage. The prospect of building a social network (in the offline sense of the word) from scratch in your mid thirties, say after moving to the other side of the country or the world, sounds intimidating even to normal extroverted people I've talked to, let alone chronic loners.
I've found that there are people that I instantly click with, typically people to whom I can speak my mind without any filter, and who come back at me with theirs. I think filters and worrying about being inoffensive in general really gets in the way for a lot of people.
I think that if you want to get past the polite acquaintance stage, you have to risk offending them, which can be scary, but I think one really good friend is worth more than almost any number of acquaintances, so I think it's worth it.
My bad social habit which I am working on correcting is in imposing a thought on someone's personal life a bit too eagerly, which for me usually begins with the phrases, "so then it's like..." or "you should..." - I got caught out on the former phrase just today, in fact. When they take offense it's always a blow to me since I don't want to be That Guy, but I have to admit that I get the same sense that people I really click with don't even bother taking offense at that stuff. They're okay with having a conversation that has some conjecture and vulnerability, and some difficulty of thought conveyance, built into it.
Conversely, I get a really bad impression when the defense mechanism rolls out, particularly so when it's elaborate, practiced, and snarky. A strong rejection indicates that I've tread into territory they'd really want to not dwell upon. Extreme snark is even worse since it indicates that their intention is to control the power dynamic. The time I encountered that, I found myself boomeranging it by replying "I'm too trusting."
I've certainly found this to be my experience with my friends, who are mostly males, but I've also found it to be that way with females as well. My theory has been that evolutionarily it is advantageous for us to get over loss quickly. If a person in your tribe suddenly disappears from your daily experience, there's really only one explanation -- they aren't coming back. It doesn't do much good to pine over them for your own survival's sake. I'm not saying that it's a good thing -- it actually depresses me quite a bit. Maybe it's different for females though. I'm not sure what to make of it.
I agree with this but, my problem is that most people have only one or two major interests so friendship is completely one-dimensional based around a single activity. So when conversation drifts off the common topic or activity, there isn't much to do or talk about. People interested in sports may not also be interested in video games, etc.
How are we really defining friendship here? I've mostly found in my experiences that females value self-serving relationships that build them up. Meaningless values of 'friendship' where they have no contrast for a real, meaningful relationship. See how sexism swings both ways? Who the heck posts this kind of drivel?
I had an issue with this while finishing up classes at school, although I understand being a college student isn't really the main demographic for this article. I had a group of friends that I met with only through convenience (we were all in the same fraternity, and then I quit).
After some time, one of the guys made a multi-way text/chat group on WhatsApp and it gave us all an opportunity to bullshit amongst each other about whatever we felt like. The best part was that it didn't leave anyone out of the loop, and held us each accountable for responding to attempts to get together. Most of the time the interactions are pretty pointless (cracking jokes at someone, sending links to a funny picture or article, changing the group photo to a hotter girl than the last one someone put up, etc), but it's just a good outlet to stay in sync with one another, even if we don't all have time to hang out. I'd recommend it to anyone who connected with the article.
Set up a Teamspeak or similar voice server. Like the guy above I'm only in my lower 20's at this point but it's the single best move I've made in maintaining friendships with people I'm no longer physically close to. My friends know that they can hop in any time they want and we can have a great time chatting or playing a game together.
I think the more accessible you make it to keep in touch the better off your relationships will be, but there's no getting around the simple fact that friendships require effort from both parties to maintain.
It's certainly easier to make friends in India. I used to do it effortlessly when I was there and I never felt lonely at all. Here it just seems harder to make friends. Part of it might just be that there are fewer people so you're less likely to find someone with whom you connect.
And the other thing might be that a lot of interactions are so much more impersonal here. I haven't lived there in years but I know many of the shopkeepers who operate near my parents house in India and we always catch up and chat a bit when I visit. The supermarket here is a merry-go-round of high school kids and other temporary workers. There's no connection to be made at all.
Ashwin's story upthread about people seeming to be very friendly and then forgetting who you are really resonated with me. There was this lady who gave me haircut a year or two ago. We chatted quite a bit, I told her where I studied and what I worked on (somewhat unusual for me because I'm very private). She told me he was doing a master's degree at a nearby university, lived in a nearby town and I think we even talked politics for a bit! I felt like we had at least established an acquaintance and I gave her a $5 tip on a $10 haircut. And the next time I went there she had completely forgotten me! I understand their profession requires them to be friendly, but I did feel a let down. :-/
A lot of this stuff is very dependent on the person I feel, the hair stylist I always went to (living in the US) was incredibly on top of what all of her customers were up to. There were even times she'd mention things my parents had told her about that my parents hadn't even thought to mention to me since they didn't deem it important. It's all anecdotal of course, but figured I'd chime in.
Speaking more broadly on your first paragraphs I feel that my ability to make new friends has really changed as I've aged. As a kid I had tons of friends and people I'd talk to, leaving for college I also met and got to be friends with new people. Now living on my own in a new city as a self employed single male I'm finding it really difficult to make friends. Or perhaps difficult isn't the right way to word it...I think it's more fair to say it requires very real effort now. I simply don't meet people unless I make a conscious effort to do so and the grocery store isn't a very conducive location for making friends.
Everyone I talk to is friendly, but I seemingly never got very good at turning "friendly" into friendships. I still have old friends that I make a point of keeping up with and talking to regularly, but without normal social obligations in my life it's tricky for me to break that invisible wall (if you will). Curious stuff.
I definitely agree it depends on the person and it gets harder with age.
While I kinda agree that the grocery store isn't the best place to make friends, the point I was trying to make was that in India sometimes these people unintentionally end up becoming friends.
An amusing related anecdote: my tailor back in India was mildly upset I didn't invite him to my wedding! On the one hand I was touched that he felt that strong a connection with me. On the other hand, while Indian weddings are quite large, one does have to draw the line somewhere! But the point is this sort of thing does happen. The security guard at the university where my wife and I studied did get invited to our wedding.
These serendipitous friendships do seem harder here or maybe it's just that the cultural gap between me and the average American is too large to bridge.
I think the article in the OP is a particularly modern problem in societies with widely disparate socio-ethnic demographies. I think in more monocultural nations (India and CHina come immediately to mind) there is a much higher base level commonality of shared experience that translates particularly well into an assumed familiarity with other people.
In America, a lot of what is actually important (family, friendship, love) is sacrificed at the altar of self.
As an American who is currently in India, I absolutely think this has to do with western culture. It really is easier forming close friendships here. I came back after being gone for a couple of years and it almost feels like I never left.
India is a more difficult in terms of meeting people (except at work), but once you do, close friendships are far closer to the norm.
There's a lot of variation between individuals, and it also changes significantly with age. 20-year-olds tend to form cliques of 5-15 people that do things together... then as they age and pair off or move elsewhere, they stop doing things as a group. Friendship dynamics change as well.
I think there's something in the research about a healthier life being one with more friends, but the author seems to make a huge jump from that to extrapolating his own experience to all other men.
This is definitely an American "culture" issue. Especially in a big city like San Francisco, i've noticed a lot of ephemeral relationships that last around convenience.
To be fair, I have only a small handful of friends who I'd entrust my body and my life to in the worse case, but I've generally made friends wherever I have lived. These friends are ones that isn't quite activity, mentorship, or convenience friends.
As a male with more close female confidants/friends than male, I find it interesting that this article in no way acknowledged the possibility of a platonic male/female friendship.
Except it ... doesn't? Not only it doesn't seem to be a well designed study (the 9 point scale doesn't make much sense, there is no graph with the numbers for each answers, etc), the conclusion they get from it seem strange, since most people don't want to go on a date:
On average: Male: 4.55 Female: 3.90, since it's a 9 point scale[1]: 5 mean "Neutral/Unsure" and below is the "no" range.
A study on the gender interactions of undergraduate students really shouldn't be used to describe the wider population. They're in a very artificial environment, in a tumultuous phrase of life.
Well, it's technically correct. The sense I get is that most people aim their "generic" comments at the 95% (straight, cis, etc). Because reality, in a statistical sense, is heteronormative. But being inclusive is kind as well. There's no exact answer - if you are 100% inclusive, people scoff at you being "politically correct". If you're not, different people get offended.
It is more like aiming generic comments at a subset of the population makes that subset "normal" and the other "abnormal" and one must conform to the "normal."
I always hate it when people say "women do this" or "women think this" because I often don't do or think that. Plus within the women I know there is a large range of personalities, actions, thoughts, beliefs, motivations, etc. It reduces women down to a stereotype.
No, not really. What about same sex friendships in homosexual men and women? Why would we single out hetero sexuality? As I said in my comment to Colin's post, no one ever makes such a statement for homosexual relations.
Let me put it a different way then. Is it possible to make a general comment on the heterosexual interactions between men and women without implicitly excluding homosexual people? And, is that exclusion sufficient reason that such general comments should never be made? (I'm not answering yes or no to these questions, just figuring out where we want to draw the lines.)
I don't think it's possible in this case. And, yes, I think it is a sufficient reason that such comments shouldn't be made. Not because it's exclusionary (although discrimination is an awful thing, I don't think homosexual people would mind being excluded from the implications of the premise we're discussing), but because it shows how wrong the comment is. The implication is that specifically heterosexual persons have the sex-friendship issue, or if not, then all humans have this issue, in which case the "men and women" part has to be thrown out.
Is there any evidence that friendship, sexual and romantic relations work differently among homosexual people? And to such an extent that the negative tension between sex and friendship exists only with heterosexual people? I don't know of any. Has anyone ever made a comment: "Gay men can't be friends because sex always gets in the way." or "Lesbians can't be friends because sex always gets in the way."?
I'm not implying there's homophobia in this kind of thinking, just very bad, shallow "analysis" of interpersonal relationships (of the kind you tend to get from "women magazines" and "men magazines", no surprise there) and, in some cases, a lot of rationalisation by people who only want infantile sexual relations from persons of desirable sex and don't even try to make friends, although they try to fake it to get sex (i.e. by people for whom friendship was never actually a motivating option).
But the thing is, why is this considered a problem really? Should we only have sex with our enemies or persons we don't like? I understand the underlying reasoning, the questions are for the most part rhetorical, but I just don't find the whole idea very well thought out, not to mention it's completely wrong in the "always" part. Also, I never heard people say gay men or lesbians can never be friends. Why is that? Is there some bogus assumption that hetero sexuality is somehow different in nature?
The point is that the "sex part" does not have to get in the way. In most cases the sex part is very superficial, it's just an idea that comes naturally to peoples minds and it's simply not a big deal at all. People, men and women, think about sex (almost all the time, both sexes) and worthless semi random thoughts about sex with almost any person will be had. It simply is not such a big deal. The funny thing is that we are all aware of the universality and banality of these thoughts, yet act as though it's something special, extraordinary and serious. Just to be clear, I'm not advocating promiscuity (although, again to be clear, I have no moral issue with that as long as it's honest), but simply putting the whole thing to rest, it's not even worth talking about.
And it better not be true that sex stands in the way of friendship because long, commited, beautiful relationships sure involve a lot of sex and deep friendship. Sex can only stand in the way of friendship if all one wants is sex.
Yeah, and/or people are totally fucked on average when it comes to sustaining deep, long-lasting relationships. Go figure. That shit is hard. Hard. Like: fulfillment, actualization, self-discipline, happiness, etc., etc.
Do men suck at friendship? Of course. Just like they suck at vying w/ their own mortality. It's hardly a gender thing.
Start with a better narrative and you'll end up with a better answer.
Well, if anything, the article concludes that men suck at gossip. Which is a little disappointing if true. Gossip has its insidious bits, but it was also the best carrier of information before things like internet forums and news aggregators.
There are studies that show things like health and job-finding happen along second-degree links. Friends of friends, that is, or in other words, the gossip space. Things like, "Oh, I hear Joe quit smoking" or "Oh, I hear Sam is looking for a new executive" and so on are gossip. So is "So it turns out Jay is allergic to chocolate", which tells you don't give any chocolate to Jay.
So, Mr. Duane? A suggestion? Tell your wife about how Matt reacted to biking through that one area. Or how goofy he looked when he finished taking apart the wall. Give her a connection to him, even if it's viewed entirely through your perspective. These are touchstones for her to help you maintain your friendship with him, too. Yeah, sure, you want to make sure he's okay with this. Don't gossip behind his back, or reveal things he wants to remain confidential. But she obviously knows what you're doing together; share details.
Change your approach? I had an acquaintance in his late 30's that still tries to hang out and make friends with the hip college crowd. Soon as his 'friends' graduate, they always end up moving on. I wasn't surprised by his frustrations.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 550 ms ] threadhttps://bitly.com/a/features
nytimes.com shortens to http://nyti.ms/1gQdV1r, Amazon shortens to http://amzn.to/1mCftnd, and anything .gov shortens to 1.usa.gov: http://1.usa.gov/1iejWVe
The shortened part is totally interchangable, ie http://bit.ly/1gQdV1r still goes to the NY Times site.
"this is how men are, this is how women are, this is how black people are, this is how gay people are..." it's a harmful way of thinking about the world
I think we could make it more linkbaity.
Men: You're shitty friends, and it's killing you
Otherwise, maybe "The Male Deficit Model"? (which, I suppose, is linkbaity in its own way)
The HN guidelines call for changing titles that are misleading or linkbait, and we do that all the time. But I can't think of a better one here. I guess we'll leave it as is.
1. http://www.peplaulab.ucla.edu/Peplau_Lab/Publications_files/...
or
"People who you were once friends with aren't necessarily good friends for life"
Patio says the same thing here: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...
Similarly, I've always liked to keep in touch with friends, see how they are doing, etc. When I was younger I expected others were the same, but no. Most people have their own friends and family and while you'll get a hi and smile from them if you bump into them at the grocery, they won't put any effort into keeping in touch.
I notice as people get older they tend to isolate themselves, dare I say on purpose. For example I have school friends from 20 years ago who don't even want to be friends on facebook, which is about as close to zero effort you can manage. No, I don't post much, treat others well, and keep it light.
In other words, get used to it.
If you hang out with co-workers on non work related (or sponsored activities), a lot, there is a greater chance for you to become friends on the long term after you moved on to different jobs.
They key is to have other common interests that are not related to work, and hang outside work related activities.
But it doesn't follow at all that you can't make friends at work, even that it can't be a good environment for doing so. On the other hand, it also doesn't follow that such friend-making come out of nothing, or that it's easy - which I guess is really the subject of the article.
What's wrong with "convenience", "mentor", or "activity" friendships? They sound perfectly logical and reasonable to me. Just because these kind of friendships might not contribute as much to longevity doesn't make them wrong.
If you want a long-term friendship, then you'd need to push those relationships beyond the convenience/mentorship/activity to have more than that single tie that may randomly disappear.
It was even more strange for me because often our conversations would be relatively honest and about somewhat personal topics (not just the weather, what cities we'd been to etc) which, in my experience, you only broach when you really want to discuss such things and feel a connection with a person, but, apart from a few people there was still always that feeling that people were just being polite and basically waiting for you to excuse them. YMMV.
I was mainly referring to the convenience/activity/mentor friends described in the article.
Why should one need a reason to be friendly? Would you rather people be curt and standoffish by default?
Politeness norms. For whatever reason, in the US, there's a certain base line expectation of cheeriness. Especially in service staff like waiters or flight attendants. ("Hi, welcome to McTuckey's. My name's Megan and I'll be taking care of you tonight.")
In my mind, those folks are classified as "acquaintances", not friends. These are folks you might be friendly to, but if you are not willing to, say, take them to the hospital because they are injured, or take them in because they are on the run and someone is after them, are they really friends?
You couldn't possible have 20 "przyjaciel"s and spend enough time with them to keep the relationship alive. Same with BFFs. You can easily have 50 "kumpel"s and same with friends.
Keeping this mistranslation in mind I think European (or at least Polish) culture isn't much different from American regarding friendship.
In the US, people are casually friendly, but not always polite. In France, politeness manifests as respectful words and actions, consistently. It doesn't hurt that formal politeness is part of the French culture. It's 'hi, how are you?' vs 'good day, sir', because most of the time the 'how are you' is not really a question, but an expression of friendliness.
There is also a fairly clear boundary between acquaintances, friends, and 'BFFs' in France. That boundary is not always clear in the US. It's not as formal as in Germany, where there is a sort of ceremony when two people want to recognize a stronger friendship. In France people (in my social circle, anyway) just switch from formal ('vous') to familiar ('tu'). I've been told that some people have a little discussion about it before switching, but I've never seen that.
- The fact that people lose touch with their friends at predictable points in their lives.
- The fact that married people have trouble finding friends.
Many of my male friendships do seem to resonate around convenience (i.e. we help each other) or activities.
If you take that away...I'm unsure what the depth is.
This could just be me though.
I do have friendships with females who are nothing like me, which are more around just...fun/chatting/hanging out.
But either way, friendships do take work/effort - and sometimes you need to push that along a bit, and think gee, I haven't seen "XYZ" in a while, let's organise a catchup.
All three of my friends have completely different stances on various topics, topics that usually divide people, in terms of subjects like religion and politics. The thing is, even though we don't agree on much of anything really, we take pleasure in endlessly bantering between one another and "fighting" our opinions. At the end of the day though, nobody is hurt. You always end up learning something new, or exploring some other outlook.
The key is to be friends with mentally strong people. Friends that are open to whatever, whenever.
I hate being friends with people who have defined things that they like, or don't like, for no real reason. My friends and I's take on life is that the only thing that truly matters are relationships, everything else is mainly either a vehicle for fun, or to support yourself, so doing things isn't a struggle because nobody holds any personal or cultural bias against anything.
We like exploring things just by virtue of curiosity and it's nearly always a fun experience.
Just plain old hanging out like as if we were kids.
I'm an extreme introvert with few, if any, close friends and relationships or a strong desire for such, and it has always befuddled me how smooth and effortless many friendships look from the outside. The whole concept of "hanging out" without some common ground or a common activity or goal in mind is almost foreign to me. I can "hang out" with a friend I haven't seen for ages to catch up with what's been going on with each other but I can't see how this is sustainable on a weekly basis or more.
Age is also a big factor. It seems that most friendships go back to childhood, teenage or college years. The older you get, the harder is to make new relationships that go past the plain acquaintance stage. The prospect of building a social network (in the offline sense of the word) from scratch in your mid thirties, say after moving to the other side of the country or the world, sounds intimidating even to normal extroverted people I've talked to, let alone chronic loners.
I think that if you want to get past the polite acquaintance stage, you have to risk offending them, which can be scary, but I think one really good friend is worth more than almost any number of acquaintances, so I think it's worth it.
Conversely, I get a really bad impression when the defense mechanism rolls out, particularly so when it's elaborate, practiced, and snarky. A strong rejection indicates that I've tread into territory they'd really want to not dwell upon. Extreme snark is even worse since it indicates that their intention is to control the power dynamic. The time I encountered that, I found myself boomeranging it by replying "I'm too trusting."
I actually didn't find this article sexist or attacking.
After some time, one of the guys made a multi-way text/chat group on WhatsApp and it gave us all an opportunity to bullshit amongst each other about whatever we felt like. The best part was that it didn't leave anyone out of the loop, and held us each accountable for responding to attempts to get together. Most of the time the interactions are pretty pointless (cracking jokes at someone, sending links to a funny picture or article, changing the group photo to a hotter girl than the last one someone put up, etc), but it's just a good outlet to stay in sync with one another, even if we don't all have time to hang out. I'd recommend it to anyone who connected with the article.
Set up a Teamspeak or similar voice server. Like the guy above I'm only in my lower 20's at this point but it's the single best move I've made in maintaining friendships with people I'm no longer physically close to. My friends know that they can hop in any time they want and we can have a great time chatting or playing a game together.
I think the more accessible you make it to keep in touch the better off your relationships will be, but there's no getting around the simple fact that friendships require effort from both parties to maintain.
This also happens in India and has nothing to do with western culture.
And the other thing might be that a lot of interactions are so much more impersonal here. I haven't lived there in years but I know many of the shopkeepers who operate near my parents house in India and we always catch up and chat a bit when I visit. The supermarket here is a merry-go-round of high school kids and other temporary workers. There's no connection to be made at all.
Ashwin's story upthread about people seeming to be very friendly and then forgetting who you are really resonated with me. There was this lady who gave me haircut a year or two ago. We chatted quite a bit, I told her where I studied and what I worked on (somewhat unusual for me because I'm very private). She told me he was doing a master's degree at a nearby university, lived in a nearby town and I think we even talked politics for a bit! I felt like we had at least established an acquaintance and I gave her a $5 tip on a $10 haircut. And the next time I went there she had completely forgotten me! I understand their profession requires them to be friendly, but I did feel a let down. :-/
Speaking more broadly on your first paragraphs I feel that my ability to make new friends has really changed as I've aged. As a kid I had tons of friends and people I'd talk to, leaving for college I also met and got to be friends with new people. Now living on my own in a new city as a self employed single male I'm finding it really difficult to make friends. Or perhaps difficult isn't the right way to word it...I think it's more fair to say it requires very real effort now. I simply don't meet people unless I make a conscious effort to do so and the grocery store isn't a very conducive location for making friends.
Everyone I talk to is friendly, but I seemingly never got very good at turning "friendly" into friendships. I still have old friends that I make a point of keeping up with and talking to regularly, but without normal social obligations in my life it's tricky for me to break that invisible wall (if you will). Curious stuff.
While I kinda agree that the grocery store isn't the best place to make friends, the point I was trying to make was that in India sometimes these people unintentionally end up becoming friends.
An amusing related anecdote: my tailor back in India was mildly upset I didn't invite him to my wedding! On the one hand I was touched that he felt that strong a connection with me. On the other hand, while Indian weddings are quite large, one does have to draw the line somewhere! But the point is this sort of thing does happen. The security guard at the university where my wife and I studied did get invited to our wedding.
These serendipitous friendships do seem harder here or maybe it's just that the cultural gap between me and the average American is too large to bridge.
In America, a lot of what is actually important (family, friendship, love) is sacrificed at the altar of self.
India is a more difficult in terms of meeting people (except at work), but once you do, close friendships are far closer to the norm.
I think there's something in the research about a healthier life being one with more friends, but the author seems to make a huge jump from that to extrapolating his own experience to all other men.
To be fair, I have only a small handful of friends who I'd entrust my body and my life to in the worse case, but I've generally made friends wherever I have lived. These friends are ones that isn't quite activity, mentorship, or convenience friends.
Maybe I'm just the outlier.
Except it ... doesn't? Not only it doesn't seem to be a well designed study (the 9 point scale doesn't make much sense, there is no graph with the numbers for each answers, etc), the conclusion they get from it seem strange, since most people don't want to go on a date:
On average: Male: 4.55 Female: 3.90, since it's a 9 point scale[1]: 5 mean "Neutral/Unsure" and below is the "no" range.
[1]https://analysights.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/071210_2340_...
I always hate it when people say "women do this" or "women think this" because I often don't do or think that. Plus within the women I know there is a large range of personalities, actions, thoughts, beliefs, motivations, etc. It reduces women down to a stereotype.
Is there any evidence that friendship, sexual and romantic relations work differently among homosexual people? And to such an extent that the negative tension between sex and friendship exists only with heterosexual people? I don't know of any. Has anyone ever made a comment: "Gay men can't be friends because sex always gets in the way." or "Lesbians can't be friends because sex always gets in the way."?
I'm not implying there's homophobia in this kind of thinking, just very bad, shallow "analysis" of interpersonal relationships (of the kind you tend to get from "women magazines" and "men magazines", no surprise there) and, in some cases, a lot of rationalisation by people who only want infantile sexual relations from persons of desirable sex and don't even try to make friends, although they try to fake it to get sex (i.e. by people for whom friendship was never actually a motivating option).
The point is that the "sex part" does not have to get in the way. In most cases the sex part is very superficial, it's just an idea that comes naturally to peoples minds and it's simply not a big deal at all. People, men and women, think about sex (almost all the time, both sexes) and worthless semi random thoughts about sex with almost any person will be had. It simply is not such a big deal. The funny thing is that we are all aware of the universality and banality of these thoughts, yet act as though it's something special, extraordinary and serious. Just to be clear, I'm not advocating promiscuity (although, again to be clear, I have no moral issue with that as long as it's honest), but simply putting the whole thing to rest, it's not even worth talking about.
And it better not be true that sex stands in the way of friendship because long, commited, beautiful relationships sure involve a lot of sex and deep friendship. Sex can only stand in the way of friendship if all one wants is sex.
More: http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/dish+out
Do men suck at friendship? Of course. Just like they suck at vying w/ their own mortality. It's hardly a gender thing.
Start with a better narrative and you'll end up with a better answer.
There are studies that show things like health and job-finding happen along second-degree links. Friends of friends, that is, or in other words, the gossip space. Things like, "Oh, I hear Joe quit smoking" or "Oh, I hear Sam is looking for a new executive" and so on are gossip. So is "So it turns out Jay is allergic to chocolate", which tells you don't give any chocolate to Jay.
So, Mr. Duane? A suggestion? Tell your wife about how Matt reacted to biking through that one area. Or how goofy he looked when he finished taking apart the wall. Give her a connection to him, even if it's viewed entirely through your perspective. These are touchstones for her to help you maintain your friendship with him, too. Yeah, sure, you want to make sure he's okay with this. Don't gossip behind his back, or reveal things he wants to remain confidential. But she obviously knows what you're doing together; share details.