I’m a 42 year old male and have found it very hard, my whole life, to establish meaningful friendships with other men.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?
> we find that men, compared to women, more highly value same-sex friends who are physically formidable, possess high status, possess wealth, and afford access to potential mates. In contrast, women, compared to men, more highly value friends who provide emotional support, intimacy, and useful social information.<p>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.<p>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.
The conclusions really didn’t resonate with me. Not the male or female preferences.<p>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.<p>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.
<i>Across evolutionary time, some of the many challenges that friendships helped to solve may have differed between men and women....</i><p>This is just a "post child" for the replication crisis.<p>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").<p>And then it add "evolutionary" to give a nice feel...
You can follow a link here to get full access to the paper (the HTML button):<p><a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C45&q=Sex+differences+in+friendship+preferences+Keelah+E.G.Williams+Ashley+M.Rankin&btnG=" rel="nofollow">https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C45&q=Sex...</a><p>ScienceDirect paywalls papers unless you arrive via Google Scholar.<p>Edit: this only works if you're logged in to a Google account.
I've only ever had few male friends in my life. I surely have had male "buddies" I've acquainted with, usually around activities. A common interest works with most men but leaves the "buddyship" very much in the shallow side and due to the lack of depth these buddyships tend to fade out as hobbies, locations and activities change. But male friends, except for a couple of childhood friends, no.<p>In contrast, female friends - plenty, from good acquaintances to close friends, with some female friendships lasting for decades.<p>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.<p>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.
Issues:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
My observation is that men tend more to form friendships around activities such as sports, hobbies, etc., while women tend more toward emotional support, as the article states.
This is too small a study to do this, but I’d be curious if the observations would hold up across various gender identities and the sexuality spectrum.<p>What would gay men prefer? What about lesbians? What about non-binary folks?
Important limitations of the study are hidden behind the paywall. From the Methods section in the full paper:<p>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."<p>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%)."<p>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."<p>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:<p>-Undergraduate students in a specific American university located in the Northeast and<p>-People accepting paid jobs on Mechanical Turk.
I wonder how inter M/F/T? friendships are affected by the DRD4 gene?
<a href="https://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/news/20101201/is-infidelity-genetic#:~:text=Influence%20of%20Genetics%20in%20the%20Bedroom&text=People%20with%20a%20genetic%20variation,not%20have%20this%20genetic%20variation" rel="nofollow">https://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/news/20101201/is-inf...</a>.
So man prefer men and women women. Or rather maybe the study is just observing that men and women tend to friendship more between themselves<p>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...
“.. men, compared to women, more highly value same-sex friends who are physically formidable, possess high status, possess wealth, and afford access to potential mates.”<p>Barf. What kind of misanthrope thinks like this. I don’t believe for a minute that this is how typical men think.
The study shows that humans are susceptible to gender and cultural stereotypes. Men want to be around the stereotypical male, women want to be around the stereotypical woman - but only in the culture that this study was taken in.<p>> Across three studies (N = 745) with U.S. participants<p>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.<p>> Indeed, a fruitful avenue for future research would be to examine friendship preferences across cultures.