Anticipating a zoom conversation with my cousin and oldest friend, Jonathan, I sent a link to an essay I had written a couple of years ago on friendship. I thought it would help us think about the evolution of our own friendship over these 79 years. Jonny, as I call him, liked the article but, partly spurred on by his wife, wondered if women thought the same way about friendship. “Good question,” I wrote. “I’m going to check in with some friends of mine to see what they think.”
So I wrote to about 20 female friends, mostly but not entirely women of my generation and all in heterosexual marriages. I sent them the essay and posed the question. Most of them wrote back quickly and answered firmly. “No. Our friendships are different.” As a reference to the original posting, see: https://barrydym.wordpress.com/2017/08/21/friendship-and-marriage/ .
The responses were all friendly—they are my friends, after all—but ranged from “you’re close” to “you are way off.” All but one assured me that we are friends and I shouldn’t take offense at the differences they noted. I didn’t but was embarrassed by how skewed my portrait was towards male friendship. And, after my initial response, I wasn’t all that surprised. During decades, while practicing marital and family therapy, I had heard women endlessly express their wish that men would be more like them, that conversation would be more intimate, vulnerable, revealing. And that men could at least try to change. Like Henry Higgins, but in reverse: Why can’t men be more like women. I hadn’t captured that yearning and that difference in my essay.
Here, as apology and recompense, are some of the differences noted by my friends:
- First, women are more emotional in the way that they experience themselves and their relationships in more intense and open ways. Some imagine that men have lots going on inside but don’t know how to share it. Others have finally concluded that men don’t even have an intense, complex internal life—and turn to female friends for that.
- Second, women formed friendship bonds less through the shared activities that I emphasized in my portrait of (male) friendship, and more through empathic connections. This way of connecting leads to feeling seen and gotten. And to intimacy. And to great comfort. Most of the women wondered if men experienced intimacy with one another but either doubted it or confessed that they couldn’t quite decipher it.
The empathic bonds were formed in several primary ways. First, through shared vulnerabilities. According to my friends, women are less afraid—often, not afraid at all—to express their fears and insecurities. And they are less afraid of asking for help. But, as they reported, compared to men, women are an open book. And that open book leads to greater emotional depth within and between women.
- In short, then, male friendships can be generally characterized as side-by- side, while women’s are face to face.
- Almost every women noted that female friends talk with one another about their families—both their immediate and their families of origins. They hang out together with friends and their children. They know and love one another’s children. So, in fact, women do connect through at least this one key shared activity. And since so many women know themselves as a woman-in-a-family, a person-in-context, their friendships share a level of complexity that is largely foreign to men, who are often bored with all the family talk.
- So, it’s not that women don’t bond through activities. It’s that the activities are different. For women, it’s about family, friendship, and work. For men it tends to be about work, sports, finances, and work-related networks are for men.
- I remember reading an article asserting that men’s friendships, while not as emotional, were still deep and enduring. To illustrate the author described a poker game that had endured for about 20 years. The guys believed they could trust and depend on one another but didn’t know each other’s families very well. The author tested his hypothesis by asking one of his poker buddies his children’s names. His friend couldn’t come up with them. He didn’t. But, at the same time, this same friend had helped him out of a couple of financial jams.
- One of my respondents emphasized the importance of meaning making: “I believe my friends have always been the people with whom I figure out life,” she wrote. This includes both understanding what’s going on and strategizing what to do about it. While the men she knows might also join in to figure out what’s going on and what to do, they do so much more often around work and less frequently around relationships. And not much at all about life’s deeper meanings.
- In my essay, I had written that by comparison to marriages, friendships are generally are far less demanding. Men generally accept what they have with one another. But several women said that their friendships are very demanding. They require rapt and frequent attention, sympathy, and advice.
Because these female friendships are so vital, a few women reported that helping one another change, sometimes unbidden, was one of the key dynamics in their relationships. I had noted that one friend might help another change but almost only when invited and, even then, with great caution. Acceptance of exactly who they each are is among the essential—and differentiating qualities of friendship; and this distinguishes friendship from marriage, in which men often feel that their female partners want them to change in important ways.
It’s Henry Higgins in reverse. Men generally don’t want to work on the emotional quality of their relationships, though they are often eager to work with and for friends in other, perhaps more instrumental, ways. In fact, most men avoid like the plague what they consider high maintenance relationships in need of repair.
- Several women emphasize how intentional their friendships are. They work to improve them. The terms of engagement are often explicit: “This is what I need from you; This is what you can expect from me.” With the intentionality and without the implicit acceptance of the status quo, there is lots of push and pull, an ongoing rebalancing of expectations. In short, women paint a much more dynamic picture of friendship than men do.
- The experience of friendship within the heterosexual marriages of friends I queried, covered a range. On one end were women who had wrestled with the differences, acknowledged disappointments, and reached an acceptance, sometimes wry, sometimes sad, sometimes full hearted. On the other were women who seemed actively disappointed and critical. Because men’s emotional distance robbed them of an intimacy they craved in marriage. Because men’s inability to form deeply emotional relationships left them feeling stranded and alone.
I already knew some of what my women friends shared with me—would have to know, having been a couple and family therapist for so many years. But there were new insights, too, and ways that what I knew were reframed, uncovering nuances of difference and complexity. I want to thank my friends, my teachers, for that.
Barry Dym 