Tom, 27, first noticed that his friendships were skewing womanward in college. Since then, he’s found it even more difficult to make male friends. “It really is easier for me to just be casual with women, and eventually become friends, rather than dudes,” he says of his platonic friendships. “Maybe that's a problem on my part.”
Tom isn’t the only one who has noticed the gender imbalance of his relationships. Recently, when he had a few acquaintances over to watch wrestling—he’s actively trying to cultivate male friends—he took a picture of the group hanging out and sent it to his roommate. She responded immediately, “I had no idea you had this many male friends!” There were four men in the photograph. Tom scrolled through his recent texts: Of the ten friends he’s texted most recently, all except one are female.
Friendships between men and women are on the rise in the U.S. In recent times, there’s been less cultural skepticism around friendships between gay men and straight women—though those relationships can also be fraught—but platonic relationships between straight, unmarried men and women are still subject to some suspicion, particularly beyond childhood. In his 2008 book Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships, Geoffrey Greif, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work, wrote that 65 percent of women and 75 percent of men reported having nonsexual friendships with the opposite gender. (He attributed the reported discrepancy to the subjectivity of relationships, and concluded that an equal percentage of men and women have platonic friendships. I attribute the difference to typical male hubris.) Greif says that the number of men in platonic friendships with women has likely increased since he published Buddy System.
The rise of male-female relationships in general has also made way for guys like Tom, whose friends are almost all women. Tom and the other men I spoke to for this piece, all of whom have wide networks of close female friends, are encouraging counterpoints to last week’s viral essay in Harper’s Bazaar. Writer Melanie Hamlett described straight men as “stranded on an emotionally-stunted island” with no friends, theorizing that many men, lacking intimate male friendships, are acting like “emotional gold diggers” toward their wives and girlfriends. “Men are taught that feelings are a female thing,” one woman told Hamlett. Thus, Hamlett theorized, men save their emotional sharing for their partner, whereas women are more likely to share their feelings with a network of therapists and friends.
Hamlett cites one man, who started a “men’s group” to create a non-threatening space to share feelings. “I needed support and intimacy that wasn’t tied up into one relationship,” he said. But Hamlett’s essay doesn’t address the men who recognize the importance of emotional sharing, and who seek that out not just from one woman but from a network of friends. Those men aren’t necessarily the emotional parasites that Hamlett describes. Rather, in my experience, friendships with men can be very symbiotic: They listen well, they know how and when to give advice, and they bring a unique perspective to my grievances.
While I disagree with Hamlett’s implication that men are incapable of “unpaid emotional labor” in their relationships—I have scream-cried my feelings at many, many men—I do see where the archetypal male friendship, which is built on sports and beer, might preclude the airing of feelings. That model is culturally reinforced to the extent that, for a long time, men with mostly female friends were objects of suspicion. I remember feeling a vague mistrust toward Adam Driver’s character in Girls when all his friends were revealed to be women in a 2012 episode. And, a few years later, I shyly confronted the man I was dating about why he didn’t have any male friends (he had never thought about it before) and then less shyly insinuated that he had hooked up with one of his female friends (they started dating after we broke up).
Now the tropes about men with mostly close female friends look archaic: It seems very ’80s—very When Harry Met Sally—to assume that a man who spends most of his time with women is just trying to hook up with them, or that he’s gay. Perhaps because #MeToo has made me more aware of the ill effects of masculinity when it’s concentrated in a toxic clique, I feel unsettled by men who don’t have female friends. It’s like looking at a man’s bookshelf and seeing only Christopher Hitchens titles.
Greif attributes the increase in platonic friendships to more equality in the workplace, and stronger policies and better education surrounding sexual harassment. (I’d also suggest that efforts to make college campuses more female-friendly, first with the genesis of co-ed colleges and more recently with attempts to make campuses safer for women, has led to a stronger infrastructure for co-ed friendships.) “Rather than having the experience that my father had, where the only woman he would see at the workplace was bringing him his coffee, men and women are now co-equals at work,” Greif says. “That opens up a different kind of relationship, which is more apt to lead to a platonic friendship than ever before.”
Friendships between superiors and subordinates are still rare today—in Mad Men times, when bosses were mostly male and women primarily reported to them, platonic friendships at work were even more unlikely. Now we expect men to make themselves available to female co-workers as friends and mentors, and vice versa. When Vice President Mike Pence said that he wouldn’t dine alone with any woman except his wife, the backlash was immediate: Pence’s puritanical resistance to unchaperoned chit-chat with women at work was seen as discriminatory and antiquated.
While the office is a common place for men and women to develop relationships (the term “work wife” has slipped quietly into the “this sounds sexist” class of phrases), some men are chronic befrienders of women in and out of the office. They become close with their girlfriends’ friends or their female roommate’s friends, they develop friendships with women they date when it doesn’t work out, or they make one female friend at work and their circle spirals out from there.
Several such men tell me that they, like Tom, feel less pressure to perform stoicism for their female friends. Greif says most people tend to feel more relaxed with people who are like themselves, but that some people just don’t enjoy spending time with their “reference group.” Jake, 27, says he connects better with women because he doesn’t enjoy the stereotypical twin pillars of male hangs: sports and drinking. In a survey Greif conducted, 80 percent of men said that most of their time with male friends is spent discussing sports. “There are women that talk about sports, and there are men that don’t just talk about sports,” Greif adds. “But there’s a sense that if you’re a man and you want to make friends with a man, you’re better off if you either played sports or are able to talk a little bit about sports.” A study in Sex Roles suggested that men bonded over activities—like sports, video games, and going out to bars to meet women—and reserved “emotional sharing” for their opposite-sex partners. Women, according to the study, just kind of marinated in each other’s company.
Particularly in college and beyond, Jake says, he found that he preferred the way women connect—all the friends he’s made since he was 12 are women. “I could just be genuine,” he says, “and not be judged for wanting to talk about how I feel.” It’s a cliché that women get together and “talk about our feelings,” but in my experience with my female and male friends, women often go right for the emotional throat of a conversation, where it may take most men several beers to commence venting.
Greif thinks that men feel more comfortable emotional sharing with women because children are still mostly socialized by women. One in five children are living with a single mother, and these children in particular may find that because their formative relationships were entirely with women, they connect more easily with women as adults. That’s certainly true for Tom. “I didn’t have a man in the household growing up,” he says. “Talking to women has always been my default when I want to talk about something serious. Or even when I just want to shoot the shit.”
Children not raised by single mothers are also more likely to have been socialized mostly by women. In spite of a very commendable minority of fathers who split child care equally with their partners, mothers still spend almost twice as many hours per week on child care as fathers do, according to analysis from Pew Research Center, published last year in a deceptively cheerful Mother’s Day dispatch. And the National Center for Education Statistics recently reported that 89 percent of primary-school teachers are women. “What happens then,” Greif explains, “is that men feel in general very comfortable talking to women and also feel comfortable talking to women about their feelings.” I imagine myself as the matriarch of my male friends, holding them to my bosom, Pietà-like, whispering in soothing tones while they vent about their unrequited crushes on other women—and feel unsettled.
One 25-year-old man, who has assembled a large cohort of female friends through work, says that when he broke up with his girlfriend recently, he mostly discussed the breakup with his female friends. When he tried to talk to other men about it, he found that they were at different levels of emotional literacy: Of his two male friends, he says, one was very receptive to breakup talk, but one became very uncomfortable. “It was awkward. As I was talking to him, he was like, ‘Yeah, that's kind of how it goes,’ ” he recalls. “I was like, ‘That's not how I want to talk about this.’ With my friends who are girls, there's a sharing of experiences, which makes it better to talk about.”
He adds that he’s wondering whether his friendships with women will change post-breakup. Having a girlfriend made him feel a lot more comfortable cultivating platonic female friendships, because it gave him a built-in barrier against the relationship turning romantic, though he says he often wondered whether his girlfriend thought it was strange that he had so many female friends. He says that he’d suspected, early on, that his closest female friend didn’t want their friendship to be platonic, but that they’d never discussed it. “You do keep some kind of emotional distance until you can make it clear that it's platonic,” he says. “Now that I don't have a girlfriend, I think I'm kind of curious how it's going to go. I'm curious about how I would make a new friend who is a girl now.”
The tension he describes is one of four major challenges to “cross-sex friendship” outlined in a 1989 study in Sex Roles. The challenges are: determining whether the relationship is non-romantic or romantic; discussing attraction, which may still be present even when the relationship has been declared non-romantic; “dealing with the issue of relationship equality within a cultural context of gender inequality,” a challenge that, as Greif suggests, has been slightly minimized by increased workplace equality; and “presenting the relationship as authentic to relevant audiences.” Which is to say, convincing your other friends—and, critically, your girlfriend—that you’re not trying to bone your cross-sex pal.
Tom says he’s concerned that people think he hangs out with women because he’s trying to hook up with them. Some of his friendships have grown from situations where one of them has tried to hook up with the other, but he says that in those cases the dynamic is now clear, for the most part. I ask him how he draws the line between romantic and non-romantic, hoping for some secret that will allow men and women to live in platonic harmony, having meaningful discussions about #MeToo over rosé.
“Sometimes you don’t,” he says, “and sometimes it’s odd, and sometimes for a while you’re just like, ‘Are they flirting with me? Am I flirting with them? Am I worried about that?’ Eventually you just end up not dating.”
