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Why Is It So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends?

nytimes.com

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Re: Why Is It So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends?

#61

Post by Dendilion »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #52
brozaman wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of us are victims of feminism to some degree. A male doesn't have male friends and this is femenism's fault? > But after high school, I preferred to hang around straight people, and a straight guy won't get too close--because it might be gay? Sounds like you have some serious insecurities... One of my best friends is gay, I don't think anyone ever thought I'm gay because I hang out with him, but if they did I…

> I don't think anyone ever thought I'm gay because I hang out with him, but if they did I just don't care. My mate is more important to me than some random prick's opinion. I worked with a man I'm pretty sure was gay, does that make me a prick? Maybe ease up on the judgement there.

Did you read his point correctly?

Re: Why Is It So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends?

#62

Post by jdmtheNth »

hobbitstan wrote: post #2

Men don’t need friends. Men need family. You have some casual friends at work then spend your quality time with family and maybe some childhood friends you kept in touch with. This is the natural way of things.

This is an excellent point, and it's telling that the article espouses feminization as the solution. Men in general are competition to each other, and it is difficult to feminize oneself sufficiently to become a non-threat to other men. Take the natural standoffishness of men and add that to the increasing number of women that think they can do better than any man who's interested in her, and you get a loneliness epidemic. Add the constant degradation of the male role in society, and you get diseases of despair.

Re: Why Is It So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends?

#63

Post by jdmtheNth »

deodar wrote: post #8
hobbitstan wrote: post #2

Men don’t need friends. Men need family. You have some casual friends at work then spend your quality time with family and maybe some childhood friends you kept in touch with. This is the natural way of things.

I always saw men in my father's generation (he was born in the 1940s) have many close friends that would get together regularly. These close and decades old friendships are especially critical now that he's retired. Without them, he'd be completely isolated. A significant percentage of men not having any close friends feels like a recent development in the last 1-2 generations.

You need people like yourself to be a community with, and we're all too fragmented now. Men needed friends as a foil for family responsibilities, and now that the ideal of the nuclear family has been cancelled over the last couple of decades, men don't have any use for friends anymore.

Re: Why Is It So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends?

#64

Post by klipt »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #59
Khaine wrote: post #45

Because any media that shows two males as friends, has legions of people claiming them as gay, i.e. Sam and Frodo, Sherlock and Watson. So in the popular conscience two close guys must be gay. You cannot have a relationship in popular culture between two males, without a vocal minority claiming them as gay. Men subconsciously react to that. To signal they are straight avoid looking like they have close relationships…

This was the original, nuanced meaning of "homophobia", before it was simplified in the popular mind (where nuance cannot live) to merely mean "hatred of gay people". I think there was an implicit "see, there's something for straight people in this too!" aspect to the argument -- something like, "by eliminating the taboo on homosexuality, we will also eliminate the negative consequences to straight men of heterosexua…

Yeah I think it's actually the opposite, in extremely homophobic middle eastern countries it's not uncommon to see close straight male friends holding hands etc, because it would be unthinkable to insinuate they are gay given the social taboo. Meanwhile in the West it is only gay male couples that hold hands, and straight men avoid it to avoid being seen as "gay" which would make women reject them etc.

Re: Why Is It So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends?

#65

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

Dendilion wrote: post #61
P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think anyone ever thought I'm gay because I hang out with him, but if they did I just don't care. My mate is more important to me than some random prick's opinion. I worked with a man I'm pretty sure was gay, does that make me a prick? Maybe ease up on the judgement there.

Did you read his point correctly?

Did you?

Just the other day I had someone assume I was the husband of a woman I was helping out, I certainly didn't think that was enough to make judgements, nor did I feel the need to correct them.

If someone making an innocuous assumption is enough to for you to determine they're a prick, maybe you're the prick?

Re: Why Is It So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends?

#66

Post by hgsgm »

cafard wrote: post #58

"One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible." Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams , Ch XX, Failure (1871). Yet curiously there is constant mention of friends in the preceding chapters and beyond: I looked up the quotation in the Gutenberg Project version, and the sentence following has the 105th of 149 occurrences of the string "friends". Was Adams just being sententious, or do we…

No post body was provided.

Re: Why Is It So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends?

#67

Post by hgsgm »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #60
nickthegreek wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never seen this happen. In fact, I only see the opposite, it can be difficult to have a friend of the opposite sex without people thinking you are intimate.

> it can be difficult to have a friend of the opposite sex without people thinking you are intimate. Is this really a counterexample? It would seem to me to be another example of the same phenomenon.

No post body was provided.

Re: Why Is It So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends?

#68

Post by Dendilion »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #65
Dendilion wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read his point correctly?

Did you? Just the other day I had someone assume I was the husband of a woman I was helping out, I certainly didn't think that was enough to make judgements, nor did I feel the need to correct them. If someone making an innocuous assumption is enough to for you to determine they're a prick, maybe you're the prick?

He clearly said that IF someone is a dick about it / a prick he just ignores them.

Re: Why Is It So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends?

#69

Post by Tagbert »

favflam wrote: post #47

I moved to a city. One reason was that the car-dominated suburbs makes it reaaaally hard to make friends. Time from getting out of bed to meeting someone is like 30-45minutes, and I have to spend money. In the city,it is more like 15 minutes, meaning you can do it twice as often, hang out longer. I would say this is a big factor. The country side works so long as your friends are close by for beer, movies, and games?…

I find the opposite problem that living in a larger city makes connecting with people outside of work harder. Everyone lives far away and getting together can take an hour of driving.

A small or mid sized city on the other hand has a large enough group of people but they are more accessible to each other on evenings and weekends.

Re: Why Is It So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends?

#70

Post by brozaman »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #52
brozaman wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of us are victims of feminism to some degree. A male doesn't have male friends and this is femenism's fault? > But after high school, I preferred to hang around straight people, and a straight guy won't get too close--because it might be gay? Sounds like you have some serious insecurities... One of my best friends is gay, I don't think anyone ever thought I'm gay because I hang out with him, but if they did I…

> I don't think anyone ever thought I'm gay because I hang out with him, but if they did I just don't care. My mate is more important to me than some random prick's opinion. I worked with a man I'm pretty sure was gay, does that make me a prick? Maybe ease up on the judgement there.

That's not what I meant. Obviously thinking someone is gay is not being a prick. I meant in the context where someone is being a prick about it.
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