I have just sat down and done a count of my closest friends, then divided them into their respective sexes. Here are the results:
Overall close friends: 17
Men: 6
Women: 12
My criteria for ‘close friend’ is someone I would happily go out with of an evening on a one-to-one basis. I could up the totals by putting in a few borderline cases, but I’ve kept it relatively strict.
I look at this result with a certain amount of surprise. Not because I seem to have relatively few friends - I’m Ok with that, one only has so much time for a certain niumber of friends, I always distrust those people who say they are going to invited 100 ‘close friends’ to their parties, and I like being by myself anyway - but because the women outnumber the men by considerably more than two-to-one.
How did this happen? It’s hard to say. Do I like being friends with women or do they like being friends with me? Either way, the imbalance is suprising and perhaps relatively unusual. In my limited experience, men largely choose to hang around with men as friends, once they have passed the dating stage, usually on the basis of sports or shared hobbies ( although I imagine things have changed considerably among millennials, gen Z etc, since the modern young seem to be a lot more gender-blind than my generation of boomers - and good for them).
But I have virtually no interest in football or any other sport ( except that I love to play tennis, not a classic ‘bonding’ team sport. I also watch it a lot now - because I have a female friend who loves it). This, I am sure, is a barrier, as sport is the vernacular that most men use to relate to one another, at least at a superficial level.
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