#360： Why Men Have a Hard Time Making Friends in Adulthood
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Summary
Well, it s a common trope that adult men don t value friendship as much as their female counterparts, and that men really don t need or want friends like women do. But my guest argues that that assumption is wrong and comes from viewing friendship from a strictly female point of view. Based on his research, most adult men very much want good friends, but just don t know how to make them. What's more, he says, male friendships look different from female friendships, and we should stop judging the quality of male friendships based on how women do relationships.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast well it's a common
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trope that adult men don't value friendship as much as their female counterparts and that men
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really don't need or want friends like women do but my guest today argues that that assumption
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is wrong and comes from viewing friendship from a strictly female point of view in fact based on his
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research most adult men very much want good friends but just don't know how to make them what's more he
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says male friendships look different for female ones and we should stop judging the quality of
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male friendships based on how women do relationships my guest name is jeffrey greif he's a professor of
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sociology at university of maryland and he's the author of the book buddy system understanding
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male friendships and today on the show jeffrey shares the common myths about male friendships
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the benefits men get from having friends and how male friendships are different from female
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friendships he then discusses the four types of friends a man will have in his life how friendship
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changes as men age and how fathers have huge influence on both their sons and daughters on
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whether they'll have friends as adults jeffrey then shares his research on how couples navigate
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friendships together and why some brothers are best friends while others won't talk to each other
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for years even though there's no grudge there at all really fascinating show after the show's over
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check out our show notes at aom.is buddy system where you find links to resources where you can
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delve deeper into this topic jeffrey greif welcome to the show thank you very much brett so you wrote
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a book highlighting research you did on male friendships called the buddy system curious before we get into the
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details about the book what what led you down that path to research friendship but particularly male
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friendship since my master's program in the early 70s i've always been interested in men in non-traditional
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roles i did my dissertation a few years later on single fathers raising their children alone
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after divorce and then i followed that up with another book on the same topic and a book on
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mothers without custody and so that's how i became interested in the topic i was a father who was very
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engaged and i've always been married to the same woman very engaged in raising his children so i've had an
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interest in men in non-traditional roles men's consciousness raising groups in the early 70s so it was a natural
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path to follow to look at men and fathers and then as i did a bunch of other research i came back to the
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notion of what about men and their male friendships how do men handle a range of roles in which they are
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placed so that's sort of is the genesis was maybe 25 years before i actually did the final work on this
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and as you highlight in your book there's a lot of myths about male friendships what are the most
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common ones that you found in your your research i think the most common myth around men's friendships
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is that they are not as important to men as women's friendships are to women and what i try to
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describe in the book is that this is a relationship that is highly important to many men it just does
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not look like what a woman's friendship might look like women tend to have friendships that are more
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emotionally and physically expressive than do men and men's friendships tend to be on the other side of
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this of course less emotionally uh and physically expressive so when a man might go and watch the
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football game at his friend's house and come back home his wife or partner will say uh wife might say
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did you know that bill was breaking up and the man might say it never came up and she might say what
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kind of a friendship is that well a lot of men don't necessarily want friendships where they have to
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open up emotionally a great deal but that does not mean that the friendship is not incredibly important
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you think of the men in war who share a foxhole with each other and then 25 years later
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one combatant will call the other former combatant and say can you come and help me and either friend
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would drop everything they're doing no questions asked and go and help the other guy without
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necessarily needing to talk about it so i think it's a matter of men tend to be in general and they tend
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to construct their friendships differently than women but they tend to be in general less physically and
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emotionally expressive but it does not mean that their male friendships are not incredibly important
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to them and why do you think like the female type of friendship is sort of held up as the ideal
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right like you know and because of that men's friendships are seen as defective i think that
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women because they are greater experts at communication are able to communicate uh that this is an important
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part of their their lives and that also a lot of men do open up to women more than they open up to men
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and it's been said that if you ask a lot of husbands who their best friend is they will say it's their
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wife whereas you ask that same question of the wives they will often mention other women not their
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husband in part because men have not been trained to the extent that i wish we had been trained to be
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good listeners and to be good processors but again i want to frame this as it doesn't mean that men's
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friendships are less than or it's a deficit model of friendship it's just that we're interested in
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different things and different relationships that are women and another difference you highlight between
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um the male female friendship is men's friendships tend to be side by side and women's tends to be you know facing
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each other what do you what do you mean by that yeah yeah in the book we talk about i talk about this being a
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shoulder-to-shoulder relationship men like to get together and do things with other people and we can say that's a
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throwback to the early years the cavemen years where we had to go out in groups and hunt or we had to go out
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and defend the homestead the fields the cave whatever it is that was being defended and we had to travel
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that way shoulder to shoulder so we got accustomed to going out in shoulder to shoulder ways and we still feel
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more comfortable relating to each other so men tend to call up their friends and say let's go out and
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do something let's go play sports let's go to the bar and watch sports come to my house and we'll watch
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sports women tend to feel more comfortable and going back to the cave women while the men were out the
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women in the beginning of the neolithic age would go and be working together in tandem maybe tending
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the crops maybe taking care of children maybe preparing a food they were doing much more face-to-face
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activities women today still feel more comfortable having an intimate face-to-face discussion with another
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woman so it's rare you'll hear men say let's get together and have a glass of wine at a at this great
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new intimate french restaurant that just opened up men i think in general would not feel as comfortable
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talking about that and going to that kind of an event as would women so in your book it's called
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the buddy system and it's it's this system of categorization of friends that men have can you
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walk us through these four types of friends that men have and where do you see most men like lying
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like where do they get most of their friendship at good question i was able to after reading through
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the qualitative interviews the survey data to come up with four different categories and to make them
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easy to remember maybe for only me i rhymed them so the most intimate are your must friends these are people
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that you must call if something catastrophically bad or catastrophically good happens you lose a
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family member or you win the lottery who were the first two three or four men that you're going to call
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these are your closest your must friends and that's a pretty small category there's
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a second wider category called trust friends and these are guys that i might see at parties i might
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run into them in the store or at some event and i love talking to them i trust them i feel
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we have something good going but we're often traveling in different circles and are not going
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to necessarily find a lot of time to get together and maybe they don't have quite that level of
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intimacy with me but i can still trust them and feel very connected to them so that's a a nice size
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category you get into a larger category of people that are just friends those are acquaintances people you
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know at work people maybe you go out to lunch with they may know about your life they may not know
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about your life they are certainly not going to know about your most personal details should you
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choose to share those with your must or your trust friends but they're still people that you
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hang with from time to time though maybe not in a planful way maybe more spontaneously
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and then there are your rust friends those that are friends from way back a lot of people have
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friends that they made in high school college early jobs that they really haven't kept up with but
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every time an alumni event comes up your 30th your 40th your 50th you go back and see these people
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again and you are taken back to the time when maybe you were very close with them but your lives have
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settled in different parts of the country or in different professions or in different
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political interests and so your rust friends can be your must friends a lot of men hold on to
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friends from high school and say these are the most important friends that i i have because i need to have
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known somebody for a long time to really consider them a friend so there can be overlaps between the rust
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and the must friend or the trust friend but it's just a way of my trying to categorize friendships
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and saying well wait a minute there's a way of thinking about these and do women have these same
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type of four friends or is it just sort of a more type of you see this more in men you know i've never
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been asked that question before um and i did interview 120 women for the book um and compared
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some of their responses to some of the men's i would say that there is a great uh similarity between the
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two i think these do work across gender and where do you see most men i don't know what category of
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friends do most men have when you ask men and we ask them specifically do you have enough friends
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um a fair minority said no i wish i had more friends there were men that did say that they
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have enough and sometimes that can be two three or four friends i want to say that there was at least
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one or two men who said i only have one good friend and that's all i need so i want to get away
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from the notion of one has to have a lot of friends in order to be a a good person or to have uh strong
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friendships if somebody says all i need is one friend to sustain myself i'm going to take that
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person at his word it does get into some of what of what the greek philosopher aristotle said about the
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number of friends and he wrote a great deal in nicomachean ethics about friendships and one of
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them one of his key points is that friendship is such a wonderful state of affairs and should be held in
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such high esteem that one really can't have too many friends because a true friendship takes so much out
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of one so when we get into the number of friends i think it's hard to really classify these things we
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do know and the data not mine but others public health data support the obvious that people with
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large social networks people with friendships live longer happier healthier lives and of course that
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makes sense you get more social stimulation from people and you also may learn more things i may see
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a friend who says you don't look very good have you been going to the doctor and that may be the kind
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of encounter that would push me to finally go and see the doctor to realize that i need to do something
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about an issue that i have so i know we've morphed from the discussion about uh the categories into the
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the the number and now into aristotle but i think it's important to sort of look at this
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from a perspective of where do friendships sit in our life and what are we trying to accomplish and
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what do we gain from them right um but i've also you know going back to that the you know you
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highlighted the research saying that friends friendship provides all these amazing benefits
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in terms of health there's also all these reports that men today are lonelier than ever
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or i mean just like not just men it's like people in general are lonelier than ever but particularly
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men because maybe there's not a depth at making friends since you've done this research have you
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know have you been following up you know and seeing how things have changed in terms of the number of
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friends people have or how important friendship is i think it's conflated a lot with and the pew research
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center does a fair amount of research on contacts and friendships through media like facebook do i have
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more friends now because i can track people down and see how they're going how they're doing am i less
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isolated now because i can decide to track somebody down and send them a quick post whereas before
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would have required me to find their name in the phone book someplace so i don't know about how that
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is sitting in terms of greater ease of contact but does that equal less meaningful contact i think
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it's a really difficult thing to determine if men are and women are more lonely than they are
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today i think certainly men are more open they are more emotionally and physically expressive younger men
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are more openly expressive than were their fathers and their grandfathers and i think that can in fact
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bode well for people we're much more accepting of people that are different than ourselves especially
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in relations to to gays and lesbians they are much more accepted and if gay men are more accepted it
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makes straight men not feel as uptight about being emotionally expressive as their fathers or grandfathers
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would have been yeah that's interesting point we've done a lot of uh writing and research about
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the history of male friendship and one thing i was surprised about and struck by if you go back to
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the 19th century or the 18th century and even the ancient greeks is like how the the male friendships
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then were very uh emotive and they're very expressive yeah and they you write you see these letters from
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the founding fathers to each other and they're just like you're so dear to me and i love you and i wish
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i could be next to you and you know the sociologists who've done this stuff they said well the reason why
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they were able to do that is because there wasn't like homosexuality or gay didn't really exist like the idea
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of it it was an identity didn't exist so they weren't worried about that but as that changed
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happened the late 19th early 20th century that's when men became like okay i can't i can't be that
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because i don't want people to think i'm gay yeah and of course i write about that in the book but uh
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borrowing the research of other people the other historical research and i didn't know that the term
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homosexual didn't exist until the end of the 19th century and i'm citing someone else's work on that
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because i haven't looked at the primary source material but i concluded from what i read at that
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point was that somehow the role of straight and strong man became it came under fire as more african
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americans and more women entered the workforce men's privileged role white men's privileged role and we
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still have a great deal of privilege now being white men i believe came under pressure so people
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tried to distance themselves you used to see young boys two and three year olds with bowl haircuts and
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long hair and at some point that became uh not something that mothers or fathers wanted their
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children to be photographed as or painted as so there was a push away and an attempt to be more
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more masculine i think that's when men started to separate themselves more emotionally and to be
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a little more concerned with how they came across to each other and to society you know the image of the
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the lover is twofold from 400 500 years ago you were the uh the poet the the man with the golden
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tongue who could woo a woman by standing outside her her window and reciting poetry on the one hand but
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there was also the knight in charming shining armor on the other hand so it's an interesting balance between
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the between the two one could be masculine and be a great poet silver-tongued or one could be masculine
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and be the strongest best knight on the playing field yeah they had a much more i guess broader
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idea they kind of encapsulated the brains in the bra and we seem to be very mono monolithic
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today well let's get into the chapter i thought was really interesting i never really thought about
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in terms of my friendships is when you interview the men interview the men you talk to about how their
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father father's friendships influence their ideas of friendship can you talk a little bit about that
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yeah and it's not a real surprise that borrowing from the family therapist murray bowen who wrote a
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great deal about the intergenerational transmission of values and what we learn from our fathers and
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grandfathers obviously we stand on the shoulders of those that came before us and i think it's important to
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think about that we clearly learn a lot from our mothers and our fathers and we found that people
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learned about friendships from their fathers about what kind of friends did my father keep and what are
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the implications of that for me and there are usually uh three ways to go with this either you follow in the
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the same pattern as your father you take the exact opposite approach or your father's uh patterns have
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no influence on you a lot of the men that i work with now and i had been running uh groups for fathers
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in prison uh we talk about what message did you get from your father and a lot of these guys did not
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have fathers in their lives and they swore to themselves before they got into prison i'm not
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going to abandon my children the way that my father abandoned me and they feel guilty about
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not being there anymore for their children after their father weren't there was not there for them and
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we of course encourage in the group that they stay involved even though they are physically absent they can
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still be emotionally present but what we learn from our fathers and from our mothers is incredibly
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important and can guide a lot of what we do in a more recent book i have out on adult sibling
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relationships we found interestingly enough that and these are interviews with people 40 to 90 if you
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believed your father was close with his siblings you were more apt to be close with your siblings
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whereas mother's closeness with her siblings which is much more common than fathers being close with
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their siblings is not a predictor of closeness with your own siblings so if you grow up and see your
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father very engaged with his brothers and sisters it's going to encourage you to be engaged with your own
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siblings and that's an important part of a public health also so in general this is under the whole
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mantle of the importance of what we learn from our parents and in this case we're looking at at dads
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yeah i mean it's amazing sometimes we underestimate the power of of a father we had a guest on a while
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back ago highlighting the research and he saw something similar where the father had more of an influence
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on the children than the mother did it was like if there's a father in the like the children track like
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their father's bmi so like the father was weight but the mother was not like their the children were
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more likely to be overweight but if the mother was overweight but the dad wasn't then the children
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weren't going to be overweight so interesting i didn't know that yeah mother had no influence
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on it but the dad did right interesting so going back to i like this idea of sibling relationships
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so the dad has a big influence but are there any other factors that contribute to
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i know some siblings particularly brothers who are like they would say their best friend is
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their brother but there's some sibling like their brother just like it's just some person like after
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after they leave the house they really don't have much to do with each other it's like not that they
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don't love each other or care about each other but they wouldn't say these are best friends so
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what besides the dad are there any other differences you found there in your research
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in terms of the sibling findings yeah the sibling like why why are some siblings best friends or why
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some brothers are best friends and um there are brothers that are best friends that was a minority
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of those we talked to it's such a complicated relationship with your sibling if you're talking
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about two brothers there's often a great deal of competition between them there are you know 10
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million interactions you have with your siblings as you're growing up and your siblings rather than men's
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friendships and women's friendships are in most cases the longest relationship you're ever going to have
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longer than with your friends unless you become a friend at a very young young age before another
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sibling is born longer than your relationship with your partner and your parents and with your
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children so the notion of trying to get through childhood and then into adulthood and staying close
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with somebody is very difficult i can drop a friend if i don't like him if he does something i think
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is beyond repair for our relationship it's harder to drop a sibling because they are always a shadow
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in your life whether or not you're close with them or emotionally cut off from them and have no
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contact with them in comparing men's and women's or brothers and sisters relationship sisters like women
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tend to play a more central role we found in navigating these relationships they tended to
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be the conduit they tended to feel more comfortable talking to each other than did uh brothers though the
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younger brothers in the 40 to 55 range looked pretty comfortable too and had a comparable level of
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comfort in talking about important matters with their siblings as did all of the women it was the older
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men the 55 to 85 or 90 uh group of brothers that tended to have the least amount of communication
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so having a brother with whom one is close and is a best friend that i'm very very close with my brother
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is to some extent based sometimes on what our parents did on what the siblings parents did we found that
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if there's more perceived interference from a parent when siblings are young that means siblings are not
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going to be as close to each other and interference is essentially cross-culturally looked at from the
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speaker's point of view everybody knows what interference is but what interference in some
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culture might look from the outside is different from what it might look like in another culture and
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that's different from a parent intervening to protect one child from the other or stepping in and
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saying look stop beating up your your younger brother it's more the sense that a parent incorrectly
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interfered and tried to do too much um to try and solve a relationship for brothers or for brothers
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and sisters whereas the siblings by the time they got to be adults thought they probably could have worked
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out some of these issues by themselves so there's a lot of learning that we get from our parents but
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there's also a lot of behaviors that we get from our parents if they are overly involved where maybe they
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shouldn't be involved so you mentioned just now that um in your research you talk to men throughout
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the ages so different age demographics from their 20s into their 90s you even highlighted so let's talk
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about how do friendships change for a man as he goes through these different decades of his life
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and let's start with the 20s like what does a typical man friendships look like when he's 23 24 25
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pretty much across the lifespan what happens is that friendships when you're in your late teens
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early 20s take on great importance and even from the time we go to kindergarten the teacher sends
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home a report of johnny plays well with the other kids or johnny has friends so it's always been on
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the radar and it stays on the radar through adolescence and young adulthood what tends to happen is when
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people get married and again we'll just assume a heterosexual marriage at this point that the
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man um tends to have less time for his friendships and tends to put more time into his relationship
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with his spouse tends to put more time into his job because he's climbing the career path or trying to
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hold on to his job and tends to of course spend more time with his children the hardest thing for
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all people men and women to balance in relationships is time how much time do i as a man have to spend
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with my male friends without my wife around how much time do i have for me alone how much time
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do i have for just my wife alone how much time do my wife and i have for our couple's friends and how
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much time do we have for family so there are a lot of different spheres of time that we have to try and
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balance and in the 20s assuming somebody gets married in their late 20s is when some of those
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old friendships might get let go in favor of spending time with one's wife and trying to build
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a relationship with that wife in the 30s you have children in many families and then of course it just
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takes up more time what's interesting is that when children are first born fathers tend to spend time
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around sports that the father or mother has entered the children in so if i grew up playing tennis and i
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play tennis on my college tennis team i'm probably going to put a tennis racket in my kid's hand before
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i'm going to put a soccer ball uh in front of the kid so maybe we'll go to to tennis lessons and i'll
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meet other fathers that are sitting there watching their kids and then we make friendships around
00:29:45.480
tennis and maybe the the father and i go and hit some tennis balls because he's like me but as the
00:29:51.400
child reaches seven eight nine ten maybe the child says you know i don't like tennis i like soccer
00:29:57.240
or i like football and if i let the child play football i'm then going to be hanging out with
00:30:03.240
football dads who i may not have as much in common with so there may be some distancing there from
00:30:11.080
people that i might meet through my kids and a lot of people in our study said they made friends
00:30:18.120
through their children you obviously make friends in school college work and through your children and
00:30:25.560
sometimes in the neighborhood too or through common interests biking chess playing basketball whatever
00:30:32.760
you do and then of course it's in the i'm skipping the 40s because it's a little bit more of the same
00:30:39.000
it's in the late 40s or early 50s depending upon the age of one's children that all of a sudden
00:30:45.000
the children are saying you know dad get out of my life but first drop me and susie off at the mall
00:30:52.200
or whatever the story is and the father then finds that his marriage hopefully is stable his children
00:31:00.680
no longer need him hopefully his job is stable though that's much more up in the air than it
00:31:05.640
was generations ago with the many job changes that we see in society and that's when men begin to say
00:31:13.320
i really have more time on my hands now saturdays can go back to me again my kids are doing their
00:31:19.240
homework or they've left for college or they're playing sports and they don't need me they can
00:31:23.160
drive themselves and that's when men start to need their male friendships more and i have out another
00:31:30.200
book on how couples make friends with other couples and that's when couples begin to hang out again
00:31:36.760
together with other couples in their 50s and 60s when both mom and dad or the husband and wife or it could
00:31:43.320
be the husband and husband and the wife and wife have more time to themselves and they're looking for
00:31:49.240
meaning they may start to connect again with other couples um once that couple's kids are out of the
00:31:56.360
house too so that's sort of a brief look across the lifespan but friends become very important in the 60s
00:32:05.080
70s 80s though we begin to lose friends as they die as they move to florida or arizona if you live in a
00:32:13.640
northern clime and you don't see them as much anymore maybe they're spending more time with
00:32:19.240
grandchildren if they're involved in grandchild rearing and helping out there and one of the things that
00:32:27.320
i learned from the men and buddy system is that a lot of them said they couldn't make friends again
00:32:33.320
they their only true friends were the ones that they had from when they were children
00:32:38.360
or when they were in college and i try to disabuse people though it's hard to do with the notion
00:32:44.840
that you can of course make friends at the age of 75 that become good friends i agree they won't know
00:32:51.240
you as they did when you were 20 but it doesn't mean that you cannot value that relationship that you
00:32:57.400
can build now and that can become very beneficial to your happiness and to your well-being
00:33:03.640
yeah there's a lot to unpack there i mean going to that idea of friends becoming more important as
00:33:07.800
you get older um it was really sad so my grandfather died last year he's 100 wow one of the things that
00:33:13.880
you know he would talk about you know it's like you know grandpa how you doing and he would say oh
00:33:18.280
you know it's just i had to go to another funeral right and he's like all my friends are dead yeah and
00:33:23.640
you can tell it affected him right because he had his family but he didn't he didn't have his friends
00:33:28.200
anymore yeah and that was hard on him um i think that's another issue you're going to start running
00:33:32.040
into more as you know the lifespan starts extending thanks to our you know advances in health care
00:33:39.640
absolutely go back to this idea of couple friends um so i'd love to dig into this because i think
00:33:45.160
whenever you get into your 30s and you're married i know for a lot of men that's how they make their
00:33:50.520
friends is like they don't they don't have time to go out by themselves and do or they feel they
00:33:55.320
don't have the time or they feel bad for going off by them by themselves how so they they rely on their
00:34:01.000
wife to basically for their social life how does that play out though because that's a weird dynamic
00:34:06.040
because you have you know the wives might get along together but then the the the men you know they're
00:34:13.240
not they might not hate each other but like they don't have a lot in common so when they get together
00:34:17.160
it's like uh i mean did when you interviewed your the men in your study did did they talk about that
00:34:23.560
dynamic yeah there's the general dynamic about we like him but we don't like her or you like her but i
00:34:31.240
don't like him and that happens in every couple that it's rare not every couple some couples and
00:34:37.720
i'm sure you if you're partnered and i and my wife have couples where we really like both members of
00:34:44.040
the couple and i don't care if i'm talking to one of them or the other one but there's always going to
00:34:49.640
be someone who you like a little bit less and maybe you're convincing your partner we really need to
00:34:57.000
spend some time with them and she'll say okay but let's make it for a movie so i don't have to talk
00:35:02.760
to them that much or that kind of thing there's that balancing i think and we i talk about this in
00:35:09.560
two plus two the couple's friendship book there's a broader way of looking at this and there are couples
00:35:16.760
that we were able to classify kathy deal and i into seekers keepers and nesters and forgive me for
00:35:25.880
going through these three categories i love it this is great seekers are couples that are always
00:35:31.800
looking to add other couples so if i go out to dinner with my wife and we happen to chat with
00:35:38.120
a couple at the next table we'll say oh you know come on over for dessert and you're always sort of
00:35:42.280
looking to add people these are obviously extroverts uh in general and there there are not too many it's
00:35:50.600
impossible to have too many couples friends because you just love talking to people there are keepers
00:35:55.640
which is a large group of folks that have a lot of friends or a lot of obligations with their
00:36:03.000
children or family members and they've got friendships they're open to other couples but
00:36:08.360
they're not out looking to add to their pile of couples friends and that's a fairly common uh experience
00:36:18.520
to have enough friends and enough family and not really looking to add on and then there are nesters that
00:36:24.440
tend to tend to be introverts or tend to be couples that are
00:36:28.680
marrying maybe for the second time or finding each other late in life and really only feel
00:36:34.120
comfortable with very few other couples want to spend time with each other maybe alone or with one
00:36:40.120
or two couples and tend to be introverts now i talk about couples as being similar they are not i am a
00:36:47.960
seeker and my wife is a nester she would rather hang out with one or two couples only i'm the kind of guy
00:36:56.760
that picks up other couples at the restaurant and say come on over and that can be a little bit annoying
00:37:01.960
to her so she pulls me in to the middle and i pull her more into the middle and we have to balance
00:37:09.000
that we have to have a discussion so these categories are a way for couples to talk about
00:37:14.120
you know how much do we want to add uh friendships to our our lives uh what do we want to do with
00:37:21.240
keeping the friends we have and there's another axis to think about that cross cuts this which are
00:37:27.880
whether or not you are emotion seeking or fun seeking as a couple a lot of couples are fun seeking
00:37:36.200
they want to go out and play golf together have a nice dinner see a movie and they don't want to get
00:37:43.240
into heavy stuff they want to keep it light and if you have a very packed in week and you just are
00:37:50.920
a busy person you've got a lot of stuff going on a lot of people especially men don't want to go out
00:37:55.960
and have some heavy emotional talk um on the weekend it goes back to the shoulder to shoulder friend
00:38:02.600
uh face-to-face issue we raised a little bit ago but there are also people that want to have
00:38:09.160
the emotion seeking couples feel really comfortable and want to connect with people around emotions
00:38:15.080
now emotion seeking people also like to have fun but they're interested in really a much more
00:38:21.080
in-depth discussion and those are men that are going to be more comfortable having a face-to-face
00:38:27.000
conversation and so that's how we can think about these couples on two axes number one are you seeking
00:38:34.600
more couples are you comfortable with what you have or do you really want to keep the small number you
00:38:39.240
have and secondly what do you want to do with your friends and so with that blueprint couples need to
00:38:45.640
talk about that and think about what do we want to do with our our friendships and um what is the dynamic
00:38:53.000
like for friendships where it's just like the man has his friends nothing to do with the wife the
00:38:59.400
wife has her friends nothing to do is that like a did you talk about that and is that like source of
00:39:05.720
yeah yeah we talked about that and usually you know couples can ideally come to some understanding
00:39:11.560
look why don't you go out with with your male friends tonight i'll go out with my female friends
00:39:15.320
tonight and you know i i appreciate joe is a good friend of yours but i really don't want to hear his
00:39:22.440
his talking anymore about sports because all you guys talk about is sports when we're together so why
00:39:27.240
don't you go hang with him and i'll either hang alone or i'll go hang out with one or a number of my
00:39:34.760
friends and as long as couples talk about this and they are clear the other side of this is of course
00:39:41.400
uh for men if we're focusing on men is some wives don't want their husbands to go and hang out with
00:39:49.320
certain guys because especially when they're younger they're they're not a good influence on them so if
00:39:54.440
you are a recently married couple and your wife has sort of taken you away from your fast crowd of guy
00:40:03.640
friends you may as the wife be understandably uncomfortable with him going with your husband
00:40:09.400
going back to the bar hanging out with the friends and you're worrying that they're going to get into
00:40:14.200
some kind of trouble or drink too much or whatever it is they're going to do so she may slowly try
00:40:20.040
and rest her husband from those friends and then she's going to need to find other male friends
00:40:26.920
other couples friends to take the place of those friends and that can be a struggle too some women
00:40:34.040
surreptitiously look for friends for their their husbands because some women said they believe
00:40:40.760
they don't think their husband has enough friends or their husband has talked about having not having
00:40:45.320
enough friends and so they'll be on the lookout for girlfriends of theirs that are married to guys
00:40:51.320
that they think their husband might enjoy being with right then there's that whole dynamic is like
00:40:56.040
well do they actually get along right the frustration and attention there um so going back to the the life
00:41:02.680
cycle um in the influence of fathers on friends as you said in your 30s your life is basically just
00:41:10.840
you're running i'm in my 30s that's how i feel like i got work i've got family i've got other responsibilities
00:41:16.040
and yeah sometimes i feel like i don't have time for friends at the same time if you think about the
00:41:20.600
influence that you have on your children i'm thinking well my son and my daughter like they're they're
00:41:27.080
watching me and and if they're seeing that i i make no time for friends then uh they're gonna not
00:41:34.360
put an importance on that and like i want them to that's or it's important to me i want them to pass
00:41:38.200
that on uh so it seems like you know it's sort of like a perpetuating cycle cycle like you you're in
00:41:45.720
your 30s you make this focus not on friends and results in your children and not putting that emphasis
00:41:50.120
on on friends so you have to be very intentional about breaking that right and i think the advice i would
00:41:55.320
give to anybody in your situation is to find other couples that also have children and get both
00:42:02.440
families together so they see you interacting with both other men and other women too and you can then
00:42:09.800
get a sense about what values around friendships you want to pass on to your children now you have to
00:42:16.200
find couples that have children that match up with your children so that's another layer of difficulty in
00:42:23.080
this in this friendship match and the other message to give your children goes back to what i said
00:42:28.520
before is i don't know if you have siblings but you would want to also try and have good relationships
00:42:35.480
with your siblings so their children and your children as first cousins can be close and so they
00:42:41.160
see that they should be close also with their own siblings man socializing is complex friendship is yes
00:42:47.960
it's super complex well based on your research and the talks with the men you you've done in your
00:42:54.120
book um how do most friends go about making friends i'm sure there's a lot of men who are listening
00:42:58.520
it's like they want some more friends they just don't know how to do it so based on your interviews what
00:43:03.480
what did you find yeah well if you haven't made them in school and most of the men that are listening
00:43:08.920
probably uh are out of school or soon to be out of school school is the natural place to
00:43:14.440
try and make friends the next stops on the friendship train would be work and would be
00:43:23.240
the neighborhood and then through your own kids the interesting thing about men trying to make
00:43:30.280
friends is you have to get involved in things that you like to do if you like to play chess join the
00:43:36.200
chess club if you like to bike go to the bike uh store or go biking and try and chat up people there
00:43:43.880
you don't make friends staying home and not being open to it you have to get out there you have to
00:43:49.080
organize things have a football party to go back to you know men in sports and invite over a number of
00:43:56.520
men uh some men may feel uncomfortable only inviting over one man and it's goes back to the fear of
00:44:04.840
appearing gay a subtext in all this is that there were a significant minority of men in my book who
00:44:11.960
said they were afraid to appear gay by approaching men to be their friends uh again my research was a
00:44:19.480
decade ago that's not as much of an issue today as it was then but believe me it's still an issue for
00:44:26.520
some men regardless of their age one guy i talked to on the phone on the plane who i met was had just
00:44:34.600
moved to a new city and he would meet guys and would want to be friends with them and maybe would call
00:44:40.760
them up once but if they were not available he didn't want to call them again he didn't want to
00:44:47.000
seem like he was stalking them to be a male friend that's not something that men like in other men this
00:44:54.440
notion of i'm emotionally needy and i want to be your your friend so there has to be some comfort
00:45:02.760
in approaching other people and doing it in a way that is not appearing overly needy there's always
00:45:10.920
the question of how much do i open up to somebody and a lot of men don't like too much emotional
00:45:17.160
vulnerability too soon they want to wait a few times before somebody opens up to them so if you
00:45:24.120
want to make friends part of it is gauging the person you're with and how open are they to hearing
00:45:30.280
some of the things that you may or may not want to talk about it's having a radar out that can read
00:45:37.400
some of the other guys feedback to you so it sounds like you you're probably going to start off just
00:45:43.480
friends right with these because you're just doing stuff with them and then sort of through the natural
00:45:48.920
origin of the relationship it might turn into a must friend or trust friend or a must friend nice
00:45:54.840
nicely said okay well jeffrey this has been a great conversation um i'm curious where can is
00:45:59.800
anywhere people can learn more about your work because i mean it's not just friends you're talking
00:46:03.000
about you talk about sibling relationship couple friends is there a place where people go can can
00:46:06.680
see all this stuff that you're doing aside from my my bio at the university of maryland school of
00:46:13.240
social work where i'm a professor you can look at the books i've read or you can go to amazon and look at
00:46:18.920
those books i have a new book i'm working on on in-law relationships and we'll have some interesting
00:46:24.840
data on how sons-in-law and fathers-in-law maintain this very unique relationship as compared with
00:46:32.360
mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law that that sounds really really fascinating well jeffrey thanks so much
00:46:37.880
for your time it's been an absolute pleasure thank you i've greatly enjoyed it brett my guest is jeffrey
00:46:42.120
greif he's the author of the book buddy system understanding male friendships is available
00:46:45.720
on amazon.com he's also got a lot of other books that he's written about couples and friendships
00:46:50.680
siblings and friendships so check it out it's all there on amazon also check out our show notes at
00:46:54.360
aom.is slash buddy system where you find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic
00:46:59.960
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:47:16.520
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you've enjoyed the show
00:47:21.640
have gotten something out of it please take a minute to give us a review on itunes or stitcher helps that
00:47:25.800
a lot as always thank you for your continued support until next time this is brett mckay telling you to