Level 9 and I have been binge-watching Boston Legal lately and re-loving the whole Denny/Alan friendship, which led to Level 9 asking me why men have longer lasting friendships with their male friends than women have with their female friends. I found this to be a very interesting question and I’ve been thinking about it a lot for the last few days, and as I do when trying to figure things out, I’m writing about it. What I've figured out might make sense. It might not.
Level 9 has two best friends and the three of them have been close for nigh on sixty years now.
I’m not sixty yet, but I can’t even come close to such a claim. I’ve had close friends in my life. I have close friends now, but I can’t say I’ve stayed close to any of my women friends for more than a dozen years.
Here’s what I think, and take it with a grain of salt because I’m not a sociologist or psychologist or anyone that studies relationships with anything more than a casual layperson’s observant eye.
What I think is that men don’t change much.
Even though he gets married, has a career, and becomes a father, a grandfather, etc… a man essentially is the same person throughout his life. A man’s identity is formed early on and while it’s developed and enhanced over time, the core of that identity doesn’t change. Therefore his friendships stay roughly the same and even though he may be geographically separated for some time from his friends, they stay in touch and when they come together from time to time, they interact with each other the same as always.
Women change a lot.
A woman takes on a new identity when she becomes a girlfriend, a wife, a mother. She takes on a new identity when she begins a career and she’s more likely to stop, start, and change careers because of her other life roles, particularly because of her role as a mother.
When a woman becomes a mother, she bonds with other mothers. When she is at work, she bonds with colleagues. When her children are grown and gone, she sometimes struggles to find her new identity and friends to whom she can relate.
A woman’s friends often come and go throughout her life, depending on who she is at any given point in her life. Women come together as friends because of like-circumstances and when those circumstances change, the friendships often change, which is not to say that the friendships dissolve - they just change.
Conclusion: A man is the same man throughout his life. A woman becomes someone different with every major life event. This affects their friendships.
Asides:
And we wonder why marriage is so difficult.
No wonder Alan married Denny.
