Since emerging from the semi-hibernation that is mothering a newborn baby I have found myself re-animated about socialising, or more specifically the socialising that takes place outside of playdates for the children. Lately I have also been trying to make a better go of my friendships with men. I have lots of close female friends and only a couple of male friends (if you discount the partners of friends and friends of my partner). And this handful of male friends of mine are all heterosexual. My partner has women friends too, in fact for some years his women friends have been closer to him than his men friends. But those women friends are lesbians and I am not sure that he finds them all that complicated to be with. I don’t like the anti-feminist notion that straight men and women can’t be friends – it smacks of the idea that women are the property of men, or that men can’t think past their dicks. But for me right now, pursuing friendships with straight men is not turning out to be all that straight forward.
One of my male friends has a fair bit in common with me – we’ve both been primary parents and we’re both now trying to get our careers back on track after being at home with babies. We have some shared academic interests, and he is intelligent and amusing conversation; but he is also a terrible flirt. It is part of who he is and it is mostly quite silly and witty. He flirts with me, he flirts with his wife, he flirts with my female friends, he flirts with any woman roughly his age. Mostly I am cool with that, I can kind of enjoy the harmless flirting and then move the conversation along, and he isn’t creepy or anything, he just moves right along with it. But very occasionally it is kind of confronting – once I even had to clarify it with him – are you totally stepping over the line here with me or just completely kidding around. This is not a problem I have encountered lately with my female friends, even those who are gorgeous, queer and flirty. He and I want to catch up together but we’re also like – how should we make time to do this, should we meet for a drink after work or organise dinner on the weekend with our partners? And we have done both those things in the past (mostly pre-motherhood), including introducing our spouses who were like yeah that’s nice but also a bit meh about it all. So I am thinking it is not worth trying to get both families together with all the organising that that takes, and the absence of interest in the idea being shown by our partners, anyway. And if he were a woman friend I would have no hesitation in inviting him out for a drink with me. But a man, and a flirty man at that? Feels weird.
Then there is this other male friend. We used to work together and I can tell we both miss that time because we were a great team, and we really click and it is very loose and relaxed with us and there is potential for a nice friendship here. But the other day we met for lunch, and first there was the fact that he insisted on paying, which I took up because he was trying to be kind and celebratory about me being back at work, but then because he is a man I had to think for a second is this a problem at all. Not long into our lunch he volunteered that he and his partner have separated and I could see that in spite of the reservations he held about opening up about all this that he was also desperate to talk about it; the way you are when heart-broken and confused about how it all ended. So I asked him about the break-up and I listened, and then he talked and talked and talked. And after a long while he got a little worried about having poured out his heart and soul to me. I tried to be reassuring, like you know this is how women friends talk to each other all the time, it isn’t considered overly intimate or needy, and when your heart is broken you sometimes really, really need to talk about that. He agreed, and said how nice it was to get a female perspective on the sitution, and how much he thought male friendships failed one another in this department; but still, obviously our conversation seemed kind of oddly intimate to him. Again, now that feels weird.
I like the idea of male friends but I have to admit to thinking that this is all too much hard work.
blue milk 
It’s extremely difficult to make new hetero male friends. I find myself just sticking to the old ones I’ve had around forever. I do think friendship is possible (You’re wrong, Harry!) but, it’s almost as if there are some unspoken questions that have to be answered (unspoken or not) before these things can securely proceed, for all interested parties. Anyways, interesting the frankness with which you share are these difficult topics. Refreshing.
Yeah. Sometimes it is just hard. Though I often think the hardest part is finding straight men who are feminist enough for me to not want to kill them.
(Incidentally, there seems to be a correlation among my male friends – the more feminist they are, the less likely they are to flirt with me. I don’t mind the flirting when it happens, but I’ve got to say, it’s incredibly restful to not *have* to flirt.)
Sadly I have very few male friends. I think that this is mostly due to my currently available avenues for meeting new people. I work from home on my PhD and so I only meet new people through child-related activities and through my partner.
Of all of these avenues my most successful new friendships have come out my Maternal & Health Centre-created ‘Mothers Group,’ probably because we see each other every week and we were all going through exactly the same vulnerable phase when we first met.
I find that I need lots and lots of time with people before I feel comfortable forming a friendship and so most social situations don’t tend to result in friendships for me…
It’d be nice to have some more male friendships though – even if they are a bit challenging…
I’ve had difficulty having friendships with males from a completely different angle in the last few years. From age 15 to 22, ie late high school through to end of first round of uni, the majority of my friends were guys (mostly straight, a couple gay). Guys didn’t buy into the beauty crap I wasn’t into but most girls seemed to be, and they were interested in interesting things, like politics, music and the cricket. All these guys were lovely, smart, slightly nerdy guys (there were a few boyfriends in there) who didn’t worry too much about a ‘grumpy young feminist’ (nickname) and we had heaps of fun.
When I moved to Canberra, I suddenly found that the majority of people I knew were female, by default of joining the public service. I :have: had male friends here, but I have found now I’m in my late twenties that it’s very, VERY hard to make friends with guys, because their girlfriends and wives do NOT NOT NOT want them even talking to other women at social events. (See also: exes who are not allowed to talk to me… even though these guys broke the relationship off! years ago! I’ve moved on!). The only place I’ve really managed to make friends with blokes is through dancing, and even that still has all the same problems.
I can’t tell you how many times I have struck up a conversation (I don’t do flirting) with a guy at a party or social event, only to have his partner zoom over, place her hand possessively on his arm, breathe ‘Hi baby’ at Her Man and then shoot me the Do Not Talk To My Man, Bitch look at me.
I am not a major seductress; I don’t have killer looks; I’m not particularly charming, I get into trouble for saying what I think at inopportune times, in fact. But for some reason, rather a lot of the women of Canberra don’t want me talking to their partners (regardless of whether I’m partnered or not).
My cousin reckons she gets this too. :shrug: anyone know WHY???
Whoa, majorly long comment. Sorry! Got carried away!
Hendo I can totally see your point! I really detest the idea that everyone has to be so suspicious of friendships between men and women. There is something quite irksome about the idea that once you are in a relationship you are no longer permitted to have friendships with people of the opposite sex (or the equivalent for the non-straighties).
I’ve noticed the same thing re suspicion. I have an old — since we were young kids — male friend. We’ve been through a lot together, spent time together in fits and starts, a lot less since adulthood, but we are comfortable in that way that only comes from knowing each other for so long. Yes, at one point in high school he wanted me to “date” him. I was never interested.
He’s married with 4 kids. I’m recently married with two and one on the way. He and his wife attended my wedding. But still, we can’t get together without him hiding it from his wife in some way or including her. And then I feel that I’m under scrutiny and suspicion, or that she’s busy asserting her possession of him. It just doesn’t make sense. I’m not a threat!
I’ve always had friends with guys and girls, but it got “weird” for everyone else only after I was married (most particularly my mother-in-law, who commented that my platonic friendships with male college friends were “bordering on inappropriate, but now that you’ve moved and have no male friends, well, that’s all to the good.” Um… Thanks for the running commentary on my life?).
Much to her chagrin, I started making male friends again (both my partner’s and otherwise) shortly after our move, though unlike in college, these men were very, very open with their sexuality and their attraction towards me in particular. Most of them are in polygamous relationships with their wives and girlfriends, and one in particular asked if I would like to sleep with him, “only if your husband is comefortable with it.” When I replied that I had no plans to do so, he said “ok, I’m still attracted to you, but I’d like to be friends, so I’ll back off.”
It’s so much easier to be friends with him now that we’ve clarified boundries. With everyone else, it’s just awkaward as hell.
I love the advice of radio therapist Dr. Joy Browne, who often talks about how men who have female friends actually tend to make better lovers, better fathers, etc. and are *less* prone to adultery.
I mean the hetero ones of course.
I don’t really get the possessive stuff, but I am lucky not to really experience jealousy. From what I can gathered from others who do it is a pretty powerful emotion and one that is hard to control.
My ex was a jealous type and it baffled me. He also used to feel slighted that I didn’t get jealous when he flirted with others or went out on the town with other women. I was always more concerned with how things were between the two of us, rather than how things were between him and anyone else.
He is now married to another jealous type and I gather she wants us to have nothing to do with each other. Given how little we ultimately had in common this hasn’t been too much of a hardship, but I would like to know how he is going in life sometimes…
Luckily for me, my current partner is not a jealous type. I would find it exhausting if he was.
Oh, and Hendo, my understanding is that Canberra can be a difficult place to meet new partners when you are new in town. Maybe this has created some of the oddly possessive behaviour that you have experienced? I am one of those strange people who actually grew up here and so my social experiences of Canberra are naturally coloured by that fact…
[…] Bluemilk got me started thinking about this. I first heard Harry’s thesis advanced by the resident I worked with on my med school psych rotation. She assured me that while I might think I had platonic friendships with men, the men didn’t see it that way. I was pretty sure they did see it that way. I wasn’t naive, I was engaged to be married and had done my share of dating and flirting — I knew what it felt like when a man was interested in me sexually and I knew the difference. I still know the difference, and I still have men friends. For most of my life, my closest friends have been men. […]
[…] Blue Milk thinks about having straight male friends: Is it As hard as it looks? […]
mmm Cristy, apart from one year overseas (last year), this is my sixth year in Canberra and I have many networks – 4 workplaces, a range of dance styles, two stints at uni… I have had a few boyfriends in Canberra – but I was known as ‘the golden exception’ for a while because of this, because I agree, it usually is quite difficult to meet blokes in Canberra.
I think it’s telling of how difficult it is in Canberra that my current boyfriend is someone I’ve known for a very long time, and we got together after seeing each other at a family party back up home where my rellies are… in northern NSW… 1000 k’s from Canberra. If those aren’t long odds I don’t know what would be!
In other words, if I have found a great man in a long time family friend who lives on a farm outside a town of 40,000 people at a party that was mostly relatives and / or partnered people, and managed a relationship at this distance, it shows you how fucking woeful the situation is in Canberra, a town of 330,000+ with ample social opportunities. I’m a pretty social person… it’s not like I was watching tv at night!!!
anyway back to the topic… thankyou for the support from the other side Bluemilk. I don’t know what to do about this perceived weirdness.