Why are friendships between genders so challenging?

Are cross-gender friendships doomed from the start?

I recently watched the powerful British mini-series Adolescence on Netflix, which explores how the toxic manosphere culture can harm young minds.

Though I don’t address this particular issue in my book, MODERN FRIENDSHIP, I do explain why maintaining cross-gender friendships can be so fraught for men and women. Hopefully this will shed some light on your own friendships. Read the excerpt below.

While we’ve made strides in befriending other genders, we aren’t socialized to fight for them.

All through my twenties, I had several close friendships with men who were like brothers to me. We’d stuck by each other’s side through typical twenties ups and downs like job changes, life stresses, and heartbreaks. But as we reached our early thirties, our solo hangouts dwindled, friendly texts went unanswered, and my upbeat emails (“Dude, I miss you! It’s been too long. I miss your face. Let’s hang!”) were met with the digital equivalent of crickets. These friendships ended with a pitiful hiss, which was both confusing and painful. It never crossed my mind that these friendships would eventually tank, as we had maintained a closeness through so much turmoil in our twenties. In a Carrie Bradshaw-esque way, I couldn’t help but wonder what was it about now that made these guy friends bail?

According to a 2016 study coauthored by British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, most adults shed friends after twenty-five, with men shedding friends at a slightly higher rate. But unlike my friendships with women, where there’s usually a reason for the dissolution, like incompatible lifestyles or shifting professional and personal goals, I couldn’t find any reasons I’d split with my male friends. We still liked doing the same things—gabbing about our jobs, discussing obscure indie movies, and geeking out over recent NASA discoveries. I couldn’t understand why these guy friends were fleeing from me en masse.

A 2021 survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life found that only 43 percent of married women—and 54 percent of married men— say they have a close friend who is a different gender. Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of unmarried, single women say they have a close male friend. Clearly, marriage is an obstacle that the majority of different-gendered friendships can’t overcome.

When a friendship ends, the closure isn’t as defined as it is when dating someone, so the grief can feel more confusing.

Shasta Nelson, relationship expert and author of Frientimacy: How to Deepen Friendships for Lifelong Health and Happiness, knows how painful these changes in friendships can be. In fact, she says friendships ending often hurts more than romantic relationships: “To add to the complexity, the closure isn’t as defined or clear as it is when dating someone so the grief can feel more confusing.”

When it comes to cross-gender friendships, Nelson says the two most common challenges she hears expressed are:

(1) having the courage to have an honest conversation about shared intentions and expectations in the cross-sex friendship to ensure both people are on the same page

(2) navigating that cross-gender friendship when one or both people are in romantic relationships with others.

According to Nelson, platonic female friends can often be perceived as suspicious, with many women “feeling threatened when it comes to their boyfriends having close female friends.” It’s a bummer for both women like me, who have this cloud of suspicion over a platonic friendship with a cis-male friend, and women who aren’t comfortable with their partners having intimate relationships with other women. We all lose out in this dynamic.

Dr. Geoff Greif, author of Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships and distinguished professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work, said the biggest problem couples in their late twenties and early thirties face is how they choose to spend their spare time. Between friends, romantic partners, children, other couples, and alone time, something’s got to give.

“If I’m going to drop somebody and I don’t have a lot of time, I’m going to drop the person that could potentially be most troublesome to my marriage,” Dr. Greif told me in an interview. If you’re a cis-male, “that’s going to be a [friendship with a] woman, perhaps.”

Dr. Greif points out that when relationships — platonic and romantic — go south, most men split, as they aren’t socialized to fight for friendships. So when friendship issues arise with female friends, men have no clue how to address them.

“I don’t know how much training men have had in having a breakup friendship conversation with men, and they certainly have not had it with women. Most of us aren’t going to have that conversation,” Dr. Greif said. “We’re going to let things drift and drag and end in some way.”

Maybe my guy friends didn’t reject me because they didn’t find value in our friendship. They might have just been unequipped to handle those tough conversations because it would put their new romantic relationship in a bad light. And instead of risking conflict with both me and their new partner, they opted to put their partner’s feelings first and place our friendship on the back burner.

So are these cross-gender friendships doomed from the start? Do they crumble as soon as we settle down in our thirties? Ms. Nelson doesn’t think so. “It’s appropriate for our relationships to ebb and flow at different times in our lives, which means that while our consistency may not be what it used to be, it doesn’t mean we can’t create a new normal that over time can still be a meaningful support for each of us.”

Nelson has some words of encouragement for those that notice their cross-gender friendships waning: “What I think is most important is to remember there are different levels of friendship. I teach [a spectrum of] one to five levels. Remember it’s possible that just because we aren’t fives anymore doesn’t have to mean that we are now zeros. Perhaps we can grieve the loss of the intimacy that came at level five and be grateful that we are still at level three, and know that someday that number can change again. It doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing to be meaningful, nor does it need to stay the same.”

For more information about gender issues and civic life, check out Daniel Cox’s newsletter, American Storylines. This piece about how young men and young women don’t understand each other is fantastic:

Despite declarations from some of the women in our focus groups that “men are simple creatures,” most men have complex emotional lives. They’ve just learned to hide their feelings or ignore them. It’s unfortunate that men are so often portrayed as emotionally immature or unsophisticated. To read news coverage about young men or listen to male-oriented podcasts you would come away with the sense that young men are shallow—they enjoy pranks, sports, video games, pornography and not much else.

These kinds of stereotypes can be seductive because of their simplicity—they serve as ready-made answers to complex questions. But pretending that men are not emotionally sophisticated does not serve them or the women in their lives well. The solution is not to double-down on these superficial characterizations, but to acknowledge that young men and women have distinctive experiences and concerns. For men, it means not only being curious about what women experience and believe, but about themselves as well.

What do you think? Have you had trouble maintaining your friendships with other genders? Tell me in the comments!