Bromance
Where women’s relationships are face-to-face, for guys it’s more like side-by-side, writes Jeffrey Zaslow in the Wall Street Journal (4/7/10).
“Our conversations deal with the doing of things rather than the
feeling of things,” says Mark Leonard, explaining how he relates to his
buddies — eight guys he grew up with in East Northport, NY. So, where
women “talk, cry together, share secrets,” for men it’s more about
going to football games or playing golf together. When they talk it’s
often about old times, but rarely about their current lives.
“If we use a women’s paradigm for friendship, we’re making a mistake,” says Dr. Geoffrey Greif, author of a 2009 book called “Buddy System.”
Geoffrey “has studied how 386 men made, kept and nurtured
relationships” and “found that men generally resist high-maintenance
relationships, whether with spouses, girlfriends or male pals … A
third of the men in his study said they learned positive things from
female friendships, but 25 percent had a negative impression of women
as friends, citing issues such as ‘cattiness’ and ‘too much drama’.”
also finds “that men often open up about emotional issues to wives,
mothers, sisters and platonic female friends … partly because they
assume male friends will be of little help. It may also be due to fears
of seeming effeminate or gay.” They also tend to turn to male friends
“to momentarily escape from their problems. The buzzword is
‘bromance’.” It’s not like guys never open up to each other, but as
Mark Leonard explains, “We’ll say, Yes. We understand. It’s really
hard. Now let’s go play some baseball.”
