Glad to see you checking in, and welcome to the SDMB. It’s a looney place, but I’m sure you are aware of that by now. 
;j
I’m the same way. In my experience it hasn’t coaused problems with my boyfriends, except for one time. However their girlfriends didn’t like it too much. Because of a few very dumb things i did this year i got sort of a reputation, and the fact that i am always surrounded by guys kind of makes things worse. And this one girl that was a close friend of mine was going out with a male friend of mine whi i had romantic interst in (neither of them knew it). male friend comes to me with relationship problems and we end up hooking up. the two of them break up and i go out with male friend. meanwhile, female friend starts going out with another male friend. someone who i refer to as my best friend, and someone i have no romantic interest in. but since i burned female friend once, she had a problem with me being so close to my best friend. and since he was so in love with her, he stayed away from me for a very long time. but luckily everything has worked out since then.
good luck if anyone can make any sense out of what i just wrote.
I have roughly an equal amount of female friends and male friends.
But I find that the converstions with my female friends always seem to be more intimate and personal.
They have become extremely comfortable around me and don’t hold anything back.
My male friends discuss material things and make mostly small talk.
If I want advice on a personal matter - I am more likely to ask one of my female friends.
I seem to be in the minority though, as most of my male friends have mostly male friends.
I’m with you on that one. The worst is on Thanksgiving when all the women are supposed to clean up all the dishes and put up the leftovers, but the men get to drink beer and watch the football game!!
One Thanksgiving I went to my boyfriend’s relatives for dinner. Since I was a guest, I figured I didn’t have to participate in the cleanup with the other women of the family, so retreated to the TV room with all the men to watch the game. Boy was that the wrong move!! It was quite a faux pas and I’m sure probably still a topic of conversation with them every Turkey Day.
techchick, I have no idea what you are talking about. what are friends? how does one get friends? why do they make TV shows about friends?
I have a wife and kids, I don’t have time for friends. whatøs more, my single female coworkers thru 17 years have never once asked me to any event. I had an assistant for 2 years, and I asked her to lunch once or twice, and on on of those occasions my wife was there too.
i have no idea…
Just a counterpoint here. I have more female friends than most of my contemporaries. I am an unusual sort statistically, because I’ve never been married at 47. The female friends have rarely cropped up as a disturbance in my longer term relationships.
I’ve been in business with a female partner for over 10 years now. She thinks it’s my job to write our name in the snow.
Good to see you, Sunbear.
I thought there were some thoughtful posts on this issue when Welfy wrote about it a few weeks ago. Of course, this is going to annoy the bejezus out of everyone, but I don’t have the link…
Anyway, me too, but I also felt I had to learn how to be a better friend to women, and once I did I came to think that was an important life skill. But all things being equal, more guy friends than girl friends, and I expect the trend will continue.
Thanks for making this newbie feel welcome. This site contains one of the very few consistently intelligent and entertaining forums on the internet (I am also addicted to the European travel forum at Fodor’s). As I’ve been reading the SD columns for years, I’m surprised I didn’t check this place out sooner!
Don’t mind the even newer newbie chiming in, but my friends are predominantly female as well. Not for any romantic purposes (oh woe is me on this front), but merely because I find their conversation to be more intellectual - or significantly less vapid, at any rate - than those of the guys I know.
When I’m with my guy friends - of which I consider only two to be close friends - it’s almost exclusively talk about sports, computer games, or tech stuff (computers, consumer electronics, etc.). But since I work at a company that’s predominantly male anyway, I don’t feel the need to “talk shop” in my off time. Maybe I only like hanging out with girls for the variety, who knows? Then again, they are easier on the eyes…
Girls, just OOC, why do you find guys so interesting and girls so flighty (I swear somebody said this), when I’ve been finding pretty much the opposite? (Not that I’m complaining, mind, but still…)
I find that most girls talk about superficial things around other girls. Not all of them are, but a lot are. I don’t like talking about clothes or boy bands or who’s dating who in Hollywood. (Stereotypical girl stuff, I guess.) Some of my girl friends actually do talk about that, and I hate it. If that makes me more tomboyish, so be it.
As for why girls are different to guys than girls, I think it’s because both genders act differently around same sex/opposite sex people. I watch a lot of what I say around my girl friends because I think about whether they’re interested in the sort of things I want to talk about. Usually, they aren’t. With guys I don’t worry as much. We all probably do that to some extent.
Or maybe it’s as simple as I prefer guys over girls. I dunno! 
Most of my friends IRL are male.
At work, it’s split roughly 50-50.
Oddly enough, on this message board, ALL of my friends are female.
I really think they’re pretending to be friends because they feel sorry for me, though… :rolleyes: 
Oh, cut it out, DRY. You know we love ya.
I love ya too, DRY, even if you never want to talk about make up or fashion or how fat I am. 
I’d say that right now I have 75% female, 25% male friends. It’s mostly because I’m a stay at home mom and most of the people I meet are other SAHMs. In college and high school the ratio was more like 50/50. I will say that the few friends I’ve kept since high school have all been men…wonder why that is?
The only times it has really caused problems was when my husband and I first started dating. There was a lot of jealousy, going both ways, between his female friends and me. One girl, in particular, was very nasty to me, but I think that was because she had a crush on him. Also, it was our first serious relationship and we were at the age where we were starting to really grow up, so I think that caused a lot of tension amongst his old crowd as well. I was new to the town, so I didn’t have many friends of my own, which probably contributed, too.
I will say that I don’t mind Hubby having women friends, but it does bother me when they refuse to acknowledge my existance. I get the feeling that they are thinking “Oh she’s just a mommy, her brain is probably mush.” :rolleyes:
So I will, although I risk repeating myself.
A number of years ago I read some stuff by Deborah Tannen, the linguist/pop sociologist. She was enumerating the different ways men and women communicate. I felt like the
“male style” was a much better description of how I think and talk and approach conversation and friendships. At first I found that disconcerting, but then I realized that it tended to explain why I got along so well with men and found friendships with them so easy to make.
I’m not saying I’m butch, and hey, I like a good sale as well as the next tomato, but I think I may tend to have a more “male” style of interacting personally.
I haven’t read that Mars/Venus bullshit, but I suspect I’d find myself more a Martian than a Venutian. Anyone else find themselves falling on the “wrong” end of the male/female spectrum on such measures?
I read enough of the book to realize he was padding a short magazine article into a full-length book, but I do see a little validity to what he said, most of which he stole from Tannen.
As I mentioned earlier, I prefer the company of women. However, my thinking is purely “Martian.” I am extremely frustrated when somebody, male or female, mentions a problem and wants sympathy rather than help in finding a solution. My wife considers herself to be totally Martian, but she’s one of those people who wants sympathy instead of help. Real conversation:
Wife: I hate my job.
Self: So get a different one. Here’re the help wanted ads.
Wife: You stupid jerk! You don’t understand me at all! Boo-hoo-hoo!
Self: What did I do wrong?
KKBattousai said:
I’d never mind that. You are entitled to your opinion, especially when it agrees with mine.
Yeah, I think I’m going to get pretty sick of talking about over-priced stereos real soon, myself.
Shhhhh! We don’t want them to know our REAL reason for enjoying their company! We want them to think we’re sensitive!
For the uninitiated (meaning, me), what is the “male style?”
::grumble:: Pop psychology…
[nitpick]
No style of communication is inherently “male” or “female”. When it comes to stereotyped gender communication styles, you can have both, neither, or a blend of the two. Problems arise when people peg themselves and others into being one or the other. I don’t think it’s so much there are different communication styles as it is some people just communicate poorly.
[/nitpick]
Okay. Carry on!
I think nearly everybody(male or female) has more male friends than female friends, for the simple reason that many friendships where one side is male have no intention of going very deep. And if the friendship doesn’t go into deep feelings, then you can’t later get to the level of pissed off it takes declare a mortal non-friend. For example, say I meet 100 guys and one hundred girls at school, and through the normal course of events I become friends with 10 guys and ten chicks. Now completely independantly of me, two guys get in a fight over something and start hating each other. You now have 10 guy friends, you just don’t hang out with all of them at the same time.
If two of the chicks get in a fight on the other hand, then there seems to be a tendancy to make you choose who is right, and who is wrong. If you are friends with one of the girls in the fight, then you can no longer be friends with the other girl, and supsequently all the other girls who chose her side.(I know it’s a sterotyping but I have seen it happen many times). So you now have aprox. five female friends from the group, then after the next fight you have 3 female friends.(At which point I get so annoyed I decide to have 0 female friends from the group)
'Scuse me? Some of my best friends are guys, and the friendships are plenty deep.
And guys never do this! Never! :rolleyes: