There are at least two ways in which friendship relates to masculinity. First, men bring masculinity to their friendships. In other words, men’s unique ways of acting, thinking and feeling influence how men develop friendships and interact with friends. Second, men individually and collectively develop and maintain masculinity in their friendships. As a consequence, friendships influence other aspects of men’s lives such as family and work.
Our focus in this essay is on the former perspective—how men express masculinity in their friendships. Ethnographers have studied male friendships in a variety of specific contexts, such as Whyte’s (1943) description of the friendship among a group of workingclass Italian American men in Street Corner Society , Liebow ‘s (19 67) acc ou nt of th tionships among the unemployed African—American men who spent time at Tally’s Corner, and Duneier’s (1994) portrayal of the interracial friendships among the retired working-class men in Chicago who ate regularly at the Valois Restaurant where Slim’s Table was located. In this essay, however, we draw primarily on other social scientific studies, which were designed to make generalisations about men’s friendships. Most of these studies included both men and women and attempted to identify gender differences in specific aspects of friendships. Many researchers limited their study scope to same-sex friendships in part because both men’s and women’s friendship networks tend to be gender homogeneous. Therefore, we focus on men’s friendships with other men, although we briefly discuss men’s experiences in crosssex friendships.
Size of men’s friendship networks
Network size is the most fundamental characteristic of friendship structure. Although finding s a re not comple tely consi stent studies, men seem to have larger friendship networks than women. For example, using a national sample of Canadian adults, de Vries (1991) reported that men have a greater number of close friends but fewer kin members in their personal networks, compared to women.
As men move from middle to later stages of life course, their friendship networks change in size. In de Vries’ (1991) study, women’s friendship networks start to increase when children leave home and continue to increase gradually throughout the later part of the life course. In contrast, men experience an increase right after launching children but then a decrease throughout the rest of the later life course. This shrinkage experienced by older men most likely results from their declining opportunities to make friends at work. Women, in contrast, experience a reduction in household obligations, which provides them with more opportunities to develop and maintain friendships. It is also possible that men’s friendship networks shrink in late stages of life course due to their fading desire to engage in social activities and make new friends.
Interactive aspects of men’s friendships
Consistent with the findings on network size, many studies have found that during middle adulthood, men have more frequent face-to-face contact with their friends than women do, although men do not call or write to friends as frequently as women. When they are older adults, however, men have less frequent contact with friends than women. Retirement may reduce men’s opportunities to engage in friendship activities as well as reducing their network size. The diminishing contact with friends may also be attributed to what men do with their friends. Men’s friendships are maintained through joint activities, in contrast to women’s friendships maintained through confiding. This emphasis on shared activities among men becomes even more pronounced when men are older adults. Therefore, it may be more difficult for men to participate in joint activities than for women to continue confiding.
Men’s friendship activities tend to take place in certain situational contexts. In his study of Toronto residents, Wellman (1992) noted that men engage in friendship activities in dyads or small groups. Contrasting his data to the findings reported before his, Wellman also argued that the context of men’s friendships has moved from public places to private homes, and married men’s friendships are now managed by their wives.
Among various types of friendship activities, talk is the most frequently studied. Compared to women, men disclose their personal information and feelings to friends less frequently. Furthermore, men discuss topics such as sports, business and politics with friends, whereas women talk to friends about relational and personal matters. These conversation patterns are consistent with emotional aspects of men’s friendships; men are less emotionally intimate with friendships than women (Wright and Scanlon 1991).
A few factors contribute to this gender difference. First, men do not think, to the same extent women do, that self-disclosure contributes to intimacy in friendships. In addition, the competitiveness in men’s friendships discourages them from disclosing personal information, so they can maintain their power in the relationships. Men also tend to think that their friends would not respond positively to or reciprocate self-disclosure.
One needs to be cautious about how to interpret men’s lower level of self-disclosure because most previous studies relied on men’s (and women’s) self-reporting of self-disclosure. In a qualitative study, Walker (1995) observed that men do disclose their personal information to their friends and share feelings, but they tend to underestimate this feminine aspect of their friendships. In this way, men can maintain their image of friendships that are consistent with their gender expectations. Walker’s argument is consistent with the findings of other studies; men do confide in friends and trust their friends.
Cross-sex friendships
So far we have discussed patterns of men’s friendships with other men, as compared to women’s friendships with other women. Although the friendship literature has traditionally focused on same-sex friendships, researchers have recently begun to examine the prevalence and characteristics of oppositesex friendships (Monsour 2001).
Both men’s and women’s friendship networks increase in sex homogeneity during young adulthood and maintain it during most of their adulthood. The gender composition of men’s friendships is more likely to be affected by stage of the life course, however. For example, the proportion of female friends in men’s friendship networks increases in late life stages, whereas women maintain high sex homogeneity in their friendship networks. This increasing sex heterogeneity in older men’s friendship networks may result from their greater need for support particularly from female friends as well as men’s shorter life span, which reduces the number of potential male friends within the age group.
As described above, men and women approach friendships differently, and these differences create problems in cross-sex friendships. For example, McWilliams and Howard (1993) argued that men assume women to be social and communal due to their stereotypes of women, and women perceive male friends as instrumental and competitive. These stereotypes may create an impression that men and women pull their opposite-sex friendships in different directions—men wanting the friendships to be instrumental and hierarchical and women wanting the friendships to be emotionally intimate. In addition, cross-sex friendships may have a greater risk of creating imbalance in social support exchange, compared to same-sex friendships. In the above-mentioned Toronto study by Wellman (1992), for example, men received emotional support from both male and female friends, whereas women receive emotional support mostly from their female friends. Despite these difficulties, cross-sex friendships have some unique benefits for both men and women. For example, crosssex friendships provide men with opportunities to learn how to develop emotionality.
Cross-cultural differences
Owing to the very small number of crosscultural studies, little is known about how men’s friendship patterns vary across countries. An exception is Bruckner and Knaup’s (1993) analysis of friendship patterns in five countries, including the US, Great Britain, Germany, Italy and Hungary. The study showed that gender variations are much smaller than cultural variations in terms of network size, composition and frequency of visiting. Moreover, not many culture-specific gender differences were found. Theoretically, however, one would expect some cultural variations in men’s friendships patterns or culture-specific gender differences. Men’s social positions, relative to women’s, vary considerably across cultures, and those structural differences are likely to influence how men and women develop and maintain friendships. Perhaps a comparison between Western and non-Western countries is necessary to demonstrate such cultural differences. Although some friendship research has been conducted in non-Western countries, these studies have not included examinations of gender differences.
Future research
Previous friendship studies have generated considerable knowledge, but there are still some limitations in the current literature. First, very few studies included more than one age group in the samples or examined changes in friendships over time. Consequently, little is known about how men’s friendships change over time and over the life course. Related to this issue, there are many studies that examine college students only. These studies often make implicit assumptions that gender differences among college students apply to non-college populations and other age groups. The assumption has rarely been tested. Second, the current literature provides information on how men’s friendships differ from women’s, but it tells little about how friendships vary across different groups of men, although there are some excellent exceptions, which describe friendship patterns among gay men (Nardi 1992a), African—American men (Franklin 1992) and working- versus middleclass men (Walker 1995). Third, researchers frequently fail to develop explanations for the gender differences that they report. In future studies, it will be important to identify how men’s friendship patterns result from the social positions they occupy within society, from their psychological dispositions, and from the interplay between these two aspects of gender (see Adams et al. 2004, for an example of a framework which can guide such studies).
Finally, as some authors have pointed out (e.g., Adams and Berggren 2004; Nardi 1992b), the friendship literature has been feminised or is lacking topics important to the understanding of men’s friendships. That is, researchers tend to examine gender differences in aspects of friendships that are more common among women (e.g. satisfaction, intimacy). To understand men’s friendships fully, we need to formulate research questions differently. Instead of relying on concepts of friendship characteristics repeatedly used in the current literature, researchers first need to identify what processes and structures may characterise men’s friendships and then test whether they distinguish men’s friendships from women’s.
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