Family Groups - Fathers

Men 'are fickle when it comes to friendship'
By DUNCAN ROBERTSON

Daily Mail 8th March 2007


Men are more likely to make friends through shared interests such as going down the pub for a pint

When the going gets tough it seems you can't count on your male friends to stick around.

A four-year investigation recently published concludes that men are fickle creatures who base their friendships on what "they can get out of them".

Women, however, make "deeper and more moral" friends and are more likely to stand by you through thick and thin.

They are genuinely interested in their friends and want to know what they are doing, how they are feeling and how their families are faring.

The analysis of the behaviour of 10,000 people showed that men are far shallower and more calculating.

They will typically make friends through shared interests such as playing football or going down the pub for a pint, while looking for ways they can profit from their pals.

Men would be much better served by forging links with women, but only a quarter of them manage to make good friends with the opposite sex.

"Friendship between women seems to be fundamentally different to friendship between men," said, Dr Gindo Tampubolon, who led the research for the University of Manchester.

"It's much deeper and more moral. It's about the relationship itself rather than what they can get out of it.

"Women tend to keep their friends through thick and thin across geography and social mobility.

"And women's view of friendship has something to do with how they express themselves and form their identity.

"Men, on the other hand, are more fickle with their relationships and seem more interested in 'what's in it for me'.

"Adding to the bad news for male prestige, the study confirms the stereotype that men are likely to base their friendship on social drinking."

Many men lose touch with friends when they relocate or change jobs, but are often happy to recruit a fresh social circle wherever they finish up.

The biggest strains on friendships are when one or another of the friends gets married, divorced or is widowed.

Pregnancy is another prime cause of a "ruptured friendship", as is having a child move to a new school.

The data also found singletons, pensioners and white-collar workers were better at pairing up, according to the data collected for the British Household Panel Surveys from 1992 to 2002.

Middle-class people are more likely to cast their net of friendship far wider, whereas working-class people had most of their friends within their socio-economic group.

A previous study has shown that busy modern lifestyles have led to a dramatic fall in the number of close friends young men can confide in.

In the past 20 years, the figure has dropped from an average of 3.5 to two – with almost a quarter of men admitting they have nobody they can speak to about personal secrets.

The research from Duke University in North California said "there was a trend towards smaller, closer social networks more centred on spouses and partners".