Why Girls Friendships Are Different?

By: Sabrina Intisar

From a young age, it becomes apparent that boy friendships are different from girl friendships. Boys prefer sports and recreational activities, while girls prefer to sit and talk quietly, but why does this difference exist?

Boys and girls approach friendship in different ways. You yourself must have felt it around you. Boys or girls talk to each other about emotional conversations and matters of personal nature. On the other hand, friendships among men are based on practical things, like watching sports together, playing video games together, etc.

The difference between the friendships of boys and girls is evident from a young age

Oxford University psychologist Robin Dunbar has been studying friendship for over fifty years. Their research shows that the difference in friendships between boys and girls is evident from an early age. According to Robin Dunbar, an analysis of thousands of photos on Facebook supports his position. Most of the pictures of women are with their close friends. On the contrary, most of the pictures of men are with friends during some social activity or sports etc. It is usually very rare for a man or boy to share a photo with his best friend. The results revealed in the analysis of social networking websites are also evident in real life. Even in primary schools, we can see that girls initially want to play next to boys in more running games, but as time goes by, they prefer to spend time with other girls and talk. Robyn Dunbar, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, also studied how, when busy with work and children, women still find time for communication and friendships. Another interesting observation was that the mother-daughter bond grows stronger over time. Telephone records of volunteers in Europe show that while a person spends most of his or her life talking with his or her partner, it is during midlife or middle age that mothers usually talk to their daughters the most. They make telephone calls. Anna M. Martinez-Aleman, a professor at Boston College in the United States, studied female friendships at the university in the mid-90s. They concluded that close friendships influenced women’s social activities, their identity formation, and their intellectual understanding of their place in the world. Professor Ana M. Martínez-Aleman contacted the same women 10 years later to see what their social world was like: did they maintain friendships? Many women did. The friendship actually increased as the women got older. Family can certainly play a role in human relationships. For example: A 2019 study published in the American Journal of Primatology indicates that the better a teenage girl gets along with her mother, the more likely she is to have a close friendship. Although social research has repeatedly noted the very different nature of male and female friendships, the reasons for this are difficult to understand. It requires an answer to a long-debated and politically complex question: Are male and female brains different? To what extent are gender differences traced back to nature and to what extent are they nurtured? Some studies have tried to answer this question. But it seems that as soon as a study is published, a review criticizing its methods follows. So until now, why male and female friendships are different, there is no clear answer.