‘Of course men and women can be friends,’ says Anna.
“No doubt about it,” Eden agrees.
“Men are the best friends,” Jenny stresses.
“They don’t judge,” Alicia says.
“Oh bitch,” Eden said again.
“Or have an agenda when you ask for clothing advice,” I suggest.
With a jarring combination of “yes,” “exactly,” and a single “how true,” the five women sitting at the bar table celebrate this niche fact. It’s a sunny Saturday; a long, leisurely girls’ lunch. But an awkward silence follows, and I think I know why.
Celia with her friend Dylan Jones, editor of the Evening Standard
“I’m not really sure I have many male friends,” Jenny says, the first to say so. “Not really.”
“I don’t have any,” Eden admits.
‘Not one.’
The floodgates open and I suddenly realise that even I, who used to pride myself on having more male friends than female, don’t see them half as much as I used to. Earlier this year, I was also strangely taken aback when I realised that a man I was constantly meeting at social gatherings and who desperately wanted to be my new gay best friend, was in fact not gay, so maybe it was too much to ask. By that point I already had his phone number – I still glance at it sometimes, finger hovering over the “message” button. But five months later, I haven’t contacted him. Why?
I bet if you polled a bunch of British women you’d find that male friends aren’t really… a thing. However, since I’m not a betting woman, I reached out to the authority on friendship to get some stats: world-renowned psychologist Robin Dunbar, author of Friends: Understanding Power of our most important relationshipsShe confirms that when it comes to British women’s best friends forever, “85 per cent are women and only 15 per cent men, but these tend to be gay men or men at the feminised end of the male distribution, meaning they are good listeners and not too dominant.”
And how weird and wrong is that? Where are all our dominant straight friends who never let us finish a story?
In the month since that Saturday lunchtime epiphany (we’ll call it a “pub piphany,” because that’s a thing), I’ve been doing my own research into this overlooked and under-discussed cultural blind spot. What I’ve uncovered has been surprising, amusing, and at times downright sad. Most alarming has been the initial debate over what counts as a male friend, with conversations typically along the lines of: “Male friends? Sure, I’ve got loads. What do brothers-in-law not count? What about my husband’s friends? The guy who sits opposite me at work? Sometimes he’ll invite me to the pub with the rest of the team, if it’s someone’s birthday.”
Celia’s husband, Piers Morgan
To clarify our definitions: a real male friend is someone you hang out with one-on-one on a regular basis. He’s someone who despises the same (real and famous) people as you do (nothing unites more than mutual hatred) and is prone to sending you uncaptioned WhatsApp pictures of particularly idiotic things those people have said, done, or worn.
Just like good girlfriends, a male friend will know exactly how you take your martinis, that you like to sit in a booth at a restaurant but prefer to sit at the bar at a bar, and that you shouldn’t bother watching the latest “coffee time” TV drama because “it’s not your thing.” So basically, they’re husbands, no sex, no resentment.
Unlike female friends, they will never ask about your children (hallelujah!) or the need to get home early to fetch theirs. Because of male blindness, they often don’t notice if you’ve gone through what I call an “ageing group” (a series of increasingly inventive forms of physical decline), which is always a blessing. They may fill dishwashers like raccoons on meth, but, by God, men make great friends. So why do we exclude 49.45 per cent of the UK population from our intimate circles?
When I ask Professor Dunbar whether the prevalence of same-sex friendships is partly due to single-sex schools and the single-sex mentality that always seems more prevalent in Britain than the rest of Europe, he assures me that the problem is “much deeper. We see it elsewhere – 75 per cent of women’s social networks are made up of women, 75 per cent of men’s are men,” he says. “There is a strong homophily effect (we prefer friends who are similar to us). However, close cultural similarities (shared interests, moral or political views, etc.) can outweigh biological differences (mainly sex, personality, age and ethnicity). We see the same in social monkeys and apes.”
If they can override these things, how come the monkeys in my stratosphere can’t? Are we back to where we were before? When Harry Met Sally enigma, where once even the possibility of sex is “out there,” the friendship is “ultimately doomed” from the start.
After attending an all-girls school until she was 18, Jessica Fellowes, author of The best friend“It took me a long time to learn how to be friends with someone of the opposite sex,” she admits. “I pretty much assumed that if you liked someone, then you made out with them. I eventually had a few guy friends in my 20s, but a combination of my boyfriends and their girlfriends tended to wipe them out, especially if one of us was single while the other was in a relationship.”
Several of my friends confirm the theory that couples forbid having close friends of the opposite sex, and I can’t help but find it depressing that beneath our progressive, post-feminist facades, we seem to be stuck in a 1950s dressing gown on this issue. Two friends told me this: “My husband wouldn’t like it if I said I was going out to dinner with a guy, even if it was platonic.” “I stopped seeing my best friend a few years ago. My husband kept asking me why I needed a friend when I had him.”
Frankly, my husband doesn’t like me having friends of the opposite sex either. As with pillows, I’ve had to fight for every one I have. He’s convinced (like so many men) that any straight man is just using “the old friendship ruse” to try to get me into bed.
If you’re going to have male friends when you’re in a committed relationship, everyone I’ve talked to agrees that there are “unspoken rules” that must be respected. A sort of boyfriend code. If the friendship predates your relationship or marriage, you can keep it up, but if you meet a man tomorrow you’d like to have dinner with, that’s pretty much out of the question. If you dated that man ages ago and both parties just got tired of each other, go ahead: be friends. You’ve probably removed any sexual tension from that relationship; it’s probably safe. If the man in question is currently dating Gisele Bündchen, that friendship is allowed, too.
I don’t like these rules. They seem like uncivilized, social constraints to me. I think the boyfriend code needs to be rewritten so we can all broaden our friendship horizons. Heck, maybe there should even be a national “meet a random guy and make him a friend” day. Aren’t we missing out on some of the most enriching relationships of our lives?
My daughter had a best friend. Once, when she was five, I walked into the bathroom and found him sitting next to her on the cold tile floor, chatting while she peed. At the time, it made me sad to think that we can’t continue to have those kinds of friendships as we grow up. The ones that are so strong that they override even basic rules of etiquette, and certainly those of gender. A male bathroom buddy, though? I can’t imagine my husband agreeing to that.
Celia’s latest novel, The squareIt is published by Sphere, £9.99. To order a copy for £8.99 until 1st September, visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.