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women told me about being upset by friends, it was often because they hadn’t been included in something or hadn’t been told something. This reflects the sensitivity, common among women, to feeling left out or pushed away. (Men’s sensitivities tend to lie elsewhere: to feeling put down or pushed around.)"
"Despite how different the relationships with those called “friends” could be, hearing about them always gave me a window into a woman’s world at the time of the friendship. For many, having friends was synonymous with having a good life. "
"“For boys and men, it’s activities that are central. For girls, your best friend is the one you tell everything to. For boys, your best friend is the one you do everything with—and the one who will stick up for you if there’s a fight.”
"Women are often surprised by what men don’t know about their friends—and by what they don’t talk about when they talk. "
"There is a type of talk that has a special place in girls’ friendships: telling secrets. "
"The role of secrets in their friendships helps explain why girls are often cliquey: you can’t tell secrets in front of a girl who isn’t a friend. (By contrast, boys have no reason to exclude a boy they don’t like. They can let him play, but stick him in an undesirable position in a game or otherwise give him a hard time.) For girls, and later for women, closeness can be gauged—and negotiated—by who knows what secrets, and how and when they know them. If a girl reveals her best friend’s secret to another girl, she might find herself with a new best friend."
“I define close,” a woman said, “as someone who knows things about me that other people don’t.” Often that closeness begins in a breakthrough conversation where something deeply personal is revealed. As one young woman put it, sharing personal information is like a first step toward friendship: “Here’s this little piece of me. This means I like you.” A friendship grows if the listener reciprocates. Another woman recalled an acquaintance becoming a friend that way: “We’d never really just talked, like about personal things. Then she opened up about some mental health issues she’s had. And so I opened up, too. And it was just a strong bonding experience. And ever since then I’ve felt so much closer to her.”
"For many women, failing to tell what’s going on in your life is a violation of friendship. "
Exchanging secrets can be a litmus test of friendship. “If they’re true friends,” a woman said, “I tell them everything I feel and everything I think.” And they are expected to do the same.
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Several women said they prefer men as friends because guys won’t repeat their secrets. I don’t think this is because men are inherently more trustworthy, but because secrets don’t have the currency in boys’ and men’s friendships that they have in girls’ and women’s: men have nothing to gain by repeating secrets. Because girls and women tend to vie for closeness—to a popular girl or a particular friend—what better way to prove you are close to someone than to show that you know her secrets? So friendship, even true friendship, can lead inevitably to gossip.
Women’s fear of gossip seems to be as universal as their desire to talk about troubles."
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“When they run out of things about themselves to say,” her mother warned, “they’ll move on to talking about you.”
Underlying this caution are two assumptions: first, that friends will tell each other personal and potentially embarrassing or even compromising things, and, second, that when women get together, they talk, and their preferred topics are personal, about their own or others’ lives. The result is that having friends entails the risk of gossip—both because of women’s desire to have material for conversation and because of their desire to open their hearts to a friend."
"But often, and more commonly, people talk about others’ lives without putting them down: just talking about. This kind of gossip simply reflects an interest in other people’s lives"
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In Trudy’s view, and that of many women, not telling a friend what’s really going on is tantamount to lying; it’s not being a true friend."
he quickly realized that talking about their personal lives was key to their friendships—and completely different from the kind of talk he and his friends engaged in. "
complained, in a letter to a friend, of just such a betrayal: “Being your friend to the extent that I am, it is ridiculous that I am always the last to know the things that concern you, and that I am ashamed to let others know I am ignorant of them.”
The answer is the type of conversation, so common and so valued among women friends but so unfamiliar to most men: troubles talk. From her point of view, “The same thing happened to me” is an expression of understanding and a reassurance of sameness, both of which are treasured benefits of friendship. But that’s only the start of the conversation. A friend would go on to ask for more details: And then what did you say? And what did she say? And why do you think she said that? And how did that make you feel? And what did you say next? The failure to ask those follow-up questions may be the most frustrating thing about his telling her how to fix the problem. By describing the problem, she meant to start a conversation. Offering a solution shuts the conversation down. This result, disappointing to her, might be a secondary gain for him, because he finds it frustrating to take part in a conversation that seems to have no point. It seems that way because he’s looking for the point in the message, while it lies elsewhere: in the metamessage.
Every utterance has meaning on two levels: message and metamessage. The message is the meaning of the words; the metamessage is what it says about the relationship that these words are spoken in this way in this context. The message of follow-up questions and extended answers is clear to everyone. It’s their metamessage that means so much to many women (and can be opaque to many men). Taking the time to explore a problem, to ask questions and listen to the answers, and then use the answers in formulating further questions—all this sends a metamessage of caring. The one who tells of a problem feels less alone if someone cares enough to engage in troubles talk. Given this expectation, short-circuiting troubles talk sends the opposite metamessage: I don’t want to hear any more about your problem because I don’t care enough about it—or about you.
The frustration a woman might feel if she wants to talk about a problem and a man she is close to doesn’t is commensurate with the magnitude of the troubles. Ironically, the greater the problem, the less eager he may be to talk about it, not because he doesn’t care but because he cares so much. If someone he loves has a problem, he feels obligated to do something—he wants to do something. Since he doesn’t feel, as women typically do, that listening and expressing understanding is doing something, talking about a problem he can’t fix aggravates his feelings of helplessness.
pooh bear!
Any conversational style difference can lead to missed signals, miscommunication, and, most damagingly, misjudgments about others’ intentions, and the kinds of people they are."
The answer is conversational style. Each learned basic habits and assumptions about how to have a conversation—how to say what you mean and show how you feel—as they learned to talk, from family members and the people they spoke to, growing up. And each had a lifetime of evidence that her own conversational style makes sense, because many of those she spoke to had similar styles.
From the time they are children, girls learn from playmates, friends, and the world in general that if they tell others what to do or are “too demanding,” they will be labeled “bossy.” To be likable—and being liked is a major goal for most girls and women—they need to find ways to negotiate what they want or need without seeming to demand it.
The pursuit of sameness underlies the characteristic rejoinders, so common and so valued among women, “The same thing happened to me” and “I know, I feel the same way.” But anything that is valued, even treasured, can become constricting if there seems to be no room for divergence. A woman told me that her women friends “don’t let you be different.”
Another woman expressed a similar view: with women, she said, “If you express an opinion or a personal choice that’s different from theirs, it’s taken as criticism or as a value judgment.” (In contrast, she added, “with men there’s almost an expectation of difference.”) These reactions illuminate why sameness is so highly valued among girls and women: it implies equality. People often say, “Not better or worse, just different,” precisely to counteract the common assumption that if two things are different, one must be better and the other worse. In other words, “different” smacks of competition, and that violates the norm, tracing back to girls’ same-sex play, that it’s unacceptable to think you’re better than your friends. That’s the violation that incurs the labels “stuck up” and “snob” and the accusation “She thinks she’s something.”
Research, including my own, has shown that girls and women tend to focus more on the closeness-distance dimension, whereas boys and men tend to focus more on who’s up and who’s down. The contrast is one of relative focus, not absolute.
The notion that competition precludes connection underlies one of the most persistent and stereotypical assumptions about women. Subtle competition can shadow just about any conversation.
"On the surface, these conversations resembled the talk about family members that is common among women, a way of connecting by showing, and assuming, interest in each other’s lives. But in the senior residence, talk about children and grandchildren often took on a subtle or not so subtle competitive edge. It seemed to address the underlying questions “How attentive are my relatives? And how successful?” Like Christmas letters, these conversations tended to include only boastable facts, neglecting to mention the problematic ones: my daughter has an important position at a top firm (but not that she was fired from her previous job); my grandson attends Harvard (but not that he had to take a term off because of psychological problems). Successful progeny enhance a resident’s status. Status also accrues when a child or grandchild visits often or helps out by driving or buying needed items—evidence of connection that carries weight in an ongoing competition. The irony is that almost everyone can walk away from those conversations feeling diminished, as if the problems she and her family face are unusually unfortunate rather than the universal human condition."
Though all four women in the group are friends, Edith and another player suspect that the rule touter has been secretly studying about the game. To level the playing field, they decided to take private bridge lessons—secretly.They didn’t want her to get better at bridge, and they didn’t want her to know that they were hoping to get better, because they didn’t want to reinforce her conviction that she was superior.
But each “like” does far more than express approval. It’s a public display of friendship. The more “likes” a girl’s picture gets, the more friends she has, the higher her status: more friends mean more power.
They “will want to show off that they are closer. They will bring up that inside joke or something that happened when the other two were not there.” It’s competition, yes, but for connection. Describing a similar dynamic among adults, a woman who has several brothers observed that when the extended family gathers, her brothers’ wives compete over which of them fits better into their husbands’ family. They compete for inclusion—that is, for connection.
Competition for connection can come at unexpected times, in unexpected ways—and it can be very subtle.
They “will want to show off that they are closer. They will bring up that inside joke or something that happened when the other two were not there.” It’s competition, yes, but for connection. Describing a similar dynamic among adults, a woman who has several brothers observed that when the extended family gathers, her brothers’ wives compete over which of them fits better into their husbands’ family. They compete for inclusion—that is, for connection.
Competition for connection can come at unexpected times, in unexpected ways—and it can be very subtle.
“A group of women is a scary thing unless you’re really on the inside, really solidly in the group.”
“With a group of men,” she said, “you can come and go. You can sit on the periphery. The boundary is permeable. It’s an unstable group. With women, it’s a stable hierarchy. Everyone knows what their role is in the group. The men are always jockeying for power and realigning status and relationships. For us, it’s much more like we have it and it’s fixed and that’s it, period.”
Several women told me they find groups of women impermeable and scary. One recalled that when she took her son to the playground, she’d see the other mothers gathered in a circle, and she’d feel her blood pressure rise. The prospect of having to break into that group reminded her of the “cliquish” high school scene she had found daunting. "
During that period, a group of women gave me courage to do something I’d been unable to do, though I knew I had to."
. But there’s a related, maybe even stronger, force—one that is particular to girls and women. I call it FOBLO: Fear Of Being Left Out.
Girls and women have good reason for FOBLO. Again, we can trace the source to children at play. When girls decide they don’t like another girl, they lock her out. Think of little girls who express anger by threatening, “You can’t come to my birthday!” Boys don’t typically exclude boys they don’t like; they let them play, though they might treat them badly. There are many reasons that girls are more likely than boys to ostracize a playmate they don’t like or want to punish. One reason is the role of talk, especially secrets, in girls’ friendships, in contrast to boys’ focus on activities. If you’re playing baseball or football, there’s no reason a low-status boy can’t be there; he might even be needed to round out the team. But if girls are telling secrets, only friends can be present; they can’t let a girl hear their secrets if she’s not, or they don’t want her to be, a friend.
Little girls can be very creative in finding ways to exclude others"
I'm listening to her audiobook (Upside of Stress)