Shoni, kudos for supplying definitions (even though they're from ChatGPT.)
It's a great question. Here's what I can offer.
Women form intimate relationships easily, yet their bonding through female partnerships seems a lot slower and harder to grow. They transactionalise confidences very well, yet seem to lean on diplomacy more than loyalty. That's highly effective for trading food and child-care favours day to day, yet doesn't work so well when you're trying to function under threat and pressure and you want loyalty and integrity from whoever's beside you.
Meanwhile, men form enduring bonds in a matter of days, and can do it without resorting to much explicit intimacy. They notice things about one another, but communicate through subtext rather than direct emotional disclosures. They test each other intensively for loyalty and capability before they'll explicitly share anything.
So there's a gap in male-female friendships where each has effective technology that doesn't work well on the other. If you want an enduring cross-sex friendship, you have to grow past the instinctive habits and play in the other's space, and you both need to do it.
Part of what makes this especially hard for women is that from age 15 to around 45 they're wired for mate-selection, not for partnership growth. They select rigorously for physical and social traits in men and then just manage the diplomacy while waiting for problems to be solved. That's a failure to develop.
Meanwhile, a lot of guys are thinking about the immediate challenges, but aren't thinking about who they'll be in 20 years time and -- especially -- who'll she'll be in 20 years time. (Menopause changes women's priorities and values enormously. They accelerate and often leave their guys in the dust.)
So if you want an enduring friendship with a guy, you both have to grow it and make it enduring. Here's how.
1. Be a woman who's willing to push and to fail and improve repeatedly. Don't even bother until you can do this. You won't get the respect.
2. Pick a guy who's not afraid to talk about feelings, anxiety and growth, but who actually does things rather than just introspect.
3. Select for common values and mutual respect.
4. Ask questions together, solve problems together, adapt and grow.
He may marry you -- or treat you as his sister. That'll be partly your decision, and partly your individual life circumstances.
Thanks Ruv, I agree that a lot of it goes back to evolutionary principles and basically wanting different things, whether we're aware of it or not. I've found it relatively easy to build and hold onto friendships with other women. I also am in a long term relationship with a man who I definitely consider my best friend, so this is about pondering the question rather than trying to solve a problem for myself :)
Shoni, I think your target readership for this question is females in their mid 30s to mid 40s. (Look at the examples you've used -- *Friends* to *X-Files*.) Most of them will already be in relationships, but may be wondering if they're losing friendship with their guy, or how to have friendships with guys and how to keep that strong as their own life roles change to more stratified responsibility. It's a good question, well-targeted, even if you also peppered it with reckless examples from your partying twenties that not every target reader may share or identify with.
My contribution wasn't for you; it was for the topic. But I directed it toward you because you wrote it personally to your audience. While I'm not your target audience, what I was trying to do was add perspective that might help distinguish your question in the minds of your readers, to help you reach the audience that you had targeted. That was your opportunity to add, extend, redirect and use that to connect with your target readership; to use the material I supplied and make it work for you.
But you treated my analysis as a lecture, which tells me that your writing is still very much about you proving yourself rather than engaging freely and adaptively with others for their benefit. I totally understand that since you have a science background and that's how science education works: it forces you to try to always be the cleverest person in the room. Any suggestion that you didn't research enough or reason enough is like a knife-wound. They force you to take yourself too seriously, and it cripples nearly every other form of social interaction. (I also realise that my language may exacerbate this for you -- I've got a very analytic background, though I sometimes hide it.)
But that's not how stand-up comedy works. It's not how group discussions work. This is why you made the mistake of republishing symbolic logic from ChatGPT (guaranteed to alienate nearly everyone except someone like myself) and getting caught up in the correctness of analysis, rather than the building of intimacy with your audience.
My suggestion? Try to be the facilitator rather than the lecturer controlling the class. Leave some air in your discussions. Work on being kind, sympathetic, open and inquisitive rather than right. If you believe you know the answer, don't patronise the audience by asking the question. Or if you ask the question, find the edge that you don't know and explore that. Assuming that what you want is more reader engagement, it might help you better.
(Yes, that last para *is* a lecture, but I'll excuse it by assuring you that I'll now leave you alone for a goodly while. I wish you the very best of success and hope to hear more about your SF some day. Good luck!)
Wow, thanks Ruv, I really appreciate you taking the time to unpack all that, and it gives me a lot to think about. It did occur to me as I was rushing to reply earlier that I should take more time to put together something more comprehensive. Sorry if I took it too personally, that's my bad. The feedback is always welcome and I'm sorry if I was too quick to answer and maybe a little defensive. That certainly wasn't my intention. TBH, most of the time I assume that I don't have an audience, so it's nice to see you break it down and show me how it looks from the other side. Of course my writing is immature and a work in progress. That's why I'm here, showing up week on week and trying to build. I'm glad that my piece caught your attention and I hope I haven't completely put you off with my response. All the best!
Not at all, Shoni. I got interested because I saw growth potential. I'm backing off because it has to be your hands on the steering-wheel and your rate of progress. This is Shoshi's Journey of course, not Ruv's.
That means a lot, really. I don't tend to see much evidence for potential myself. So am just trying lots and seeing what happens. I really appreciate the in-depth feedback. I will spend more time with it over the coming days.
> I don't tend to see much evidence for potential myself
Okay, look.
Today I read four posts of yours to a friend (female, former academic; she's in her fifties.) We discussed your choice of topic, your approach and what you might do next. I shared what my responses were and how you'd received them. In fact I read part of this exchange to her over lunch.
I'm not going to share that conversation because you're already self-conscious. But if you want to reflect, please reflect on this.
Go look at your recent Melway topic, which I thought was a great seed: original, localised, personal and specific. It's great material for comedy, intimacy and nostalgia: a precious item that was always hard to use in its intended context, which we miss and yet can't be sure why. Everyone over thirty has funny, personal stories about a street-directory. It gives you an instant, sympathetic bond with a target readership and a chance to draw them out through talking with you (and why you? because nobody else thought of this idea!)
Then look at my response, which I wrote in 20 minutes as a displacement activity while I was actually meant to be writing something harder for my day-job. In that reply I tried to explore that potential -- just sketched a bunch of short ideas until I ran out of ideas or time (it was time.) My point is: it's not crafted writing, but wasn't hard.
Ask yourself what focus you want, what tone you want, what reaction, what response and what's getting in your way. You could have done similar with that yourself. You had brought everything to the table except trust.
Or in your ChatGPT consult about relationships (another great idea, turning it into an improvised therapist and life-coach.) You could have set up the novel idea better as an act of exasperation, used the technology to reveal more about the frustrations, paradoxes and hypocrisies that people won't readily admit, how even a machine sometimes knows better than we do, and yet sometimes doesn't know enough -- how we might even make the machine lie to us just as a friend might, and how it might capitulate because that's all that we can understand. Those elements were there, but ill-focused and undercooked, the delivery stilted because you were so worried about being *wrong*.
Then look at my reply, which didn't have your situation comedy yet did contain a potentially comedic paradox: the diplomatic sisters with facile intimacy vs the practical, loyal brothers who can't disclose anything, each trying to build friendships. I even told you how to plot it out in four steps.
It didn't use ChatGPT, but was analytic and simple and took a different line and tone. (Also because I was *really* running out of time.) It made dangerous generalisations but also took a potentially constructive line that you could have turned into pros and cons, comedy... whatever you wanted. You were a post away from asking your readers to write a short about it, or a piece of flash fiction, or even their own anecdote in refutation or support.
I took that approach because open, intimate, confronting discussions online can also be a good thing and because you asked a great, general question and might have gotten interesting reader reactions had you not also shut potential creative and intimate responses down with process, literalism and hard work in the same article.
My writing is not meant to be your magical solution, Your Shonitude; it's to show you how much potential there already *is* in your ideas and how many excellent potential approaches, once you trust yourself more, trust the readership more, engage for the readers more, allow readers to delight more in you, play with them more, and ultimately, get out of your own way.
Speaking of which, the latter is what I also promised to do, and so I should. Very best of luck!
I shall attempt to write a non-angry-feminist response to some of the generalisations you mentioned here, and instead appeal to your scientific side (I'm getting the impression that's your background), and not mention that dreaded word 'mansplaining'.
I do, however, take issue with your statement that women are wired for mate selection. This strikes me as perhaps a little Victorian and patriarchal (I'll avoid the word 'misogynist' as I know you didn't mean it that way), in the sense of seeing women as baby machines. So here's the scientific disproof of that. First, hormones. Women's sexuality is based on a cycle of hormones of course. That means most of the time women are not remotely interested in sex. Men, however, with their constant testosterone levels, may well be. Don't worry, I'm not that kind of feminist, so I'm not going to suggest that your brains are wired for discharge.
Talking of brains, let's bring some neuroscience into it. The human brain evolved in a small social group of 150 people - most importantly, not all of them related genetically. This is where the social cognition number (Dunbar's number) comes in. If it were true that 'mate selection' was the most important driving factor behind the human organism then those social groups would've disintegrated. Again, this elevation of 'the sexual drive' to primary position is a very unfortunate legacy of that awful Victorian patriarchy. The real drive is simply 'survival' - specifically, survival of the individual within its own lifetime. The idea of 'I must propagate the species' never comes into it, and is simply not wired into the human brain. This is why 'the desire to have sex' only accounts for, what, less than 1-2% of human activity, both physically and cognitively. Yes, even for men. Once a man has discharged, for example, I gather it takes several hours before he can reload. So let's call that 1-2% of the time.
Given that 'survival' for a social species depends entirely on mutual cooperation, and second, this takes place within a very close-knit community in which everyone knows everything and everyone else, but everyone isn't preoccupied with fucking everyone of the opposite sex, it logically follows that 'friendship' between males and females without sexual desire of any kind is in fact the norm, not the exception. Once 'mate selection' has taken place - and that happens quite quickly, due to 'fancying' plus 'compatible personality', we don't emotionally worry about it anymore. We are in fact hard wired to develop friendships first, well before any 'mate selection'.
Maybe this modern world is abnormal in this way as well as in so many other ways, but there must be something very wrong indeed if a man and a woman cannot be just friends with no complications. I find the entire idea of 'can't just be friends' absurd to the point of being disconcerting.
And as far as I am concerned, social psychology, evolution/anthropology, endocrinology, and neuroscience pretty much prove my point. That and extensive personal experience. I don't understand, really, how it's possible to have sexual desire towards someone you don't fancy. And I seriously doubt everyone fancies every example of the opposite sex... As I say - human social harmony would disintegrate, were that to be true.
Evelyn, I owe you an apology. I'm currently having two similar conversations in two different newsletters, and conflated them. This one is about male/female friendships, while another is about the fragility of masculinity and what that does to any sense of justice. They overlap immensely of course, and neither conversation lacks for bright, feisty women arguing with me.
For *this* conversation I'm fine talking about relationship strategies and so on. My hesitancy was because I thought I was in the other newsletter, and risked running off-topic.
So back to topic: are you interested in what indigenous Australians do? If so, I'll unpack it. (I assume that Shoni's fine with this sort of on-topic community side-chat, and that if she's not, I imagine she'll tell us.)
I would certainly be interested - although bear in mind I live in Europe (France, to be precise) and I shall be going to bed very soon, so I won’t be able to reply to you until tomorrow (something to look forward to though). So feel free to take your time, is maybe what I’m saying.
Having conversations with people in totally different timezones is sometimes suddenly weird. It’s like a sort of time travel.
Alright. But firstly, an apology to Shoni in advance because her topic was about urban strangers forming and holding friendships across the stresses of geography, economics and life-phases, and this is entirely the opposite.
Background
My interest in anthropology is casual. I read, but it's sporadic and not systematic. So presented here is not the field, but only my casual, localised understanding of it. Also, I live on a continent that was occupied everywhere by indigenous people, and read mostly about those who lived in my corner of the continent -- the Australian Alps. Anyway, here's how I decypher it.
Hunter Gatherer Challenges
An understanding of indigenous culture and behaviour has to begin with understanding the problems they're trying to solve, and that's inseparable from environment. Hunter-gatherers don't have a farmer's seasons and there may not be four of them. Indigenous seasons are tied to what they do where, and indigenous Australians might have as many as six.
They don't normally have food stores either, so if they want to store calories, they do it in their bodies. In early summer, the local indigenous peoples of my area would come together from hundreds of kilometres away to gather, roast and feast on moths, which were cooling themselves in caves and easy to harvest. They'd put on kilograms of body-fat in about six weeks.
Hunter-gatherers live in a seasonal precariat and must always either be moving or planning to move. Although they're hardy and enormously resilient, a single bad season can wipe out the elders, the infants and many of the children to starvation, and can decimate the breeding males to misadventure as they take on more risks to hunt food. The land is also saturated with hunter-gatherers, and hunting outside your traditional lands is an act of disrespect, typically leading to battle. Yet after good seasons you get more surviving babies and that leads to population pressure, so you're constantly at risk of battle with the neighbours. Further, young men can also distinguish themselves in this way so they constantly *want* battle, while the elders are trying to keep this sexual/food/range competition down to a dull roar.
Lifestyle
So imagine bands of around 20 people (in Australia, not normally 150), all working together to build nightly shelters, gathering and sharing food together, spending every night together, starving together, feasting together, celebrating and mourning together, and relying on one another for defense.
These aren't friends and even a modern notion of family doesn't capture it. Their lives literally depend on one another's competence, loyalty, bravery, endurance and resilience every day, along with the knowledge and wisdom of their elders. Everyone has to be able to walk as far as they need to when they move, in a place where food and water aren't always abundant. It makes them highly formal, socially conservative because a fractured family is death, yet they're also highly empathic. What one feels, all feel. And everyone they deal with is the same -- all bands know how to kill one another, but generally try to refrain. There are no driver's licenses or degrees, but men are often permanently marked to show that they can travel and trade as adults. Sometimes there are scars on the torso, often rubbed with ash to raise them, called cicatrices. In my local area, they knocked out a front tooth.
So think military brotherhood among commandos and I think that might come close.
Reproduction and Marriage
But these are the people who raise you; they're not the people you raise children with. Genetic diversity is a key challenge and we're looking at a population density of one person per 36 square kilometres. With a range supporting 20 people, that puts the range of the next band around 27km away in any direction. With nobody writing down lineages, how do you work out who you'll marry and raise children with?
Every band is part of a language group, and language groups divide into clans, totems and moieties. Broadly a clan represents someone's descendants, and will usually have the name of an animal. A totem is symbolic and can be attached to a language group, the moiety, the clan or family and one for yourself -- it's inherited by tradition or else assigned at birth or at initiation by an elder, and it's usually an animal. Depending on the language group there might be a dozen totems, and everyone has at least one. There are usually taboos about what you must or must not do with your totem, and every totem has mythical significance too -- and may have mythical relationships with other totems in a way remniscent of modern astrology.
A moiety is French word for 'half', and divides each clan and totem in two. Moieties are typically matrilineal because every child can trace their mother.Among indigenous people, moiety is sometimes referred to as 'skin', so you might be called light skin or dark skin, which has nothing to do with actual skin pigmentation.
Marriages are arranged between bands, often between clans and always across moieties, and in many cases it's the elders who arrange the marriage, often at early childhood. The 'cross moiety' arrangement supports genetic diversity, while the inter-band, inter-clan arrangement supports alliance between nearby bands and clans. Traditionally it was also possible though less common to marry across language groups. I mention this to explain that at low population density there simply isn't the luxury of choice in whom you'll marry, and it serves strategic marriages to commit them early.
There are rules for interactions between moieties -- often, any interaction at all is discouraged unless it's necessary. They'll sit apart, might even face in different directions, will avoid unnecessary communication at social events. I believe that this discourages casual attraction, while marriages within a moiety are forbidden. And there are rules for interacting with your betrothed, sometimes called your 'snake' -- often you may be forbidden to talk, or even see one another.
In local cultures, when the husband marries he leaves the family to join the wife's band. The wife doesn't move in with hubby, but men can abduct women in consequence of battle and have them move in with his family. In my local area, marriages were generally monogamous, though sometimes women would flee (expensive since they'd leave all their female relatives), or powerful men would take a second wife.
Friendship
I think you can see where I'm headed with this. The childhood friends you form are most likely within your band and your moiety. Given the generational distribution, they're most often the children of two or three mothers, who may themselves be sisters... so your friends are your cousins.
If you're male, your male childhood friends will all be going somewhere else at adulthood, and so will you. This means you'll be separated from your sisters, brothers and cousins and may only see them at feast-times. Even worse, you may sometimes see them in battle.
If you're female, your sisters and female cousins will likely be staying together. Unless you're abducted as a war-prize, you'll live with them your whole life.
In any case both men and women will typically sit apart at feasts. They have their own music, stories and dances, even their own laws. And they go away for Secret Men's Business and Secret Women's Business, which is not shared across sexes.
Conclusions
The ties here are intensely complex -- far more so than what we see in urban societies with disapora populations. They're also strained, yet likely to be very enduring.
What they aren't is spontaneous, informal or casual. Every relationship has formal social and political elements, along with a mythic context that may capture history. You'll sometimes form friendships despite the orthodoxy at your own risk (there are plenty of indigenous stories of this.) But often, it's in your interests to form friendships within the rules, with politically sensitivity to your safety, dependence, status and future belonging.
There's obviously amity here and empathy, respect and mutual responsibility. But past middle or late childhood, I don't think a modern urban meaning of 'friendship' captures any of it.
I hope that may be interesting and useful, Evelyn.
[sorry for not replying sooner - I got busy; also hoping Shoni doesn't mind!].
I too have a casual, or rather non-specialist/layperson's interest in anthropology, so I'm not an expert as such. And you have given me lots of information of which I was previously completely ignorant. So I'm grateful there.
There's a lot to unpack there for sure. My first thought interestingly enough was something you yourself mentioned which is how their behaviour and customs simply can't be divorced from their environment. Thus hunter gatherer societies in other parts of the world develop strikingly different ways of life. The life you have described seems to be characterised by a response to scarcity and precariousness. As such, a lot of it sounds extremely harsh! And I have to say seemingly excessively violent. Like, in times of scarcity they seem to resort to attacking each other. To me this seems stupid, if I can use that word - cooperation is so much more beneficial than conflict. Especially seeing as most of what you have described as their way of life seems to be focussed on pure survival, above anything else.
Of course, if they exist in bands of 20 then this might explain it. If their social cognition number is so much lower, I mean. Seems more akin to Neanderthal level. Which may explain why, despite tens of thousands of years with no external threat, they did not achieve what one might call 'civilisation' (or an agricultural revolution). This is not to be patronising in a sort of white/western manner. Difficult to avoid it coming across like that, though. It almost seems like, not necessarily an 'alien' culture, but a fairly incompatible one.
It would definitely merit comparison with other hunter-gatherer groups from other parts of the world, that's for sure...
Evelyn, when a species lives for tens of thousands of years in an environment, they saturate it. By that I mean, their population reaches a point where it can't much increase without a change to the environment. So they either migrate or their mortality rate comes to match their birth rate -- by whatever means.
Modern humans have been insulated from this harsh reality in recent centuries largely due to fertiliser, irrigation and industrial farming and more recently contraception, but that only defers the problem. Every species encounters it eventually unless it has socially-planned births.
So what happens with hunter-gatherers is that they saturate their range. Lacking contraception, in years where they have more food they have more surviving infants, which just puts pressure on one another as the temporary food glut diminishes.
So they're constantly pressing one another's boundaries. This produces battles among the males of breeding age, but it's in the elders' interests to stop it from becoming genocidal wars, which has a lot to do with how the elders manage marriage.
Far from being unsophisticated, it's highly sophisticated given the constraints.
And living with 20 people doesn't mean that you only knew 20 people. When the local indigenous folk feasted annually on bogong moths, they'd meet in the hundreds to do so. This would be vast networks of kinship groups extending over tens of thousands of square kilometres of territory, and you can imagine that they'd deal with a lot of social and political business too -- at a time when everyone is well-fed and relaxed.
Just before the moth-feasting time, they'd send runners with verbal invitations to other bands to come and feast -- a political expression of warmth and friendship -- and the runner would carry a decorated message-stick, intricately carved and ornamented with precious pigments that themselves might have been traded over hundreds of kilometres, and kept with them for over a year. There'd surely be subtext and humour in those invitations at times, as well as formal greetings.
And since that was happening all through an extensive mountain range there might be thousands of indigenous folk distributed among the caves where the bogong moths rested.
That was ten thousand years before we ever heard of a United Nations.
Evelyn, thank you for your contribution. I loved what you had to say because I didn't disagree with any of your key facts. Where we differ is in your interpretation of my meaning and also our syntheses of the consequences.
Rather than unpack that here though, let me make a note of it and return to it with you if you wish, at a future time when our topic might be more about relationship strategies rather than fragility of masculinity.
Until that happens, rather than dismiss your points, I'll note that you differ, that we haven't discussed it yet, and that your views might represent many other views, should I need to mention it again.
You've just sparked off another curious thought. You probably guessed I'm really interested in anthropology, and I think this question about male-female friendships is far less trivial than it might seem.
If we consider that current social norms probably are somewhat 'repressed', when we go very far back in history (or prehistory) we perhaps don't encounter that sort of repression. Example - bonobos. Bonobos practice sexual intimacy with each other in their little social groups in a variety of circumstances, most of them completely unrelated to reproduction/mate selection (actually I recently read that chimps aren't that different either as it happens). So what if in prehistory humans were a bit like this too. Except because it was 'the norm' there wouldn't actually be much 'jealousy' and 'rivalry' and suchlike. Because it's not really 'sexual promiscuity' that causes jealousy, it's 'possessiveness'. If we have a social group in which there isn't any notion of 'possessiveness' then we don't have a problem, and men and women would indeed be 'friends with benefits'. It's a sort of socialism maybe. I am now writing this with a sly grin on my face. So I'd best leave it there.
Although what I'm perhaps getting at is that 'possessiveness' and 'jealousy' aren't necessarily hard-wired into the human brain. I think those traits are far more modern and socially conditioned (especially with repressive ideologies like patriarchal monotheism - pagan societies are far more permissive, in that respect). So I think this question about 'can men and women be just friends' would not have even occurred to ancient humans. I think it's a very modern question, in that respect.
Fascinating stuff. And I am totally grateful to you for sparking my intellectual curiosity. Thanks!
> You probably guessed I'm really interested in anthropology, and I think this question about male-female friendships is far less trivial than it might seem.
Me too. Living in Australia as I do, I have convenient access to whatever is documented about the longest continuous set of indigenous cultures in the world.
Although it mightn't be obvious, there's not just one indigenous culture here. We're privileged to cohabit this continent with the descendants of some 250+ language groups and around 800 dialects, whose occupancy extends over some 45,000 to 60,000 years, and who managed to survive at least one Ice Age in the harshest inhabited continent on the planet. So if they didn't know what they were doing, I'm not sure who did.
Like you I also track chimps and bonobos, and I also have an interest in evolutionary biology's take on morality and consciousness, which sometimes connects.
Under the right topic, there's an opportunity for more chat here, for sure.
> I am totally grateful to you for sparking my intellectual curiosity.
I'm grateful to you for reflecting and revising as we talk, Evelyn. Nobody doing that need ever offer precautionary apologies for language and assumptions.
Ah - 'relationship strategies' - that's a good way of putting it - and I would agree that men and women do differ in that respect.
Perhaps one of the enduring problems in this modern world, perhaps because we no longer tend to live in those small groups, is that men and women have been prevented from properly understanding each other, let alone living together all their lives as a community, and so the 'mate selection' thing doesn't happen in a smooth, easy, straightforward way like it would've done all those aeons ago. Today we have to go through these ridiculous elaborate social rituals, and it's easy to see how this would exacerbate anxieties about finding that special someone. So it becomes more prominent in our minds, because obviously (as per the spectrum of human needs) people do require the fulfilment of having a special other, so if that becomes uncertain, then stress follows, and we're thinking about it more than we otherwise would.
Which explains a lot of our adolescence, that's for sure. Well, it definitely explains mine.
> Ah - 'relationship strategies' - that's a good way of putting it - and I would agree that men and women do differ in that respect.
Yes. Relationship strategies are not just sexual though they certainly are that. They permeate everything lifelong and their neglect can result in tragic consequences. Further, how is anyone to talk about respect and justice without regard for how we respectively recognise trust? Intimacy? Vulnerability? Belonging? Even dignity?
> Perhaps one of the enduring problems in this modern world, perhaps because we no longer tend to live in those small groups, is that men and women have been prevented from properly understanding each other, let alone living together all their lives as a community
Again, strongly agreed, Evelyn. And since it's also on-topic, I'd go further: it's extremely hard to do the important parts of cultural improvement without continuity of community, and our socioeconomics have shredded, atomised and transactionalised community.
And absent cultural continuity, we cannot build, review and improve our cultural norms. Hence, among other issues, we cannot reliably build justice across our relationship strategies; we can only hope to intervene when injustice occurs -- which is too little, too late, too slow and generally only tokenistic.
And obviously, the harm in that is not shared evenly.
"I'd go further: it's extremely hard to do the important parts of cultural improvement without continuity of community, and our socioeconomics have shredded, atomised and transactionalised community."
Totally spot on! Brilliantly put and I couldn't agree more. And maybe that was what I was trying to get at. I'm always encountering intelligent people such as yourself who are so much more succinct than I could ever be. It's refreshing.
My counter-examples have durations of between 45 to 50 years.
Beautiful to hear. Some people seem more comfortable at it than others. I'm obviously a work in progress, even now 😅
Did I mention the counter-counter examples? 😋 We all remain works-in-progress. There shouldn't be any other way.
One of the perennial questions, well done for exploring, giving cause for further reflection
Thank you, glad you got past the logic part. That was a bit of a speed hump haha
it’s powerfully what marriage was meant for
That's an extremely good lens to look at it through.
❤️
Shoni, kudos for supplying definitions (even though they're from ChatGPT.)
It's a great question. Here's what I can offer.
Women form intimate relationships easily, yet their bonding through female partnerships seems a lot slower and harder to grow. They transactionalise confidences very well, yet seem to lean on diplomacy more than loyalty. That's highly effective for trading food and child-care favours day to day, yet doesn't work so well when you're trying to function under threat and pressure and you want loyalty and integrity from whoever's beside you.
Meanwhile, men form enduring bonds in a matter of days, and can do it without resorting to much explicit intimacy. They notice things about one another, but communicate through subtext rather than direct emotional disclosures. They test each other intensively for loyalty and capability before they'll explicitly share anything.
So there's a gap in male-female friendships where each has effective technology that doesn't work well on the other. If you want an enduring cross-sex friendship, you have to grow past the instinctive habits and play in the other's space, and you both need to do it.
Part of what makes this especially hard for women is that from age 15 to around 45 they're wired for mate-selection, not for partnership growth. They select rigorously for physical and social traits in men and then just manage the diplomacy while waiting for problems to be solved. That's a failure to develop.
Meanwhile, a lot of guys are thinking about the immediate challenges, but aren't thinking about who they'll be in 20 years time and -- especially -- who'll she'll be in 20 years time. (Menopause changes women's priorities and values enormously. They accelerate and often leave their guys in the dust.)
So if you want an enduring friendship with a guy, you both have to grow it and make it enduring. Here's how.
1. Be a woman who's willing to push and to fail and improve repeatedly. Don't even bother until you can do this. You won't get the respect.
2. Pick a guy who's not afraid to talk about feelings, anxiety and growth, but who actually does things rather than just introspect.
3. Select for common values and mutual respect.
4. Ask questions together, solve problems together, adapt and grow.
He may marry you -- or treat you as his sister. That'll be partly your decision, and partly your individual life circumstances.
Either way you'll have a friend for life.
I hope that may help.
Thanks Ruv, I agree that a lot of it goes back to evolutionary principles and basically wanting different things, whether we're aware of it or not. I've found it relatively easy to build and hold onto friendships with other women. I also am in a long term relationship with a man who I definitely consider my best friend, so this is about pondering the question rather than trying to solve a problem for myself :)
Shoni, I think your target readership for this question is females in their mid 30s to mid 40s. (Look at the examples you've used -- *Friends* to *X-Files*.) Most of them will already be in relationships, but may be wondering if they're losing friendship with their guy, or how to have friendships with guys and how to keep that strong as their own life roles change to more stratified responsibility. It's a good question, well-targeted, even if you also peppered it with reckless examples from your partying twenties that not every target reader may share or identify with.
My contribution wasn't for you; it was for the topic. But I directed it toward you because you wrote it personally to your audience. While I'm not your target audience, what I was trying to do was add perspective that might help distinguish your question in the minds of your readers, to help you reach the audience that you had targeted. That was your opportunity to add, extend, redirect and use that to connect with your target readership; to use the material I supplied and make it work for you.
But you treated my analysis as a lecture, which tells me that your writing is still very much about you proving yourself rather than engaging freely and adaptively with others for their benefit. I totally understand that since you have a science background and that's how science education works: it forces you to try to always be the cleverest person in the room. Any suggestion that you didn't research enough or reason enough is like a knife-wound. They force you to take yourself too seriously, and it cripples nearly every other form of social interaction. (I also realise that my language may exacerbate this for you -- I've got a very analytic background, though I sometimes hide it.)
But that's not how stand-up comedy works. It's not how group discussions work. This is why you made the mistake of republishing symbolic logic from ChatGPT (guaranteed to alienate nearly everyone except someone like myself) and getting caught up in the correctness of analysis, rather than the building of intimacy with your audience.
My suggestion? Try to be the facilitator rather than the lecturer controlling the class. Leave some air in your discussions. Work on being kind, sympathetic, open and inquisitive rather than right. If you believe you know the answer, don't patronise the audience by asking the question. Or if you ask the question, find the edge that you don't know and explore that. Assuming that what you want is more reader engagement, it might help you better.
(Yes, that last para *is* a lecture, but I'll excuse it by assuring you that I'll now leave you alone for a goodly while. I wish you the very best of success and hope to hear more about your SF some day. Good luck!)
Wow, thanks Ruv, I really appreciate you taking the time to unpack all that, and it gives me a lot to think about. It did occur to me as I was rushing to reply earlier that I should take more time to put together something more comprehensive. Sorry if I took it too personally, that's my bad. The feedback is always welcome and I'm sorry if I was too quick to answer and maybe a little defensive. That certainly wasn't my intention. TBH, most of the time I assume that I don't have an audience, so it's nice to see you break it down and show me how it looks from the other side. Of course my writing is immature and a work in progress. That's why I'm here, showing up week on week and trying to build. I'm glad that my piece caught your attention and I hope I haven't completely put you off with my response. All the best!
Not at all, Shoni. I got interested because I saw growth potential. I'm backing off because it has to be your hands on the steering-wheel and your rate of progress. This is Shoshi's Journey of course, not Ruv's.
That said, you know where I am.
Very best, RD.
That means a lot, really. I don't tend to see much evidence for potential myself. So am just trying lots and seeing what happens. I really appreciate the in-depth feedback. I will spend more time with it over the coming days.
> I don't tend to see much evidence for potential myself
Okay, look.
Today I read four posts of yours to a friend (female, former academic; she's in her fifties.) We discussed your choice of topic, your approach and what you might do next. I shared what my responses were and how you'd received them. In fact I read part of this exchange to her over lunch.
I'm not going to share that conversation because you're already self-conscious. But if you want to reflect, please reflect on this.
Go look at your recent Melway topic, which I thought was a great seed: original, localised, personal and specific. It's great material for comedy, intimacy and nostalgia: a precious item that was always hard to use in its intended context, which we miss and yet can't be sure why. Everyone over thirty has funny, personal stories about a street-directory. It gives you an instant, sympathetic bond with a target readership and a chance to draw them out through talking with you (and why you? because nobody else thought of this idea!)
Then look at my response, which I wrote in 20 minutes as a displacement activity while I was actually meant to be writing something harder for my day-job. In that reply I tried to explore that potential -- just sketched a bunch of short ideas until I ran out of ideas or time (it was time.) My point is: it's not crafted writing, but wasn't hard.
Ask yourself what focus you want, what tone you want, what reaction, what response and what's getting in your way. You could have done similar with that yourself. You had brought everything to the table except trust.
Or in your ChatGPT consult about relationships (another great idea, turning it into an improvised therapist and life-coach.) You could have set up the novel idea better as an act of exasperation, used the technology to reveal more about the frustrations, paradoxes and hypocrisies that people won't readily admit, how even a machine sometimes knows better than we do, and yet sometimes doesn't know enough -- how we might even make the machine lie to us just as a friend might, and how it might capitulate because that's all that we can understand. Those elements were there, but ill-focused and undercooked, the delivery stilted because you were so worried about being *wrong*.
Then look at my reply, which didn't have your situation comedy yet did contain a potentially comedic paradox: the diplomatic sisters with facile intimacy vs the practical, loyal brothers who can't disclose anything, each trying to build friendships. I even told you how to plot it out in four steps.
It didn't use ChatGPT, but was analytic and simple and took a different line and tone. (Also because I was *really* running out of time.) It made dangerous generalisations but also took a potentially constructive line that you could have turned into pros and cons, comedy... whatever you wanted. You were a post away from asking your readers to write a short about it, or a piece of flash fiction, or even their own anecdote in refutation or support.
I took that approach because open, intimate, confronting discussions online can also be a good thing and because you asked a great, general question and might have gotten interesting reader reactions had you not also shut potential creative and intimate responses down with process, literalism and hard work in the same article.
My writing is not meant to be your magical solution, Your Shonitude; it's to show you how much potential there already *is* in your ideas and how many excellent potential approaches, once you trust yourself more, trust the readership more, engage for the readers more, allow readers to delight more in you, play with them more, and ultimately, get out of your own way.
Speaking of which, the latter is what I also promised to do, and so I should. Very best of luck!
I shall attempt to write a non-angry-feminist response to some of the generalisations you mentioned here, and instead appeal to your scientific side (I'm getting the impression that's your background), and not mention that dreaded word 'mansplaining'.
I do, however, take issue with your statement that women are wired for mate selection. This strikes me as perhaps a little Victorian and patriarchal (I'll avoid the word 'misogynist' as I know you didn't mean it that way), in the sense of seeing women as baby machines. So here's the scientific disproof of that. First, hormones. Women's sexuality is based on a cycle of hormones of course. That means most of the time women are not remotely interested in sex. Men, however, with their constant testosterone levels, may well be. Don't worry, I'm not that kind of feminist, so I'm not going to suggest that your brains are wired for discharge.
Talking of brains, let's bring some neuroscience into it. The human brain evolved in a small social group of 150 people - most importantly, not all of them related genetically. This is where the social cognition number (Dunbar's number) comes in. If it were true that 'mate selection' was the most important driving factor behind the human organism then those social groups would've disintegrated. Again, this elevation of 'the sexual drive' to primary position is a very unfortunate legacy of that awful Victorian patriarchy. The real drive is simply 'survival' - specifically, survival of the individual within its own lifetime. The idea of 'I must propagate the species' never comes into it, and is simply not wired into the human brain. This is why 'the desire to have sex' only accounts for, what, less than 1-2% of human activity, both physically and cognitively. Yes, even for men. Once a man has discharged, for example, I gather it takes several hours before he can reload. So let's call that 1-2% of the time.
Given that 'survival' for a social species depends entirely on mutual cooperation, and second, this takes place within a very close-knit community in which everyone knows everything and everyone else, but everyone isn't preoccupied with fucking everyone of the opposite sex, it logically follows that 'friendship' between males and females without sexual desire of any kind is in fact the norm, not the exception. Once 'mate selection' has taken place - and that happens quite quickly, due to 'fancying' plus 'compatible personality', we don't emotionally worry about it anymore. We are in fact hard wired to develop friendships first, well before any 'mate selection'.
Maybe this modern world is abnormal in this way as well as in so many other ways, but there must be something very wrong indeed if a man and a woman cannot be just friends with no complications. I find the entire idea of 'can't just be friends' absurd to the point of being disconcerting.
And as far as I am concerned, social psychology, evolution/anthropology, endocrinology, and neuroscience pretty much prove my point. That and extensive personal experience. I don't understand, really, how it's possible to have sexual desire towards someone you don't fancy. And I seriously doubt everyone fancies every example of the opposite sex... As I say - human social harmony would disintegrate, were that to be true.
Apologies for the overlong answer!
Evelyn, I owe you an apology. I'm currently having two similar conversations in two different newsletters, and conflated them. This one is about male/female friendships, while another is about the fragility of masculinity and what that does to any sense of justice. They overlap immensely of course, and neither conversation lacks for bright, feisty women arguing with me.
For *this* conversation I'm fine talking about relationship strategies and so on. My hesitancy was because I thought I was in the other newsletter, and risked running off-topic.
So back to topic: are you interested in what indigenous Australians do? If so, I'll unpack it. (I assume that Shoni's fine with this sort of on-topic community side-chat, and that if she's not, I imagine she'll tell us.)
lol! We’ll call that multitasking!
I would certainly be interested - although bear in mind I live in Europe (France, to be precise) and I shall be going to bed very soon, so I won’t be able to reply to you until tomorrow (something to look forward to though). So feel free to take your time, is maybe what I’m saying.
Having conversations with people in totally different timezones is sometimes suddenly weird. It’s like a sort of time travel.
Alright. But firstly, an apology to Shoni in advance because her topic was about urban strangers forming and holding friendships across the stresses of geography, economics and life-phases, and this is entirely the opposite.
Background
My interest in anthropology is casual. I read, but it's sporadic and not systematic. So presented here is not the field, but only my casual, localised understanding of it. Also, I live on a continent that was occupied everywhere by indigenous people, and read mostly about those who lived in my corner of the continent -- the Australian Alps. Anyway, here's how I decypher it.
Hunter Gatherer Challenges
An understanding of indigenous culture and behaviour has to begin with understanding the problems they're trying to solve, and that's inseparable from environment. Hunter-gatherers don't have a farmer's seasons and there may not be four of them. Indigenous seasons are tied to what they do where, and indigenous Australians might have as many as six.
They don't normally have food stores either, so if they want to store calories, they do it in their bodies. In early summer, the local indigenous peoples of my area would come together from hundreds of kilometres away to gather, roast and feast on moths, which were cooling themselves in caves and easy to harvest. They'd put on kilograms of body-fat in about six weeks.
Hunter-gatherers live in a seasonal precariat and must always either be moving or planning to move. Although they're hardy and enormously resilient, a single bad season can wipe out the elders, the infants and many of the children to starvation, and can decimate the breeding males to misadventure as they take on more risks to hunt food. The land is also saturated with hunter-gatherers, and hunting outside your traditional lands is an act of disrespect, typically leading to battle. Yet after good seasons you get more surviving babies and that leads to population pressure, so you're constantly at risk of battle with the neighbours. Further, young men can also distinguish themselves in this way so they constantly *want* battle, while the elders are trying to keep this sexual/food/range competition down to a dull roar.
Lifestyle
So imagine bands of around 20 people (in Australia, not normally 150), all working together to build nightly shelters, gathering and sharing food together, spending every night together, starving together, feasting together, celebrating and mourning together, and relying on one another for defense.
These aren't friends and even a modern notion of family doesn't capture it. Their lives literally depend on one another's competence, loyalty, bravery, endurance and resilience every day, along with the knowledge and wisdom of their elders. Everyone has to be able to walk as far as they need to when they move, in a place where food and water aren't always abundant. It makes them highly formal, socially conservative because a fractured family is death, yet they're also highly empathic. What one feels, all feel. And everyone they deal with is the same -- all bands know how to kill one another, but generally try to refrain. There are no driver's licenses or degrees, but men are often permanently marked to show that they can travel and trade as adults. Sometimes there are scars on the torso, often rubbed with ash to raise them, called cicatrices. In my local area, they knocked out a front tooth.
So think military brotherhood among commandos and I think that might come close.
Reproduction and Marriage
But these are the people who raise you; they're not the people you raise children with. Genetic diversity is a key challenge and we're looking at a population density of one person per 36 square kilometres. With a range supporting 20 people, that puts the range of the next band around 27km away in any direction. With nobody writing down lineages, how do you work out who you'll marry and raise children with?
Every band is part of a language group, and language groups divide into clans, totems and moieties. Broadly a clan represents someone's descendants, and will usually have the name of an animal. A totem is symbolic and can be attached to a language group, the moiety, the clan or family and one for yourself -- it's inherited by tradition or else assigned at birth or at initiation by an elder, and it's usually an animal. Depending on the language group there might be a dozen totems, and everyone has at least one. There are usually taboos about what you must or must not do with your totem, and every totem has mythical significance too -- and may have mythical relationships with other totems in a way remniscent of modern astrology.
A moiety is French word for 'half', and divides each clan and totem in two. Moieties are typically matrilineal because every child can trace their mother.Among indigenous people, moiety is sometimes referred to as 'skin', so you might be called light skin or dark skin, which has nothing to do with actual skin pigmentation.
Marriages are arranged between bands, often between clans and always across moieties, and in many cases it's the elders who arrange the marriage, often at early childhood. The 'cross moiety' arrangement supports genetic diversity, while the inter-band, inter-clan arrangement supports alliance between nearby bands and clans. Traditionally it was also possible though less common to marry across language groups. I mention this to explain that at low population density there simply isn't the luxury of choice in whom you'll marry, and it serves strategic marriages to commit them early.
There are rules for interactions between moieties -- often, any interaction at all is discouraged unless it's necessary. They'll sit apart, might even face in different directions, will avoid unnecessary communication at social events. I believe that this discourages casual attraction, while marriages within a moiety are forbidden. And there are rules for interacting with your betrothed, sometimes called your 'snake' -- often you may be forbidden to talk, or even see one another.
In local cultures, when the husband marries he leaves the family to join the wife's band. The wife doesn't move in with hubby, but men can abduct women in consequence of battle and have them move in with his family. In my local area, marriages were generally monogamous, though sometimes women would flee (expensive since they'd leave all their female relatives), or powerful men would take a second wife.
Friendship
I think you can see where I'm headed with this. The childhood friends you form are most likely within your band and your moiety. Given the generational distribution, they're most often the children of two or three mothers, who may themselves be sisters... so your friends are your cousins.
If you're male, your male childhood friends will all be going somewhere else at adulthood, and so will you. This means you'll be separated from your sisters, brothers and cousins and may only see them at feast-times. Even worse, you may sometimes see them in battle.
If you're female, your sisters and female cousins will likely be staying together. Unless you're abducted as a war-prize, you'll live with them your whole life.
In any case both men and women will typically sit apart at feasts. They have their own music, stories and dances, even their own laws. And they go away for Secret Men's Business and Secret Women's Business, which is not shared across sexes.
Conclusions
The ties here are intensely complex -- far more so than what we see in urban societies with disapora populations. They're also strained, yet likely to be very enduring.
What they aren't is spontaneous, informal or casual. Every relationship has formal social and political elements, along with a mythic context that may capture history. You'll sometimes form friendships despite the orthodoxy at your own risk (there are plenty of indigenous stories of this.) But often, it's in your interests to form friendships within the rules, with politically sensitivity to your safety, dependence, status and future belonging.
There's obviously amity here and empathy, respect and mutual responsibility. But past middle or late childhood, I don't think a modern urban meaning of 'friendship' captures any of it.
I hope that may be interesting and useful, Evelyn.
[sorry for not replying sooner - I got busy; also hoping Shoni doesn't mind!].
I too have a casual, or rather non-specialist/layperson's interest in anthropology, so I'm not an expert as such. And you have given me lots of information of which I was previously completely ignorant. So I'm grateful there.
There's a lot to unpack there for sure. My first thought interestingly enough was something you yourself mentioned which is how their behaviour and customs simply can't be divorced from their environment. Thus hunter gatherer societies in other parts of the world develop strikingly different ways of life. The life you have described seems to be characterised by a response to scarcity and precariousness. As such, a lot of it sounds extremely harsh! And I have to say seemingly excessively violent. Like, in times of scarcity they seem to resort to attacking each other. To me this seems stupid, if I can use that word - cooperation is so much more beneficial than conflict. Especially seeing as most of what you have described as their way of life seems to be focussed on pure survival, above anything else.
Of course, if they exist in bands of 20 then this might explain it. If their social cognition number is so much lower, I mean. Seems more akin to Neanderthal level. Which may explain why, despite tens of thousands of years with no external threat, they did not achieve what one might call 'civilisation' (or an agricultural revolution). This is not to be patronising in a sort of white/western manner. Difficult to avoid it coming across like that, though. It almost seems like, not necessarily an 'alien' culture, but a fairly incompatible one.
It would definitely merit comparison with other hunter-gatherer groups from other parts of the world, that's for sure...
Evelyn, when a species lives for tens of thousands of years in an environment, they saturate it. By that I mean, their population reaches a point where it can't much increase without a change to the environment. So they either migrate or their mortality rate comes to match their birth rate -- by whatever means.
Modern humans have been insulated from this harsh reality in recent centuries largely due to fertiliser, irrigation and industrial farming and more recently contraception, but that only defers the problem. Every species encounters it eventually unless it has socially-planned births.
So what happens with hunter-gatherers is that they saturate their range. Lacking contraception, in years where they have more food they have more surviving infants, which just puts pressure on one another as the temporary food glut diminishes.
So they're constantly pressing one another's boundaries. This produces battles among the males of breeding age, but it's in the elders' interests to stop it from becoming genocidal wars, which has a lot to do with how the elders manage marriage.
Far from being unsophisticated, it's highly sophisticated given the constraints.
And living with 20 people doesn't mean that you only knew 20 people. When the local indigenous folk feasted annually on bogong moths, they'd meet in the hundreds to do so. This would be vast networks of kinship groups extending over tens of thousands of square kilometres of territory, and you can imagine that they'd deal with a lot of social and political business too -- at a time when everyone is well-fed and relaxed.
Just before the moth-feasting time, they'd send runners with verbal invitations to other bands to come and feast -- a political expression of warmth and friendship -- and the runner would carry a decorated message-stick, intricately carved and ornamented with precious pigments that themselves might have been traded over hundreds of kilometres, and kept with them for over a year. There'd surely be subtext and humour in those invitations at times, as well as formal greetings.
And since that was happening all through an extensive mountain range there might be thousands of indigenous folk distributed among the caves where the bogong moths rested.
That was ten thousand years before we ever heard of a United Nations.
Evelyn, thank you for your contribution. I loved what you had to say because I didn't disagree with any of your key facts. Where we differ is in your interpretation of my meaning and also our syntheses of the consequences.
Rather than unpack that here though, let me make a note of it and return to it with you if you wish, at a future time when our topic might be more about relationship strategies rather than fragility of masculinity.
Until that happens, rather than dismiss your points, I'll note that you differ, that we haven't discussed it yet, and that your views might represent many other views, should I need to mention it again.
I trust that will be acceptable to you.
You've just sparked off another curious thought. You probably guessed I'm really interested in anthropology, and I think this question about male-female friendships is far less trivial than it might seem.
If we consider that current social norms probably are somewhat 'repressed', when we go very far back in history (or prehistory) we perhaps don't encounter that sort of repression. Example - bonobos. Bonobos practice sexual intimacy with each other in their little social groups in a variety of circumstances, most of them completely unrelated to reproduction/mate selection (actually I recently read that chimps aren't that different either as it happens). So what if in prehistory humans were a bit like this too. Except because it was 'the norm' there wouldn't actually be much 'jealousy' and 'rivalry' and suchlike. Because it's not really 'sexual promiscuity' that causes jealousy, it's 'possessiveness'. If we have a social group in which there isn't any notion of 'possessiveness' then we don't have a problem, and men and women would indeed be 'friends with benefits'. It's a sort of socialism maybe. I am now writing this with a sly grin on my face. So I'd best leave it there.
Although what I'm perhaps getting at is that 'possessiveness' and 'jealousy' aren't necessarily hard-wired into the human brain. I think those traits are far more modern and socially conditioned (especially with repressive ideologies like patriarchal monotheism - pagan societies are far more permissive, in that respect). So I think this question about 'can men and women be just friends' would not have even occurred to ancient humans. I think it's a very modern question, in that respect.
Fascinating stuff. And I am totally grateful to you for sparking my intellectual curiosity. Thanks!
> You probably guessed I'm really interested in anthropology, and I think this question about male-female friendships is far less trivial than it might seem.
Me too. Living in Australia as I do, I have convenient access to whatever is documented about the longest continuous set of indigenous cultures in the world.
Although it mightn't be obvious, there's not just one indigenous culture here. We're privileged to cohabit this continent with the descendants of some 250+ language groups and around 800 dialects, whose occupancy extends over some 45,000 to 60,000 years, and who managed to survive at least one Ice Age in the harshest inhabited continent on the planet. So if they didn't know what they were doing, I'm not sure who did.
Like you I also track chimps and bonobos, and I also have an interest in evolutionary biology's take on morality and consciousness, which sometimes connects.
Under the right topic, there's an opportunity for more chat here, for sure.
> I am totally grateful to you for sparking my intellectual curiosity.
I'm grateful to you for reflecting and revising as we talk, Evelyn. Nobody doing that need ever offer precautionary apologies for language and assumptions.
Ah - 'relationship strategies' - that's a good way of putting it - and I would agree that men and women do differ in that respect.
Perhaps one of the enduring problems in this modern world, perhaps because we no longer tend to live in those small groups, is that men and women have been prevented from properly understanding each other, let alone living together all their lives as a community, and so the 'mate selection' thing doesn't happen in a smooth, easy, straightforward way like it would've done all those aeons ago. Today we have to go through these ridiculous elaborate social rituals, and it's easy to see how this would exacerbate anxieties about finding that special someone. So it becomes more prominent in our minds, because obviously (as per the spectrum of human needs) people do require the fulfilment of having a special other, so if that becomes uncertain, then stress follows, and we're thinking about it more than we otherwise would.
Which explains a lot of our adolescence, that's for sure. Well, it definitely explains mine.
> Ah - 'relationship strategies' - that's a good way of putting it - and I would agree that men and women do differ in that respect.
Yes. Relationship strategies are not just sexual though they certainly are that. They permeate everything lifelong and their neglect can result in tragic consequences. Further, how is anyone to talk about respect and justice without regard for how we respectively recognise trust? Intimacy? Vulnerability? Belonging? Even dignity?
> Perhaps one of the enduring problems in this modern world, perhaps because we no longer tend to live in those small groups, is that men and women have been prevented from properly understanding each other, let alone living together all their lives as a community
Again, strongly agreed, Evelyn. And since it's also on-topic, I'd go further: it's extremely hard to do the important parts of cultural improvement without continuity of community, and our socioeconomics have shredded, atomised and transactionalised community.
And absent cultural continuity, we cannot build, review and improve our cultural norms. Hence, among other issues, we cannot reliably build justice across our relationship strategies; we can only hope to intervene when injustice occurs -- which is too little, too late, too slow and generally only tokenistic.
And obviously, the harm in that is not shared evenly.
"I'd go further: it's extremely hard to do the important parts of cultural improvement without continuity of community, and our socioeconomics have shredded, atomised and transactionalised community."
Totally spot on! Brilliantly put and I couldn't agree more. And maybe that was what I was trying to get at. I'm always encountering intelligent people such as yourself who are so much more succinct than I could ever be. It's refreshing.