Men in Relationships Need More Women Friends

I dread meeting hetero married couples at parties. The wife is rarely the problem: At minimum, she'll likely greet me with polite eye contact and a warm, if modestly disinterested, smile. She'll compliment my earrings, even if she hates them. Meanwhile, the eyes of her husband will have glazed over. He'll be looking through me like a sheet of glass, transfixed by the refreshments table on the other side. I might get a grunt before he wordlessly bumps into me, like a bird into a very clean window, on his way for a fresh scoop of hummus.

I have no trouble making friends with single men. And though I'm appropriately wary of them, I sometimes think it's easier for me to connect with male strangers than with women. But once a man is married — and no longer trying to sleep with me — he will likely go cold. More often than not, men in serious relationships with other women do not seem interested in getting to know me. Usually this is annoying but ultimately harmless. It's not like I'm dying to talk to them about golf averages or why they prefer bourbon Manhattans to whiskey. (Yes, all men in my head are side characters in an episode of "Mad Men.")

But now that Donald Trump has been re-elected by a deeply gender-divided populace, it seems the question we thought we'd answered decades ago with a resounding "duh" — can men and women really be friends? — is suddenly back up for debate, like the separation of church and state or the need for a polio vaccine.

Now, the most basic truths that progressives once took for granted, like the value of diverse friendships, are at risk of crumbling (not to mention our democracy).

Trump and the men he keeps company with wear their misogyny on their suit-sleeves; his first vice president was the poster boy for single-gender friendships, having famously said he "never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won't attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side," according to The Washington Post. That gentlemanly refrain reeks of rape culture and the belief that women are of no use if they aren't for sex. By that logic, any woman who isn't your wife isn't a human but a temptation.

Whether or not women want to be friends with men is a totally different story, however. In 2024 America, I don't blame anyone whose answer is no. While it's true that about 45 percent of (primarily white) women voted for Trump, multiple aspects of this election pointed toward one of the starkest gender divides in decades — from the actual rights on the ballot to fearful wives hiding Harris votes from their husbands, to countless young men who were mobilized to vote red because of what they perceived as Trump's unapologetic masculinity.

But at least within my circle of (largely queer and progressive) friends, many are feeling inter-gender friendships might be the simplest way to decrease the gender gap. I checked in with a handful of male friends of my own who are in serious relationships with women to gauge how they feel about our friendship and their other friendships with women. All of them said their romantic relationships didn't inhibit them from making friends with women, and many added that they not only feel encouraged to seek friendships with people of all genders, but that they actually see it as a cornerstone of a good relationship to build connections with all sorts of people.

My friend Jun tells me over text that, generally speaking, he appreciates his women friends because they're "cool people" and not necessarily because "they happen to be women." "It feels obvious to me that life is more enriching when you can develop friendships with people of varying backgrounds," he says, "so it's really nice to be able to connect with and learn from people who have a different lived experience than I do!"

For several of my guy friends, deep platonic connections with women sometimes form more easily or organically than with other men. My friend Jesse, for example, says he's often "much more comfortable" talking about his emotions and sharing "deeply personal/sensitive things with women." My friend Sam feels similarly.

"I've always felt more [able] to be vulnerable around women . . . I find that it takes a looooong time to get men to open up to me," Sam tells me in a text message. "I think mutual vulnerability is the bedrock of any good relationship and that seems to be more embedded into female friendships. So I think I've partly ended up with more female friends than male friends simply because I'm impatient and haven't wanted to wait around for guys in my life to figure out that I want to talk to them, lol."

My own partner has significantly more women friends than men because he's found they're more "equipped to hold emotionally intimate, vulnerable conversations." It's not totally that he doesn't "trust" men with few women friends, he tells me, but that he feels a "substantial incompatibility" in their "relationship values."

My friend Jack is also skeptical of men with no women friends. But he points out that "men in our culture are not encouraged to foster platonic relationships with women" and therefore may not be bad dudes individually, just the result of systemic failures.

Emma, a woman friend of mine, tells me that her boyfriend's "diverse friendships" were attractive to her "off the bat" when they first met at a mutual friend's party. (That friend was a gay man.) "This sounds so bar-is-on-the-floor," she laughs, "but I immediately observed his relationship with this man and felt like he could get along with anyone of any gender expression and identity." In particular, her boyfriend's many friendships with women have made her confident that he "sees women as people, not just moms and partners," she says.

A few months ago, comic and podcaster Dylan Palladino posted a TikTok about how being in a relationship "fundamentally changes your reality," noting how none of his single guy friends had heard of Moo Deng, the world's most famous baby pygmy hippopotamus. Meanwhile, he's been inundated by Moo Deng content from his girlfriend left and right.

"When I try to talk to my single friends about it, they have no idea what I'm talking about," he mused. "I texted one the other day and was like 'Yo, Moo Deng's so cute huh?' And he was like 'What are you talking about, is that a Malaysian dictator'? And I'm like, how do you not know about this hippo? But then I remember he's single, he is not in that world."

Palladino continued: "I can't expect him to know about Moo Deng the same way he can't expect me to know about crying alone in the shower."

Emma, that same friend, reshared the video to her Instagram Stories with a caption to the effect of: "We get it, you all have no female friends. Move on."

It should go without saying, and for a while many of us assumed that it did, but having friends with different backgrounds — yes, even women! — has the potential to enrich life in countless ways. A steady stream of serotonin-boosting pygmy hippo videos to balance out distressing political news is just the tip of the iceberg.

Emma Glassman-Hughes (she/her) is the associate editor at PS Balance. In her seven years as a reporter, her beats have spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she's covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and food, climate, and farming for Ambrook Research.