This is really interesting, but also makes me wonder if male friendship mattered more in societies where women had restricted freedom of movement, education, etc. Women couldn't be very good friends to men because their lives were boring and they had little shared experience to discuss. Nowadays a lot of couples say that their partner is their best friend, but we also share a lot of our lives with our partners.
But I will share maybe my least popular opinion, which is that we should do away with the idea that spouses need to be best friends. The problem with this idea, imo, is that if your friendship falters, the entire marriage falls apart and then so too does the village and lives of everyone around you. I've written about this a few times before but it has been awhile (apologies if I'm repeating stuff), but the idea is that we're in a "soul-mate" paradigm right now, which is where couples are supposed to have primarily emotional bonds and be best friends.
But the historic norm is actually a work-mate paradigm, where spouses are presumed to be partners in an enterprise. (Stephanie Coontz has written about this.) My view is that the work mate paradigm is actually a much stronger, pro-village bond because it can survive even as emotional connections evolve, ebb and flow, etc. The work mate paradigm also necessitates a larger social network, because the spouse isn't expected to bear the burden of all social connections.
In other words, right now we expect spouses to be friends, lovers, household management partners, caregivers, etc etc. That's the soul mate paradigm. But in the work mate paradigm, these different roles can be distributed to different people.
I'm sort of rambling here, but I guess what I'm saying is that I think the reprioritization of formal friendships would probably come at a cost to best-friend marriages. Spouses would spend less time together etc. But I don't think that's a bad thing. And while historically there were some gender imbalances in some context, I don't see why a more egalitarian version of this couldn't work today.
Yes I think you are probably right about this (although personally I really like being friends with my husband). Marriages really do function more like a co-worker relationship than a best friend relationship and I agree that we've raised our expectations for companionate marriage to an unsustainable degree.
However I think there is also something about the valorization of male friendship that reflects a time period where women's and men's activities were so different that they had nothing to offer each other conversationally. Nowadays our village is comprised of a lot of mixed-sex relationships, couples being friend with other couples, etc., but that weakens the exclusivity of the male-male "partners in crime" bond.
Ivan Illich’s book on gender talks a lot about traditional societies having male and female worlds, quite separate but with interaction in certain work and marriages. If we’re talking about the mongols, I would not call Mongol women’s lives ‘boring’. Given their menfolk were often away hunting or raiding other tribes, women who owned the yurts, ran the herds, defended themselves and their families from other raiders and taught their sons to ride and shoot.
Great point! I meant “boring from the perspectives of their husbands” who were probably out marauding, but “boring” is probably not the right word in any case.
I mean, it’s more like “no you’re not allowed here” because lightning will strike you for it. A lot of aboriginal Australian tribes have at least one story of a man attempting to spy on or interfere with ‘secret women’s business’ and meeting a sticky end. None of women getting involved in secret men’s business though interestingly enough.
Friendship is a social technology for resource sharing outside of kinship. Even if no claim upon the lion's share is made, giving strategic data, key foodstuffs, or materials would come across as traitorous outside the framework for friendship. Women's more domestic sphere would place the key focus of friendship being between herself and members of her married family and families of prospective spouses to children. That all of those become family means that women were hardly even friends with one another, let alone with men. Their lives were likely not boring, but when it came to sharing resources, their range of actions were determined by the men setting hard boundaries on who was welcome.
Between the sexes, women's friendship was most necessary to young, unattached men. This is still true. The concept of a "friend zone" is often portrayed as a bad place for men because there is nothing in friendship that women would excel their peers in except romantic interest.
As someone who has chosen to have a baby with a friend and make a family life separate from my romantic life and any marriage I might enter, I have done a LOT of thinking/writing/talking about the ritualized nature of romantic relationships and the lack of structure/ formalization for platonic ones.
When you date, you discuss levels of commitment upfront, on roughly preordained time frames: dating exclusively; meeting the parents; moving in together; engagement; marriage; parenthood. All these steps are an expected part of the relationship pipeline.
There is no such discussion of commitment, verbalizing your needs and sacrifices, to your friends. There are NO expected milestones or universally acknowledged rituals for friends.
I think we are very much the poorer for it. I don’t think we should cast aside the relationship pipeline, nor does friendship need to adhere to such rigid standards as we impose upon our expectation of romance and marriage. HOWEVER I think greater flexibility and disruption of both romantic and platonic relationships is essential to building stronger families and communities. There’s a rich and beautiful middle ground.
In my case (which is not for everyone!) it means my friendships are privileged above my romantic relationships, and will need to fit into my life as it is, rather than my friendships flexing to fit with my romantic priorities.
This is really interesting, but also makes me wonder if male friendship mattered more in societies where women had restricted freedom of movement, education, etc. Women couldn't be very good friends to men because their lives were boring and they had little shared experience to discuss. Nowadays a lot of couples say that their partner is their best friend, but we also share a lot of our lives with our partners.
Yeah, there probably is a gender component here.
But I will share maybe my least popular opinion, which is that we should do away with the idea that spouses need to be best friends. The problem with this idea, imo, is that if your friendship falters, the entire marriage falls apart and then so too does the village and lives of everyone around you. I've written about this a few times before but it has been awhile (apologies if I'm repeating stuff), but the idea is that we're in a "soul-mate" paradigm right now, which is where couples are supposed to have primarily emotional bonds and be best friends.
But the historic norm is actually a work-mate paradigm, where spouses are presumed to be partners in an enterprise. (Stephanie Coontz has written about this.) My view is that the work mate paradigm is actually a much stronger, pro-village bond because it can survive even as emotional connections evolve, ebb and flow, etc. The work mate paradigm also necessitates a larger social network, because the spouse isn't expected to bear the burden of all social connections.
In other words, right now we expect spouses to be friends, lovers, household management partners, caregivers, etc etc. That's the soul mate paradigm. But in the work mate paradigm, these different roles can be distributed to different people.
I'm sort of rambling here, but I guess what I'm saying is that I think the reprioritization of formal friendships would probably come at a cost to best-friend marriages. Spouses would spend less time together etc. But I don't think that's a bad thing. And while historically there were some gender imbalances in some context, I don't see why a more egalitarian version of this couldn't work today.
Yes I think you are probably right about this (although personally I really like being friends with my husband). Marriages really do function more like a co-worker relationship than a best friend relationship and I agree that we've raised our expectations for companionate marriage to an unsustainable degree.
However I think there is also something about the valorization of male friendship that reflects a time period where women's and men's activities were so different that they had nothing to offer each other conversationally. Nowadays our village is comprised of a lot of mixed-sex relationships, couples being friend with other couples, etc., but that weakens the exclusivity of the male-male "partners in crime" bond.
Ivan Illich’s book on gender talks a lot about traditional societies having male and female worlds, quite separate but with interaction in certain work and marriages. If we’re talking about the mongols, I would not call Mongol women’s lives ‘boring’. Given their menfolk were often away hunting or raiding other tribes, women who owned the yurts, ran the herds, defended themselves and their families from other raiders and taught their sons to ride and shoot.
Great point! I meant “boring from the perspectives of their husbands” who were probably out marauding, but “boring” is probably not the right word in any case.
I mean, it’s more like “no you’re not allowed here” because lightning will strike you for it. A lot of aboriginal Australian tribes have at least one story of a man attempting to spy on or interfere with ‘secret women’s business’ and meeting a sticky end. None of women getting involved in secret men’s business though interestingly enough.
Friendship is a social technology for resource sharing outside of kinship. Even if no claim upon the lion's share is made, giving strategic data, key foodstuffs, or materials would come across as traitorous outside the framework for friendship. Women's more domestic sphere would place the key focus of friendship being between herself and members of her married family and families of prospective spouses to children. That all of those become family means that women were hardly even friends with one another, let alone with men. Their lives were likely not boring, but when it came to sharing resources, their range of actions were determined by the men setting hard boundaries on who was welcome.
Between the sexes, women's friendship was most necessary to young, unattached men. This is still true. The concept of a "friend zone" is often portrayed as a bad place for men because there is nothing in friendship that women would excel their peers in except romantic interest.
As someone who has chosen to have a baby with a friend and make a family life separate from my romantic life and any marriage I might enter, I have done a LOT of thinking/writing/talking about the ritualized nature of romantic relationships and the lack of structure/ formalization for platonic ones.
When you date, you discuss levels of commitment upfront, on roughly preordained time frames: dating exclusively; meeting the parents; moving in together; engagement; marriage; parenthood. All these steps are an expected part of the relationship pipeline.
There is no such discussion of commitment, verbalizing your needs and sacrifices, to your friends. There are NO expected milestones or universally acknowledged rituals for friends.
I think we are very much the poorer for it. I don’t think we should cast aside the relationship pipeline, nor does friendship need to adhere to such rigid standards as we impose upon our expectation of romance and marriage. HOWEVER I think greater flexibility and disruption of both romantic and platonic relationships is essential to building stronger families and communities. There’s a rich and beautiful middle ground.
In my case (which is not for everyone!) it means my friendships are privileged above my romantic relationships, and will need to fit into my life as it is, rather than my friendships flexing to fit with my romantic priorities.
I don't know if you have found Stephen Bradford Long on Substack yet, but he writes a lot about taking friendship more seriously.