January 30, 2012 • 26 mins
In this episode, Cristen and Caroline explore the etymology of the term "frenemy," the psychology of female friendships and women's evolutionary tendencies toward cultivating friendships. Tune in to learn more.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From house Stop works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Caroline and I'm Kristin kristen Um. I
(00:21):
moved back to Atlanta, as you know, from Augusta and
Georgia almost two years ago. And there was something, there's
something missing because I've been in Augusta for for a
couple of years, four years, and so I had I
had a really good close network of friends, girlfriends and
guy friends. But it was nice to have a good
solid group of girlfriends. And and something happened when I
(00:41):
moved to Atlanta, and I realized that it was harder
to just make girlfriends out of thin air. Almost it
seems like I have an easier time making guy friends.
But you know, there's something about being older. You're out
of college, and everybody's got their social groups. And so
when I moved back to Atlanta, I was like, where
old girls well girlfriends? And I am not the only
(01:04):
one who feels like sometimes it's harder to make friends
than maybe to meet a romantic partner. Right, I experienced
a very similar thing. When I moved to Atlanta from Athens, Georgia.
It was such an excursion along seventy miles up the road,
but it really felt like a dating process to try
(01:28):
to make friends because there was someone who's now my
my roommate, this one girl in particular, where I was like,
she's super cool. I want to be her friend. Oh,
I hope she likes what I'm wearing. Uh yeah. And
that this is sort of the basis for the book
(01:48):
UH MWF Seeking BFF Year Long Search for a New
Best Friend by Rachel Birch. And this this author relocated
from Chicago to New York and left behind her whole
social network. She she moved with her fiance or the
man who would become her fiance, and now they're married,
and so she has all this stuff, this great life
going on, but she looks around and realizes, I don't
(02:09):
have anybody to call if I want to go get
brunch or have a glass of wine or you know,
talk about my day, anybody besides my fiancee. And so
she goes on this quest she decides as a married
white female, which is MWF Seeking BFF Best Friend. Uh.
She goes on fifty two friend dates in a year.
That's that's a friend date a week for those of
you who don't know how long a year is. UM.
(02:32):
And it's interesting her experiences. She comes up with a
lot of good advice. And it's kind of what Kristen
was talking about. You know, you developed these almost crushes
on other girls because I mean it's naturally You're like, Wow,
that person is really cool. How do I get to
know them better? How do we how do we hang
out in real life outside of work or outside of whatever,
the train or wherever. I don't know where you meet people,
but it's clear, I mean clearly have no friends, because
(02:56):
I still to this day no friends. UM. Some of
her advice just ask the person out to hang out, like, hey,
do you want to go do something fun? Let's go
get coffee, um. But just swap narratives, not just grilling
the person with questions, right, because a lot of those
initial friendships that you'll have with other women on that
(03:17):
first friend date is so similar to a first romantic dates.
Some awkward silences, some twiddling of the thumbs. You ask
about families, you'll probably talk about jobs. But the good
thing is about female first dates, first friend dates. Is
that it is okay to talk about past relationships. It
(03:40):
is there's a bonus. And if you guys don't click,
you don't have to be stuck together. I mean, not
that you have to be stuck together after a first
date romantic date either. But you're like, well, I guess
I can just save her for when I'm born. That's Caroline.
That sounds very friend of me, of you, frenemy, I
would never are you insinuating something about friendship over here?
(04:04):
I am insinuating. Uh well, I'll just state it. You know,
I won't do a friend of me ish thing and
insinuate I will state that. Uh. There is that the
sweet side of female friendship, which which is like getting
to know you in building that bond um. But then
there is the flip side that I feel like has
been way over exposed in popular culture in the past
(04:29):
five to ten years, which is the friend of me,
which is the whole that's when words like caddy come
out and caddy. But but you know what I mean.
I feel like ever since mean girls, which I love,
was such a sensation, all of a sudden, every woman
is a secret friend of me. So at the other
(04:51):
end of the spectrum from m f W or n
WF speaking BFF, we have things like The Twisted Sisterhood,
a raveling the dark legacy of female friendships that sounds terrifying.
It's by Kelly Valen. It got a lot of press
because it's about this just heart wrenching process that she
went through in a sorority in which she was completely
(05:13):
stripped of any faith whatsoever in female friendships because girls
be mean. Jeez, Well, it sounds like she's meeting the
wrong people because I don't. I don't think I've ever
been stripped of anything. Well, well, it's the whole argument
that since women's friendships, one on one friendships are so
(05:34):
emotionally binding, because we do tend to share so much
of ourselves compared to men, which we'll talk about in
a later podcast, we tend to have more activity based
friendships that since you get to know each other on
such a deep level, that they can hurt you even more. Yeah,
(05:54):
of course, I mean, obviously, if you have genuine friendships
with people, you have a good foundation for your friendship
and it's not built on maybe competition or social standing,
then those are your safe friendships that actually help you mentally,
emotionally and all that stuff. But yeah, I mean, I
feel like everybody has had at least one friend at
some point who you can classify as a friend of
(06:16):
me who has tried to undermine you or only wants
to hear about when things are going wrong with you,
not like, yeah, you cheer you on, you've got a
new job, or you gotta I don't know whatever reward
of some kind. Uh, you know, they just want to
know about when you're down in the dump so they
can commiserate, right. Or the friend who will only call
you up when things are going poorly and needs a
(06:40):
listening ear a big emotion dump, right, and and all
of those things I think are just part of the
female friend spectrum. But the big question I have is,
you know, why does it seem like female friendships in
particular are sort of, um, I don't know, boxed up
(07:01):
in stereotype like that and maybe devalued a little bit,
Because I think at the end of the day, there
is really something to be said for that really true
BFF girlfriend, the girl who you can turn to, the
girl who will tell you the truth, and not in
a mean way, not in a in a front of
me way like, oh, yeah, I don't know if you
should wear the pants they kind of make your asp
(07:23):
with it, or maybe you shouldn't wear those pants. Yeah,
how don't be honest, that'd be nice about it with
with good intentions behind the telling you to not wear
the pants. Um, but something that was pretty eye opening
when I was reading all this stuff about female friendship. Um,
because I feel like this is stuff that's pretty common sense. However,
(07:43):
I had no idea the biological drives behind some of
our our habits and our desires as far as friendship goes,
both same sex and opposite sex friendships. But um, you
know you're talking about how how female friendship can kind
of be looked down upon sometimes like women be shopping,
they're just talking about shoes again. Well, well, how about
(08:05):
this this quick snippet, This was from a summary of research.
I'll be a little bit dated on friendship. Ronveig Trousse,
the Daughter observed history does not celebrate female friendships, and
there is a longstanding myth of the greatest friendships have
been between men. Yeah, buddy comedies. Yeah, whereas they're just
(08:26):
a little bit different, right, Women have a different drive
as far as seeking seeking relationships and seeking comfort we
as we'll get into momentarily women and and a lot
of female animals. This is sort of across cultures, across species.
Women when they are stressed seek uh the association of others.
They seek to be part of a group for safety,
(08:50):
for comfort, for stress release, and um, we sort of
talked about that in a path podcast. It's called tend
and befriend. Where men have more of a uh, fight
or flight response to stress, women have similar a similar
release of chemicals driving us to do things when we
were stressed, but they sort of drive us together as
(09:10):
opposed to apart. Right, And this was from a pretty
groundbreaking U c L A study published in the year
two thousand UH in Psychological Review, And it was groundbreaking
because it was related to stress and specifically related to
the biochemical markers of female stress, which up until around
(09:35):
had been so understudied. I think the statistic was only
seventeen percent of study participants in stress related physiological stress
studies were women. So it really wasn't until the two
thousands that were starting to get this kind of information
and they found that, like you said, Caroline, in response
(09:55):
to stress, women tend and befriend, and we actually tap
into female social support and networks to manage stressful conditions
because of evolution. Evolution, everybody, yes, um, a mother's flight
or attack on a predator could leave her offspring fatally unattended.
(10:18):
So back in the day, I mean, if a mother
had the same instinct as the male to go attack
the predator, she'd leave her baby behind and that could
be eaten or stolen away in the night, who knows what.
And so the mother's desire to go back to her
offspring soothe it, take care of it, take it to
(10:38):
a safe place. That's sort of that's that's continued through
in our desire to tend and befriend and building on
that physiological framework of friendship. There's also the important role
of oxytocin, which is enhanced by estrogen, and what the
researchers found was that oxytocin is really related to relationship
(11:01):
stress and attachment needs. Now we've talked about oxytocin in
the podcast before in terms of what's happening in your
brain deering an orgasm, it's released. It's a bonding neurochemical.
So it seemed counterintuitive at first to hear that or
read that oxytocin might be related to feeling relationship gaps,
(11:22):
but you can more think of it as a driver
to build those networks, and it has a more potent
effect in females because of the influence of estrogen. Right,
speaking of chemicals, females largely lack androgens, which in many
species act to develop the male brain for aggression and
(11:44):
then activate aggressive behavior in specific threatening context. So, uh,
you know this U c l A analysis talked about
how boys from a very young age or more boys
human boys and young male primates animal boys, animal boy
if it felt like Peter Pan or something um are
(12:04):
more prone to develop rough and tumble play than girls.
And you know, we talked about in the Men Versus
Women Exercise podcast about how on the playground, boys are
more likely to form these big groups and play games
like football, soccer, whatever, whereas girls are more likely to
hang back in smaller groups and and play maybe verbal
games like you know we mentioned mash um And so yeah,
(12:28):
these these uh androgen's, specifically testosterone, are are driving boys
to play rough basically, whereas women are more nurturing. And
it might also have to do something with something else
going on in our brain. This was mentioned in an
article by Victoria Costello in Psychology Today, and she attributes
(12:49):
some of that um instant friendship building that tends to
happen more often among women two more mirror neurons in
the female rain, and these neurons are responsible for us
paying attention to and empathizing with what's going on with
the person sitting across from us. Right right now, I'm
(13:10):
I'm looking at Caroline and she's just blinking and smiling,
smiling sweetly at me, And that's that's making me smile. Yeah,
it's also making her a little uncomfortable because my face
looks weird right now. Um yeah. Victoria Costello, you know,
brings up the whole women empathy, women's intuition thing and
says that most of these clues go right by men, so,
(13:34):
you know, sorry for those empathetic men who feel like
you can pick up on clues, but Costello says that
women are just better at it because we have more
mirroring neurons. She also talks about hormones that you know
and and like you touched on, we have more estrogen
and a greater default level of oxy tosin, and of
course we've talked about evolution a little bit. But here's
(13:55):
the thing though, with Costello's whole thesis on the fact
that she says that you can leave two women who
have never met in a busy doctor's waiting room, and
by the time they're called for their appointments, they know
each other's life story and have traded phone numbers. And
she also says that thanks to that estrogen and the oxytocin,
it makes us want to bond at the mere touch
(14:16):
of hand, and that is really sweet. And maybe I
have low high levels of and androgens and low levels
of oxytocin because that I'm I'm not a hugger. Yeah,
I'm not either. I don't want strangers to touch me.
I don't like people getting too close to me on
the train. And it's not that I'm not friendly. I
(14:37):
just think it might be an example that, yes, we
we are everyone. Friendships are are unique. They're like snowflakes. Sure, okay,
they're all They're all kind of different. I think we
all make friends a little bit differently. And I don't
want anyone to be offended that if they run into me.
The guy know, I'm probably just gonna read my vanity fair.
(14:57):
It's funny, Kristen, I was actually thinking the same thing
reading some of this, Like, God, judging by this research,
I should really be like all over my female friends
and we should be holding hands right now, which should
be remind me to do that later. Um, yeah, we
should have more female friends and we should all be
hugging all the time. But I'm really not like that.
(15:17):
And I actually was thinking about it, and I have
just always had more male friends than female friends. I mean,
in college, I feel like I had a big group
of female friends because you know, living in the dorm
and and whatever, you make a lot of friends that way,
synchronizing menstrual cycle. And I was I started to really wonder,
if you know, it's something wrong with me that I
(15:38):
I don't seem to bond with women in the same
way that these studies are saying I should. And then
I started really worrying about myself because so we released
all these chemicals during stress, and in a study on
reesless monkeys, scientists blocked some of those stress chemicals by
using in the lock zone and opioid antagonist and ended
(15:59):
up reduced seeing the monkey's maternal behavior in social grooming. So,
of course I start googling that in the lock zone,
wondering like, oh my god, do I have a shortage
of something of opioid antagonists in my Do I need
to take a pill so that I hug people? And
uh yeah, And then a study found that giving women
nel truck zone a long acting opioid antagonists caused them
(16:21):
to increase their time alone, reduced time with friends, and
it reduced the very pleasantness of women's social interaction. But
think about what that opioid antagonist is doing in your brain.
It's preventing you from responding to opiates, which are usually
uh involved with our brain's reward system, and also endorphins,
which tend to based you up, Yeah, lift us up.
(16:44):
So maybe it's just your friendship is lifting me higher. Yeah.
I don't really know how that's supposed to be comforting
to you. Uh, but maybe it's just that are obviously
neurochemical levels and all of our brains are a little
bit different. They're all different, and you know, yeah, friendships
are unique and it depends on the person too. And
(17:07):
it's also I mean, it's it's a grain of salt
thing too to take with this kind of research, because
did you and I make friends because at some point
we weren't going to want to abandon our babies we
might have in the future. I mean it was on
my brain so that we could go to Jim Boree later. Yes, yeah,
(17:28):
now I'm pretty I don't know. It was probably like, hey,
that cool, that girl, that girls cool, she has nice bangs.
So moving away from the brain and all of these
chemicals that might be a little more difficult to relate
to um in terms of real world friendship interactions. The
fact that Rachel Birch in her what was a mid
(17:48):
twenties or early thirties, was looking for a new crop
of friends. There was another column that we found by
Carrie Shane Parvin who had an essay written about in
being in her early forties and looking for new girlfriends.
And according to other studies, this is from an article
in the Wall Street Journal by Jeffreys Aslow looking at
(18:10):
gender differences in friendship patterns. Studies have shown that in
our late twenties and thirties, women have a harder time
staying in touch with old friends because we're busy starting
our careers, were raising children, and we don't have time
for getting together every night to hang out um. And
then by the time you reach your forties, you might
(18:31):
have a little more time opened up because your kids
are in school, they have their extracurriculars. Some might be
out of the house by them, and you look around
and you haven't done a good job tending and befriending.
And maybe we feel worse about it than men do,
just because of our biological drives. Because of that, we
think there's something wrong. Whereas a man's like, yeah, I'm busy,
(18:53):
I'm doing work, I have a family, you know whatever,
I have hobbies, it's fine, he might not. And you know,
obviously this is a realization and just a hypothesis of
my you know, but maybe men are thinking, well, you know,
it's okay, I'll catch up with them over the game sometime.
That maybe women just have that drive to be like,
this is not normal. Where are my girlfriends? I need
a glass of wine and to hang out and and
(19:13):
find out what's going on with her. And I think
understanding more about that that's biological stress response really explains
why there might be more of that pressure. Yeah, it's interesting.
It's interesting to google female friendships and find the number
of dating like websites that come up. We apparently need
(19:36):
a lot of help from the internet. I had no idea.
I have never googled female friendships before. Well, I think
it's tougher to make friends in general today because everyone
is so busy and so in moving around constantly. And
it's tough to make friends in your mid twenties when
everyone is busy either building their career or they're settling
(19:58):
down for long term relationships where they might have had
first kids. You know, it's it's a it's a challenging
be a challenging time, and it takes time to build
those friendships. Yeah, you gotta have follow through. Yeah you
actually have to call people and say how you're doing right,
But making a friend of me you can do that. No.
I think a friend of mine put it very well
(20:20):
when he said that, you know, you can be stressed
at work, you can be stressed in traffic, you know,
but you shouldn't be stressed in your friendships. And so
I you know, I hope that for those of you
who have one or more in front of me, is
that maybe you either have a heavible talk or maybe
it's time to get rid of toxic friendships. And speaking
of friend of me for a fun little knowledge nugget.
(20:43):
The Oxford Word blog sites Walter Winschell as the first
person to use a friend of me, I guess in
a public forum. He used it in a nineteen fifty
three newspapers like it's not talking about Real housewives of
it Anna right, right, And I think that's part of
I mean, speaking of real housewives. The whole reality franchise
(21:08):
thrives on female freenemies, and that's something that Nicole Roger
is writing for the Huffington Post, talks about how we've
had um, you know, all of these caddy shallow women
portrayed almost formulaically now on television. And on the other side,
we've got the rise of the bromance. Oh I love
you man, that's so sweet. Yeah, Like suddenly it's it's
(21:29):
okay for for men on these reality TV shows to
be all about each other. But it's which is great. No,
I'm yeah, absolutely, I'm not saying it's not, but it's
it's at the same time, we're like, oh, well, we
value these same sex male relationships, but when women get together,
they're just gonna be angry and fight all the time.
That's normal, right, Yeah, they're either Gabby or Catty. Yeah,
(21:50):
I don't like that. I don't like it either, But
to end this podcast on a positive note about female friendships,
because I'm sure you feel the same way, Caroline. I
have some just dear female friendships that I wouldn't trade
for all the podcasts in the world. Um. There was
a post representation from three psychologists at the University of
(22:12):
Nevada and Las Vegas analyzing the sex differences in friendship
and they used a best friend questionnaire to measure how
people describe equality of their friendships and come to find out, women,
at least in how they described them, viewed their friendship
relationships more positively than men did. Yeah, they used warmer,
(22:35):
more intimate descriptors um warm being one of them and
also caring and loving. They rated those words very highly.
As far as describing their relationships, men's highest ratings went
to comfortable, friendly, and supportive, which I think is an
interesting split and it makes a lot of sense thinking
about the male friendships that I have and the intra
(22:55):
male friendships that I've witnessed. UM, So, frenemies or not,
Despite whatever kind of cultural stereotypes are out there, women
really value their friendships It's nothing to put down or
roll your eyes at when groups of women are friends
with each other and go out with each other just
because women have different emotional needs as far as relationship goes.
(23:19):
That's that's not anything to poo poo. We're indulging in
a little bit of oxytocin. Yeah, ear me alone, let
us do that. But next time, guys, you are not
off the hook. We're going to talk about male to
male friendships because there are some fascinating patterns among your
bonding habits as well, so be sure to tune in
(23:42):
for that. And in the meantime, ladies, let us know
about your friendships. What do you think about I mean,
do you have the most special friend in the world.
Let us know all of your friendship stories or a
frenemy story. What to you is a frenemy? And also
among guys, do male frenemies happen to m good question?
(24:04):
Lots of questions that I have. Answer them all at
Mom's Stuff at how stuff works dot com. And we
got a couple of emails to share with you as well. Okay,
this email is from Katie. I just listened to your
Martha Stewart episode and wanted to tell you about my
favorite Martha incarnation. She was on an episode of The
(24:25):
Simpsons where she helped Marge make over the house for Christmas.
At the end of the episode, though March, Marge realized
that her family was miserable living in the perfect wasp
middle class lifestyle and asked Martha to change everything back.
She does so by waiving her magic wand which she
made herself out of an old car antenna, which she
baked in the tears of a leprecn at three fifty
(24:46):
degrees until a rainbow shot out the end. Personally, I'm
not a fan of Martha, but I absolutely love this episode,
and if she voiced the character, which I think she does,
I admire her for being able to make fun of
herself and also for her incredible business success. All right,
I've got one here from Judy, and this is in
response to our sex Ed podcast subject line sex Said
(25:08):
circa nineteen seventy nine, which I knew was going to
be a good one when I saw that subject line.
She writes, we had a seventh grade health class with
both boys and girls in it, and ganoia and syphilis
were covered in a clinical way. We had a spelling
test of clinical terms for male and female body parts,
but no descriptions really of what name was for what
(25:30):
part or what the parts did. That's confusing. We also
saw a short film in which a completely naked woman
had a physical, including the doctor doing a breast exam,
although there was no shot from the business in of
the vaginal exam. Thank goodness. The short film humiliated every
girl in the class and either turned the boys on
(25:51):
or gave them something to make fun of. No representation
of the male body was ever covered in film, photo
or even a drawing. So thank you Judy, and thanks
everyone else who's written in mom stuff At house stuff
works dot com is where you can send your letters.
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thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From house Stop works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Caroline and I'm Kristin kristen Um. I
(00:21):
moved back to Atlanta, as you know, from Augusta and
Georgia almost two years ago. And there was something, there's
something missing because I've been in Augusta for for a
couple of years, four years, and so I had I
had a really good close network of friends, girlfriends and
guy friends. But it was nice to have a good
solid group of girlfriends. And and something happened when I
(00:41):
moved to Atlanta, and I realized that it was harder
to just make girlfriends out of thin air. Almost it
seems like I have an easier time making guy friends.
But you know, there's something about being older. You're out
of college, and everybody's got their social groups. And so
when I moved back to Atlanta, I was like, where
old girls well girlfriends? And I am not the only
(01:04):
one who feels like sometimes it's harder to make friends
than maybe to meet a romantic partner. Right, I experienced
a very similar thing. When I moved to Atlanta from Athens, Georgia.
It was such an excursion along seventy miles up the road,
but it really felt like a dating process to try
(01:28):
to make friends because there was someone who's now my
my roommate, this one girl in particular, where I was like,
she's super cool. I want to be her friend. Oh,
I hope she likes what I'm wearing. Uh yeah. And
that this is sort of the basis for the book
(01:48):
UH MWF Seeking BFF Year Long Search for a New
Best Friend by Rachel Birch. And this this author relocated
from Chicago to New York and left behind her whole
social network. She she moved with her fiance or the
man who would become her fiance, and now they're married,
and so she has all this stuff, this great life
going on, but she looks around and realizes, I don't
(02:09):
have anybody to call if I want to go get
brunch or have a glass of wine or you know,
talk about my day, anybody besides my fiancee. And so
she goes on this quest she decides as a married
white female, which is MWF Seeking BFF Best Friend. Uh.
She goes on fifty two friend dates in a year.
That's that's a friend date a week for those of
you who don't know how long a year is. UM.
(02:32):
And it's interesting her experiences. She comes up with a
lot of good advice. And it's kind of what Kristen
was talking about. You know, you developed these almost crushes
on other girls because I mean it's naturally You're like, Wow,
that person is really cool. How do I get to
know them better? How do we how do we hang
out in real life outside of work or outside of whatever,
the train or wherever. I don't know where you meet people,
but it's clear, I mean clearly have no friends, because
(02:56):
I still to this day no friends. UM. Some of
her advice just ask the person out to hang out, like, hey,
do you want to go do something fun? Let's go
get coffee, um. But just swap narratives, not just grilling
the person with questions, right, because a lot of those
initial friendships that you'll have with other women on that
(03:17):
first friend date is so similar to a first romantic dates.
Some awkward silences, some twiddling of the thumbs. You ask
about families, you'll probably talk about jobs. But the good
thing is about female first dates, first friend dates. Is
that it is okay to talk about past relationships. It
(03:40):
is there's a bonus. And if you guys don't click,
you don't have to be stuck together. I mean, not
that you have to be stuck together after a first
date romantic date either. But you're like, well, I guess
I can just save her for when I'm born. That's Caroline.
That sounds very friend of me, of you, frenemy, I
would never are you insinuating something about friendship over here?
(04:04):
I am insinuating. Uh well, I'll just state it. You know,
I won't do a friend of me ish thing and
insinuate I will state that. Uh. There is that the
sweet side of female friendship, which which is like getting
to know you in building that bond um. But then
there is the flip side that I feel like has
been way over exposed in popular culture in the past
(04:29):
five to ten years, which is the friend of me,
which is the whole that's when words like caddy come
out and caddy. But but you know what I mean.
I feel like ever since mean girls, which I love,
was such a sensation, all of a sudden, every woman
is a secret friend of me. So at the other
(04:51):
end of the spectrum from m f W or n
WF speaking BFF, we have things like The Twisted Sisterhood,
a raveling the dark legacy of female friendships that sounds terrifying.
It's by Kelly Valen. It got a lot of press
because it's about this just heart wrenching process that she
went through in a sorority in which she was completely
(05:13):
stripped of any faith whatsoever in female friendships because girls
be mean. Jeez, Well, it sounds like she's meeting the
wrong people because I don't. I don't think I've ever
been stripped of anything. Well, well, it's the whole argument
that since women's friendships, one on one friendships are so
(05:34):
emotionally binding, because we do tend to share so much
of ourselves compared to men, which we'll talk about in
a later podcast, we tend to have more activity based
friendships that since you get to know each other on
such a deep level, that they can hurt you even more. Yeah,
(05:54):
of course, I mean, obviously, if you have genuine friendships
with people, you have a good foundation for your friendship
and it's not built on maybe competition or social standing,
then those are your safe friendships that actually help you mentally,
emotionally and all that stuff. But yeah, I mean, I
feel like everybody has had at least one friend at
some point who you can classify as a friend of
(06:16):
me who has tried to undermine you or only wants
to hear about when things are going wrong with you,
not like, yeah, you cheer you on, you've got a
new job, or you gotta I don't know whatever reward
of some kind. Uh, you know, they just want to
know about when you're down in the dump so they
can commiserate, right. Or the friend who will only call
you up when things are going poorly and needs a
(06:40):
listening ear a big emotion dump, right, and and all
of those things I think are just part of the
female friend spectrum. But the big question I have is,
you know, why does it seem like female friendships in
particular are sort of, um, I don't know, boxed up
(07:01):
in stereotype like that and maybe devalued a little bit,
Because I think at the end of the day, there
is really something to be said for that really true
BFF girlfriend, the girl who you can turn to, the
girl who will tell you the truth, and not in
a mean way, not in a in a front of
me way like, oh, yeah, I don't know if you
should wear the pants they kind of make your asp
(07:23):
with it, or maybe you shouldn't wear those pants. Yeah,
how don't be honest, that'd be nice about it with
with good intentions behind the telling you to not wear
the pants. Um, but something that was pretty eye opening
when I was reading all this stuff about female friendship. Um,
because I feel like this is stuff that's pretty common sense. However,
(07:43):
I had no idea the biological drives behind some of
our our habits and our desires as far as friendship goes,
both same sex and opposite sex friendships. But um, you
know you're talking about how how female friendship can kind
of be looked down upon sometimes like women be shopping,
they're just talking about shoes again. Well, well, how about
(08:05):
this this quick snippet, This was from a summary of research.
I'll be a little bit dated on friendship. Ronveig Trousse,
the Daughter observed history does not celebrate female friendships, and
there is a longstanding myth of the greatest friendships have
been between men. Yeah, buddy comedies. Yeah, whereas they're just
(08:26):
a little bit different, right, Women have a different drive
as far as seeking seeking relationships and seeking comfort we
as we'll get into momentarily women and and a lot
of female animals. This is sort of across cultures, across species.
Women when they are stressed seek uh the association of others.
They seek to be part of a group for safety,
(08:50):
for comfort, for stress release, and um, we sort of
talked about that in a path podcast. It's called tend
and befriend. Where men have more of a uh, fight
or flight response to stress, women have similar a similar
release of chemicals driving us to do things when we
were stressed, but they sort of drive us together as
(09:10):
opposed to apart. Right, And this was from a pretty
groundbreaking U c L A study published in the year
two thousand UH in Psychological Review, And it was groundbreaking
because it was related to stress and specifically related to
the biochemical markers of female stress, which up until around
(09:35):
had been so understudied. I think the statistic was only
seventeen percent of study participants in stress related physiological stress
studies were women. So it really wasn't until the two
thousands that were starting to get this kind of information
and they found that, like you said, Caroline, in response
(09:55):
to stress, women tend and befriend, and we actually tap
into female social support and networks to manage stressful conditions
because of evolution. Evolution, everybody, yes, um, a mother's flight
or attack on a predator could leave her offspring fatally unattended.
(10:18):
So back in the day, I mean, if a mother
had the same instinct as the male to go attack
the predator, she'd leave her baby behind and that could
be eaten or stolen away in the night, who knows what.
And so the mother's desire to go back to her
offspring soothe it, take care of it, take it to
(10:38):
a safe place. That's sort of that's that's continued through
in our desire to tend and befriend and building on
that physiological framework of friendship. There's also the important role
of oxytocin, which is enhanced by estrogen, and what the
researchers found was that oxytocin is really related to relationship
(11:01):
stress and attachment needs. Now we've talked about oxytocin in
the podcast before in terms of what's happening in your
brain deering an orgasm, it's released. It's a bonding neurochemical.
So it seemed counterintuitive at first to hear that or
read that oxytocin might be related to feeling relationship gaps,
(11:22):
but you can more think of it as a driver
to build those networks, and it has a more potent
effect in females because of the influence of estrogen. Right,
speaking of chemicals, females largely lack androgens, which in many
species act to develop the male brain for aggression and
(11:44):
then activate aggressive behavior in specific threatening context. So, uh,
you know this U c l A analysis talked about
how boys from a very young age or more boys
human boys and young male primates animal boys, animal boy
if it felt like Peter Pan or something um are
(12:04):
more prone to develop rough and tumble play than girls.
And you know, we talked about in the Men Versus
Women Exercise podcast about how on the playground, boys are
more likely to form these big groups and play games
like football, soccer, whatever, whereas girls are more likely to
hang back in smaller groups and and play maybe verbal
games like you know we mentioned mash um And so yeah,
(12:28):
these these uh androgen's, specifically testosterone, are are driving boys
to play rough basically, whereas women are more nurturing. And
it might also have to do something with something else
going on in our brain. This was mentioned in an
article by Victoria Costello in Psychology Today, and she attributes
(12:49):
some of that um instant friendship building that tends to
happen more often among women two more mirror neurons in
the female rain, and these neurons are responsible for us
paying attention to and empathizing with what's going on with
the person sitting across from us. Right right now, I'm
(13:10):
I'm looking at Caroline and she's just blinking and smiling,
smiling sweetly at me, And that's that's making me smile. Yeah,
it's also making her a little uncomfortable because my face
looks weird right now. Um yeah. Victoria Costello, you know,
brings up the whole women empathy, women's intuition thing and
says that most of these clues go right by men, so,
(13:34):
you know, sorry for those empathetic men who feel like
you can pick up on clues, but Costello says that
women are just better at it because we have more
mirroring neurons. She also talks about hormones that you know
and and like you touched on, we have more estrogen
and a greater default level of oxy tosin, and of
course we've talked about evolution a little bit. But here's
(13:55):
the thing though, with Costello's whole thesis on the fact
that she says that you can leave two women who
have never met in a busy doctor's waiting room, and
by the time they're called for their appointments, they know
each other's life story and have traded phone numbers. And
she also says that thanks to that estrogen and the oxytocin,
it makes us want to bond at the mere touch
(14:16):
of hand, and that is really sweet. And maybe I
have low high levels of and androgens and low levels
of oxytocin because that I'm I'm not a hugger. Yeah,
I'm not either. I don't want strangers to touch me.
I don't like people getting too close to me on
the train. And it's not that I'm not friendly. I
(14:37):
just think it might be an example that, yes, we
we are everyone. Friendships are are unique. They're like snowflakes. Sure, okay,
they're all They're all kind of different. I think we
all make friends a little bit differently. And I don't
want anyone to be offended that if they run into me.
The guy know, I'm probably just gonna read my vanity fair.
(14:57):
It's funny, Kristen, I was actually thinking the same thing
reading some of this, Like, God, judging by this research,
I should really be like all over my female friends
and we should be holding hands right now, which should
be remind me to do that later. Um, yeah, we
should have more female friends and we should all be
hugging all the time. But I'm really not like that.
(15:17):
And I actually was thinking about it, and I have
just always had more male friends than female friends. I mean,
in college, I feel like I had a big group
of female friends because you know, living in the dorm
and and whatever, you make a lot of friends that way,
synchronizing menstrual cycle. And I was I started to really wonder,
if you know, it's something wrong with me that I
(15:38):
I don't seem to bond with women in the same
way that these studies are saying I should. And then
I started really worrying about myself because so we released
all these chemicals during stress, and in a study on
reesless monkeys, scientists blocked some of those stress chemicals by
using in the lock zone and opioid antagonist and ended
(15:59):
up reduced seeing the monkey's maternal behavior in social grooming. So,
of course I start googling that in the lock zone,
wondering like, oh my god, do I have a shortage
of something of opioid antagonists in my Do I need
to take a pill so that I hug people? And
uh yeah, And then a study found that giving women
nel truck zone a long acting opioid antagonists caused them
(16:21):
to increase their time alone, reduced time with friends, and
it reduced the very pleasantness of women's social interaction. But
think about what that opioid antagonist is doing in your brain.
It's preventing you from responding to opiates, which are usually
uh involved with our brain's reward system, and also endorphins,
which tend to based you up, Yeah, lift us up.
(16:44):
So maybe it's just your friendship is lifting me higher. Yeah.
I don't really know how that's supposed to be comforting
to you. Uh, but maybe it's just that are obviously
neurochemical levels and all of our brains are a little
bit different. They're all different, and you know, yeah, friendships
are unique and it depends on the person too. And
(17:07):
it's also I mean, it's it's a grain of salt
thing too to take with this kind of research, because
did you and I make friends because at some point
we weren't going to want to abandon our babies we
might have in the future. I mean it was on
my brain so that we could go to Jim Boree later. Yes, yeah,
(17:28):
now I'm pretty I don't know. It was probably like, hey,
that cool, that girl, that girls cool, she has nice bangs.
So moving away from the brain and all of these
chemicals that might be a little more difficult to relate
to um in terms of real world friendship interactions. The
fact that Rachel Birch in her what was a mid
(17:48):
twenties or early thirties, was looking for a new crop
of friends. There was another column that we found by
Carrie Shane Parvin who had an essay written about in
being in her early forties and looking for new girlfriends.
And according to other studies, this is from an article
in the Wall Street Journal by Jeffreys Aslow looking at
(18:10):
gender differences in friendship patterns. Studies have shown that in
our late twenties and thirties, women have a harder time
staying in touch with old friends because we're busy starting
our careers, were raising children, and we don't have time
for getting together every night to hang out um. And
then by the time you reach your forties, you might
(18:31):
have a little more time opened up because your kids
are in school, they have their extracurriculars. Some might be
out of the house by them, and you look around
and you haven't done a good job tending and befriending.
And maybe we feel worse about it than men do,
just because of our biological drives. Because of that, we
think there's something wrong. Whereas a man's like, yeah, I'm busy,
(18:53):
I'm doing work, I have a family, you know whatever,
I have hobbies, it's fine, he might not. And you know,
obviously this is a realization and just a hypothesis of
my you know, but maybe men are thinking, well, you know,
it's okay, I'll catch up with them over the game sometime.
That maybe women just have that drive to be like,
this is not normal. Where are my girlfriends? I need
a glass of wine and to hang out and and
(19:13):
find out what's going on with her. And I think
understanding more about that that's biological stress response really explains
why there might be more of that pressure. Yeah, it's interesting.
It's interesting to google female friendships and find the number
of dating like websites that come up. We apparently need
(19:36):
a lot of help from the internet. I had no idea.
I have never googled female friendships before. Well, I think
it's tougher to make friends in general today because everyone
is so busy and so in moving around constantly. And
it's tough to make friends in your mid twenties when
everyone is busy either building their career or they're settling
(19:58):
down for long term relationships where they might have had
first kids. You know, it's it's a it's a challenging
be a challenging time, and it takes time to build
those friendships. Yeah, you gotta have follow through. Yeah you
actually have to call people and say how you're doing right,
But making a friend of me you can do that. No.
I think a friend of mine put it very well
(20:20):
when he said that, you know, you can be stressed
at work, you can be stressed in traffic, you know,
but you shouldn't be stressed in your friendships. And so
I you know, I hope that for those of you
who have one or more in front of me, is
that maybe you either have a heavible talk or maybe
it's time to get rid of toxic friendships. And speaking
of friend of me for a fun little knowledge nugget.
(20:43):
The Oxford Word blog sites Walter Winschell as the first
person to use a friend of me, I guess in
a public forum. He used it in a nineteen fifty
three newspapers like it's not talking about Real housewives of
it Anna right, right, And I think that's part of
I mean, speaking of real housewives. The whole reality franchise
(21:08):
thrives on female freenemies, and that's something that Nicole Roger
is writing for the Huffington Post, talks about how we've
had um, you know, all of these caddy shallow women
portrayed almost formulaically now on television. And on the other side,
we've got the rise of the bromance. Oh I love
you man, that's so sweet. Yeah, Like suddenly it's it's
(21:29):
okay for for men on these reality TV shows to
be all about each other. But it's which is great. No,
I'm yeah, absolutely, I'm not saying it's not, but it's
it's at the same time, we're like, oh, well, we
value these same sex male relationships, but when women get together,
they're just gonna be angry and fight all the time.
That's normal, right, Yeah, they're either Gabby or Catty. Yeah,
(21:50):
I don't like that. I don't like it either, But
to end this podcast on a positive note about female friendships,
because I'm sure you feel the same way, Caroline. I
have some just dear female friendships that I wouldn't trade
for all the podcasts in the world. Um. There was
a post representation from three psychologists at the University of
(22:12):
Nevada and Las Vegas analyzing the sex differences in friendship
and they used a best friend questionnaire to measure how
people describe equality of their friendships and come to find out, women,
at least in how they described them, viewed their friendship
relationships more positively than men did. Yeah, they used warmer,
(22:35):
more intimate descriptors um warm being one of them and
also caring and loving. They rated those words very highly.
As far as describing their relationships, men's highest ratings went
to comfortable, friendly, and supportive, which I think is an
interesting split and it makes a lot of sense thinking
about the male friendships that I have and the intra
(22:55):
male friendships that I've witnessed. UM, So, frenemies or not,
Despite whatever kind of cultural stereotypes are out there, women
really value their friendships It's nothing to put down or
roll your eyes at when groups of women are friends
with each other and go out with each other just
because women have different emotional needs as far as relationship goes.
(23:19):
That's that's not anything to poo poo. We're indulging in
a little bit of oxytocin. Yeah, ear me alone, let
us do that. But next time, guys, you are not
off the hook. We're going to talk about male to
male friendships because there are some fascinating patterns among your
bonding habits as well, so be sure to tune in
(23:42):
for that. And in the meantime, ladies, let us know
about your friendships. What do you think about I mean,
do you have the most special friend in the world.
Let us know all of your friendship stories or a
frenemy story. What to you is a frenemy? And also
among guys, do male frenemies happen to m good question?
(24:04):
Lots of questions that I have. Answer them all at
Mom's Stuff at how stuff works dot com. And we
got a couple of emails to share with you as well. Okay,
this email is from Katie. I just listened to your
Martha Stewart episode and wanted to tell you about my
favorite Martha incarnation. She was on an episode of The
(24:25):
Simpsons where she helped Marge make over the house for Christmas.
At the end of the episode, though March, Marge realized
that her family was miserable living in the perfect wasp
middle class lifestyle and asked Martha to change everything back.
She does so by waiving her magic wand which she
made herself out of an old car antenna, which she
baked in the tears of a leprecn at three fifty
(24:46):
degrees until a rainbow shot out the end. Personally, I'm
not a fan of Martha, but I absolutely love this episode,
and if she voiced the character, which I think she does,
I admire her for being able to make fun of
herself and also for her incredible business success. All right,
I've got one here from Judy, and this is in
response to our sex Ed podcast subject line sex Said
(25:08):
circa nineteen seventy nine, which I knew was going to
be a good one when I saw that subject line.
She writes, we had a seventh grade health class with
both boys and girls in it, and ganoia and syphilis
were covered in a clinical way. We had a spelling
test of clinical terms for male and female body parts,
but no descriptions really of what name was for what
(25:30):
part or what the parts did. That's confusing. We also
saw a short film in which a completely naked woman
had a physical, including the doctor doing a breast exam,
although there was no shot from the business in of
the vaginal exam. Thank goodness. The short film humiliated every
girl in the class and either turned the boys on
(25:51):
or gave them something to make fun of. No representation
of the male body was ever covered in film, photo
or even a drawing. So thank you Judy, and thanks
everyone else who's written in mom stuff At house stuff
works dot com is where you can send your letters.
Facebook is where you can send your comments, your likes,
(26:11):
your shares, and all that good stuff. And of course
you can tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or you
can read us at the blog During the week it's
stuff Mom Never told you at how Stuff Works dot com.
Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we
(26:33):
explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The
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