if you were me, one thing would immediately stand out: almost all of my close friends are female, while almost all of my acquaintances and casual friends are male. at least 90% of the people-hours i spend with people are spent with males; at least 90% of the meaningful email i send is sent to females. there are tons of potential outs for me here: for instance, one could argue that i'm one of these "sensitive guys" that are personality-wise closer to females, while being in math most of the people i meet are male. but i think the truth is far more sinister, although i might be wrong.
i think what's going on here is that i hold women to a much higher standard than i hold men. (this sentence doesn't really make sense, since i consider my friends to be girls and guys rather than women and men, but i digress.) when i meet a female, i immediately scrutinize them for faults, appraising them as a potential mate or somesuch. (again, i'm guessing as to my motives, but i suspect they're dead-on in this case.) meanwhile, i am content to have acquaintance-style friendships, compartmentalized friendships, with guys. these friendships only require a specific overlap of interest; meanwhile, because i give up so easily on girls who are not perfect, i end up with only close female friends.
i wouldn't be surprised if everyone does this to some extent, or maybe just everyone like me. of my female friends who have "best friends from high school," as far as i can enumerate four of them are male and only two are female. (i'm undoubtedly missing some.) note that i know comparatively less about the high school lives of my male friends, which i guess is just emblematic of the fact that i'm not as close to them.
still, this doesn't explain why i don't end up with as many close male friends and just more acquaintances. here, i have to admit that the primary cause is probably the extent to which i bother to be me around males. i have an autopilot that works very well for everyday interaction, and although i rarely admit it, i probably have a limited reservoir of divulging that i don't bother to waste on people who i won't share a life with. the weblog here is a great device for this, since it's equal-opportunity, but every time i tell my life story it gets a little bit worse, a little bit more boring for both me and the listener.
i guess the main thing is that i don't bother to put together unique things for people whose admiration of me will either have relatively little impact on my life. i should stress here that i'm not talking about anything i do consciously; i'm trying to find the motives behind the actions behind the facts. the companion fact here is that i may well not bother to put together unique things for people whose opinions of me i feel i am unlikely to affect much, which explains some other action tendencies in my life.
i'm not going to stop and apply a moral judgment here. i just think it's interesting to look at the unconscious reasons behind these very concrete facts, and i bet they apply to others. after all, i can think of many other people, including several readers, who quite obviously treat females and males very differently in a similar way (with genders reversed when appropriate.)
happy boxing day, everybody.