Professor Peter Nardi Quoted in Toronto Globe & Mail

[Excerpt]

Budding bromance

Boys' night out -- if men made plans at all -- used to mean something like jock talk on Super Bowl Sunday. But as ERIN ANDERSSEN reports, a radical shift in male friendships is transforming beer buddies into confidants.

By ERIN ANDERSSEN

Saturday, February 3, 2007 – Page F9

This intimate side of male bonding tends to get short shrift in the study of friendship.

For one thing, men, who are less likely to see a doctor or lie on a therapist's couch, are notoriously elusive subjects for social scientists. It's a rare study that actually catches friendship in action -- like one conducted recently at the University of Western Ontario that asked pairs of friends to discuss a problem while researchers watched.

This means that much of the findings on male friendships come out of survey research comparing them with female friendships. And every psychologist in the field can quote the results: Women meet "face-to-face"; men hang out "side-by-side." Women do lunch; men go to a hockey game. Women talk about everything; men hardly talk. Women keep their friends as they age; men, even sociable guys such as Jerry Halmos, tend to lose them.

"I always find that sort of annoying," says Peter Nardi, a sociologist at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., who has written several books on male friendship. "What is it about our society that says that talking over coffee has a higher score on the intimacy scale than if you play a golf match for five hours?"

Dr. Nardi believes that friendships differ more within the genders than between them -- that ethnicity, class, education and sexual orientation all have a larger impact on friendship than being a man or a woman. Generally, the genders value friendship for the same reasons, and define a friend in the same way, by the social support they offer and the trust they keep. Those findings just don't often make their way into academic journals.