Male-Female Friendships And Conversation

8 Pages 2070 Words

Male-Female Friendships and Conversation.


I have always been fascinated, and sometimes discouraged, by the friendships I have with women. Right now I have three or four close friendships with women; I met and pursued each on because of initial feelings of romance and despite the fact the we remain intimately uninvolved I have secured lasting friendships with each. Friendships between men and women are inherently different than those amongst the same sex conversational partners. One pattern I have observed in my life is that most heterosexual men have more male friends than female and the opposite holds true for most heterosexual women. This is why friendship in opposite-sex pairs, is so unique. It is a fact that men and women grow up in different, yet ongoing social creations known as gender (Walker 1994). These differences influence their conversational habits and techniques. How do men interested in professional athletics, beer, hard rock music, competition and gastrointestinal happenings come to find friendship with women interested in relationships, jam bands, photo albums and shopping?
Conversational compromise is my answer. In a sense, one of the sexes compromises their usual habits of conversation for the sake of perpetuating friendship. Language is the medium of friendship, and conversations with other people are where we find not only more information about like minded people but information about ourselves. In this paper I plan to unconfound the different aspects of conversation between same sex and mixed sex interlocutors. I will look at multiple aspects of conversation such as asymmetries and symmetries, cross-purposes, interruption, framing and more. By comparing and contrasting the transcribed conversations of my classmates, as well as researching other similar studies in scholarly journals, I hope to find conclusive evidence supporting the fact that males make more of these conversational compromises t...