Can men and women still be friends?

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. The day after the 2024 presidential election was called for Donald Trump, Alex felt her life was in turmoil. She was devastated by the results, she says, and, as a Black woman, felt there were few safe spaces for her. One of her closest guy friends didn’t seem to share these worries. Over the last few months, Alex, who is using a pseudonym in order to speak freely about her friendships, has become a source of support for her friend who recently lost his job, his marriage, and moved back in with his parents. Alex, 31, is empathetic to her friend’s pain, but felt like he wasn’t reciprocating in the same way and sucking up all the emotional oxygen. “You’re this white guy only thinking about yourself and complaining about yourself, and your Black female friend is also having [an] experience that you don’t really care about right now,” she says. “I get it, you’re depressed and your life has imploded, but at the same time, it takes five minutes just to check in on me too.” This tension bookends another frayed relationship, dating back to Trump’s first presidential victory. When Alex discovered a different close male friend had voted for Trump in 2016, she felt betrayed. They’d been friends for years, Alex says, and she didn’t see it coming. Not knowing what else to do, she cut him off. Alex eventually reconnected with her friend, telling him how she regretted handling the situation. They’ve buried the hatchet, Alex says, but aren’t as close as they once were. “[I] boiled him down to a vote,” she says, “and really just in that moment, ignored the seven years where he showed me who he was as a person, as a friend.” With time and earned wisdom on her side, Alex is handling the present resentment with her male friend differently. She vents about her frustrations to other friends who don’t know him. She mines her memories for evidence he’s not completely self-centered, and the times he has shown up for her. “Back in 2020, me and some of my friends put on this series to talk about what was happening with George Floyd,” she says, “and he was one of my only white guy friends that participated in that.” Still, she plans on sharing her frustrations with him when they next see each other in person. The gender divide has never quite felt so stark, politically and culturally. Early exit polls revealed men of all ages tended to vote Republican in the 2024 presidential election, with the chasm between Gen Z men and women’s political preferences particularly pronounced. Moreover, in the days following Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris, social media platforms were flooded with comments from men declaring “your body, my choice,” (parroting a refrain from white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes) while some women vowed to swear off men altogether as an act of resistance. This seems to follow a period of deteriorating relations between the sexes in general — young women online regularly proclaim their disdain for men, while many men gravitate toward a media diet that’s laced with misogyny. Despite the impulse of some to wash their hands of the opposite sex, research suggests interacting with a greater variety of people results in higher levels of well-being. To close yourself off from a significant proportion of the population based purely on gender may not help bridge differences, friendship researchers say. And although people recognize the ways gender impacts their relationships, in big ways and small, many that I interviewed for this story told me that they still see the benefit of maintaining friendships with the opposite sex — even in a time of fraught gender relations. Differing expectations of friendship Platonic relationships between men and women are a relatively recent phenomenon. Throughout history, men tended to befriend other men, while women formed connections with other women. “We can trace that back potentially to things like divisions of labor with men hunting and women participating in child-rearing,” says Jaimie Arona Krems, an associate professor of psychology and the director of the UCLA Center for Friendship Research. It wasn’t until women entered the workforce that they were given more opportunities to form platonic relationships with men, says Beverley Fehr, a social psychologist at the University of Winnipeg. Even in contemporary society, people tend to befriend those with similar qualities. Research shows that people often form friendships with those of similar age, religion, education, occupation, and yes, gender, with some exceptions — one study found that younger gay and bisexual men are more likely to have cross-gender friendships while lesbian women are not. Other research has found a majority of transgender participants had cross-gender friendships. (Most studies on cross-gender friendship focus on heterosexual groupings.) Gender differences in friendship expectations play out when it comes to what these friends actually do together. According to research, women tend to lean into self-disclosure when hanging out, while men get together for shared activities or helping each other with a project or task. When you add a woman into a male friendship dynamic, “then that interaction becomes a more intimate interaction,” Fehr says. Give men an environment where vulnerability is safe and accepted and they’re more likely to do so, Fehr continues. This emotional openness can be hugely beneficial for men. This was true for Eli Harel, who never had much experience when he was growing up talking to women. It wasn’t until he started dating in his teens and eventually working with them that he realized he had an easier time connecting with women than men. “I don’t necessarily care about sports or betting like a lot of my male friends are,” Harel, 28, says. “Where I’ll talk about my female friends’ day or how are things going with [their] dating life?” Even after six years of marriage, Harel maintains relationships with his women friends — jealousy is not an issue with his wife, he says. Rather than fall into the trap of competitiveness he’s noticed among his male friends, Harel appreciates his female friends’ emotional intelligence. Men aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit from cross-gender friendships. Although her research hasn’t yet confirmed her hypothesis, Fehr says women can learn from the activity-based mode of male friendship. “Maybe every interaction with a female friend doesn’t have to be a heart-to-heart talk at a coffee shop,” she says. “But maybe it would be fun to go out and do an activity together and share some lasting memories.” Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, has found that both men and women value friendships with people with whom they enjoy spending time, but women have higher expectations that their friends will listen and be responsive when they share personal information. Women also expect their friends to be loyal, accepting, and genuine slightly more than men. “Men generally have slightly lower expectations than women for almost everything,” Hall says. “They just expect less out of friends in general.” Female friendships can be rife with ambiguity, Krems says, with comments that may be interpreted multiple ways. You’re so brave for wearing that could just as easily be levied as an insult as well as a compliment. Men are often more straightforward, she says, and their intentions and emotions can be easier to decipher. Sydney Rae Chin, who is nonbinary and queer, has friends across the gender spectrum and would agree that their friendships with cisgender men are easier to navigate. “I’m neurodivergent and I like when people are straightforward,” Chin says. “Sometimes — not all the time, but a lot of the times — in my experience, cis men have been more straightforward with me. I’m like, okay, clearly this person does not like me, or clearly this person’s getting along with me, and that to me [is] more helpful in friendship rather than someone pretending to be my friend and then the next minute, they’re talking shit behind my back.” “Who’s that guy?” Friendships with those of another gender can be enriching, but they also come with unique challenges. These friendships are threatened, most notably, by romantic partners. Emotional closeness is crucial in friendship, but the line between heart-to-hearts and cheating is thin. Many of the hallmarks of emotional infidelity — building intimacy with someone other than your partner, spending time with them, and confiding in them — bear a striking resemblance to friendship. “If you took all of the characteristics of what a close cross-sex friendship is,” Hall says, “that’s emotional infidelity.” Because many friendships eventually do bloom into romantic relationships, the potential for sexual tension among heterosexual friends can be high. Research shows the qualities people look for in a mate aren’t all that different from what they desire from a friend of a different gender, “suggesting that potentially we’re looking for backup mates, or we’re looking for mates if we’re single,” Krems says. While not the case for all cross-gender friendships, oftentimes, beneath the surface, pointed questions linger: Do they want to date me? Do I want to date them? That’s definitely been an issue for Jessica Goudy. If there was one way she would classify her past friendships with men, one succinct tagline to encompass the experience, it would be this: “He would if he could.” Growing up, Goudy, 32, says she maintained friendships with people of all genders with no issue. But as adolescent playdates gave way to college parties, she noticed some of her male friends might have a bit to drink, sit a little too close, and make a comment that could be perceived as a little more than friendly. On more than one occasion, male friends would offer Goudy a shoulder to cry on after a breakup only to disclose their own romantic feelings for her. Some of her guy friends would take her gentle rejection in stride, never addressing it again. Others, she’d never hear from again. “That makes me reanalyze the friendship in my head,” Goudy says. “Were you ever my friend, or were you just waiting around for a potential opportunity?” Even if you’re both single, once either of you enters into a romantic relationship, a cross-gender friendship might be the first friendship on the chopping block. “Because potentially the new romantic partner, at least in these cisgender heterosexual relationships,” Krems says, “serves a lot of the same functions that this cross-gender friendship did.” For these reasons, a person will have the highest number of cross-gender friendships before finding a long-term partner, Hall says. Before she ever hard-launched a romantic relationship, Emma “Tommy” Thomas’s Instagram was full of pictures of one man in particular: her best friend Griffin. They met in college and quickly bonded over a shared sense of humor; on one of their first hangouts, Griffin and Thomas wrote five minutes of material they performed later that day at a comedy open mic. Despite being romantically involved with other people, the two were frequently asked if they were sure they were just friends. “It also made it complicated to go on dates, because people would look me up and be like, ‘Who’s this guy that’s always there?’” Thomas, 23, says. “And I’m like, ‘That’s Griffin. You don’t have to worry about him.’” Can friendship withstand the gender war? Aside from interpersonal challenges to these relationships, cultural forces shape how people view others. In the last few years in particular, the rise of the Me Too movement, the dramatic erosion of reproductive rights, and men and women retreating to distinct corners of the internet have seemingly, and notably, divided the sexes. Few have stoked the flames of the gender war quite like President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance. Trump, who was found liable for sexual abuse, as president nominated Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade while Vance has resorted to name-calling, claiming child-free women as “cat ladies.” Men, many of whom bought into Trump’s vision of masculinity, are seemingly at odds with women who fear the further disintegration of their rights. “When your core values around issues such as reproductive rights — those are just such fundamental core values — and when another person doesn’t share those core values, it’s really tough to then be on any other plane,” Fehr says, “because at the most basic and fundamental level, you have some huge differences.” To demonstrate their values, some men in women’s lives might also feel compelled to display their virtue. Thomas’s younger brother as well as her best friend Griffin defend themselves against the narrative that all men are dangerous. “But I’m a good guy,” they tell her. “I can totally understand facing broad generalizations like that can be really frustrating,” Thomas says. “I think that’s also why it’s polarized a lot of young men, because they’re like, ‘I’m not a bad guy.’” But the more you have to remind people you’re a good guy, the less you seem like one, she says. Alex, the woman who became estranged from her Trump-supporting male friend, says the current cultural and political climate isn’t helping men and women maintain close friendships. Buying into the narrative that men are inherently dangerous and irredeemable might only push them farther afield, she says. Despite the social momentum pushing men and women apart, it is possible to maintain a close relationship over the course of decades with mutual respect and understanding. Just look at Peter McGraw and Julie Nirvelli, who have made theirs work for over 20 years. After meeting in the parking lot of their apartment building, Nirvelli invited McGraw, 54, to a party she was throwing in a few weeks. “And he said, ‘I have a scientific way of throwing better parties,’” says Nirvelli. So she invited McGraw over to plan. “From then on, we were just great friends.” Over the course of their friendship, they formed rituals like renting a ski house during the winter and continuing to throw parties together. They help talk the other through family and dating conundrums. (They’re both single and dating.) While McGraw hasn’t experienced any gender-related tensions in his friendships with women, he has noticed a broader cultural shift, “a polarization in a way that I, as a lifelong bachelor, haven’t quite seen,” he says. The key to their relationship, McGraw says, is he can be fully himself around Nirvelli without fear of judgment. Nirvelli says she feels safe around McGraw and never once questioned if he had ulterior motives. Safety. Validation. Support. These are the key tenets of friendship, regardless of gender. If friends can look past the messages painting entire populations of people as toxic or manipulative or unsafe, they may be more open to relationships that provide a unique perspective, a slightly different way of looking at the world. For McGraw, great friendships have three components: you bring value to each other’s lives, the person is reliable and honest, and they celebrate your successes and commiserate in failures. Nirvelli checks all three boxes. “Regardless of her gender,” McGraw says, “she is just a great friend.”

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Can men and women still be friends?