Richard’s Ramblings

I spied a new search term that was recently used to locate my website: “maid of honor all best friends are male”.

It is gratifying to know that there are others with the same problem that I have historically had, namely that they relate better to members of the opposite sex. In my case, it’s been both a pleasure and a curse; during my college years, I had countless female friends. Somewhere a picture exists of me, taken on my last day at UC Davis, that shows me and a bunch of my favorites. Best guess is that there were at least a dozen, and that was just the ones I lived with in the dorm. But my supposed “popularity” with women made me extremely unpopular with the guys. Not only was I not interested in their activities anyway, apart from the odd drinking game or late night TV binge, but they perceived me as a threat. Why, I do not know. Perhaps they thought I was sleeping with all or most of the girls, removing them from accessibility.

I remember having the same dilemma as the soon-to-be bride when I got married — I had to choose a best man and two groomsmen out of a very shallow pool of male acquaintances. Yet, oddly, today I would have less difficulty choosing members of the bridal party; two of my best friends are somehow male. Odder still, I’ve run into a bit of a no-man’s land in the battle of the sexes. Where I used to be welcomed with open arms (hugs and kisses included!), the female population has generally become less accepting and gender exclusive. If it ever truly WAS accepting and non-gender-biased, that is…

Here’s where it gets more interesting. And I knew this would take a large number of edits before publishing. Even despite the precautions, someone is bound to take offence (spelled the English way, dammit!)…

I attribute the decline to a realistic variety of personal and social circumstances:

• I am married;
• I am getting older;
• As our relative age increases, so does the likelihood that the females, too, are married;
• It is deemed generally socially unacceptable to spend quality one-on-one time with opposite genders outside of marriage, let alone to want or need that friendship;
• Most people’s friends are really just acquaintances in disguise, and I am not interested in just being acquaintances. If someone isn’t truly interested in me as a person and willing to put forth the same effort, energy, and love that I do, I see no reason to continue wasting my time. What’s better? A high school yearbook crammed with cliched scribbles and giggles from everyone in your graduating class, or a few volumous pages from a small select circle of true friends. I prefer the latter;
• The female’s own marriage, including its inherent issues and social mores, increases desire for pure female peerdom or socially acceptable friendships, often taking the form of escapism or relief from boredom;
• Of my own unfortunate creation, I’ve always been less comfortable in a crowd than I am one-on-one, so I tend to shy away from socializing in groups, which to me consists of more than two people. Given that one-on-one time rarely exists outside of the standard marriage unit, that often presents an increasingly insurmountable personal obstacle to generating and retaining opposite-sex (or sometimes even same-sex) relationships;
• Worse still, is my own apparent and unforgivable lapse and acceptance of social stereotypes and the subsequent vorpal, manifested, increased awareness of both my own sexuality and my female companion’s. It’s not like it wasn’t there before — it’s just more difficult to ignore;
• I have also become increasingly aware over the past several years as to how uncaring, two-faced, hypocritical, bigoted, and gender-biased most people really are, including women. Not all, mind you. But most.

The proof of this gender bias exists in almost any gathering of people. At a school dance, the boys and girls cluster together, separately. A dinner conversation; the women talk, the men talk, in segregated groups. They group instinctively. Both eye contact and conversation are geared for same-sex benefit. Hold a dinner party, a barbecue, an outdoor concert, a fire drill, and watch the ensuing clustering. Visit a cafeteria, a mall, a festival of any kind.

A female in a nearby office cubicle has two welcoming chairs; visiting women sit in the chairs, the men do not, standing instead outside the office, leaning on the raised countertop. A subtle difference, yet a difference indeed. Sex, the dividing line between genders, may play a huge part. In her case, you don’t necessarily think “pretty”, you don’t think “intelligent”, but you do think “sexy” — laced with innuendos, provocation, bronzed curves, and availability. So, it may be something as simple as the parade (band? bevy? swarm?) of men that hover every day seeking a glimpse down her form-hugging blouse. But I still think there’s more to it than just sex.

I think I need to end this now, or I’ll never get it published. I went a lot further with this than originally intended, and I frequently harp about this topic because I feel that it is morally wrong, but with others searching for their own answers to the same problem of dealing with friendships outside the social norm, at least I don’t feel so alone.

Of course, that still doesn’t explain how they find my site searching for “sell drugs business opportunity”, “ding dong dragon bøøbš”, or “male pørn star hair removal methods”…

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