I think that is a very interesting point. I have mentioned that as well in the past a couple of times. There was a difference in how friendships worked in my old country (in Eastern Europe) and how they work here. Here "friendships" are just acquaintances as you said. People gather lots of acquaintances but no or few good friends.

I'll propose a couple of reasons:

* People are more mobile. They move more so they don't have time to really make friends. This starts in childhood when kids move with the parents from school district to school district from neighborhood to neighborhood. There is a non-negligible network effect here and that is even if you don't move and live on one street and go to one school, chances are your friend's family will.

* Education system. At some point kids stop being in one class and are allowed to pick individual classes and schedules. So they stop seeing or spending time with the same classmates. There is extracurricular activities of course but it is not the same as starting with 1st grade and potentially being with the same group of people until the 12th grade.

* More individualism. Being a friend means sharing more and means relying on other more. In other words it means asking for help and offering help. This means "being in other people's business" which is a no-no in U.S. But the other side of being too individualistic means never really opening up to a friend. And at the end of the day one can only get so close talking about the weather, after some time it gets boring. So there is the wall that people don't let others through.

* Affluence. I think in countries where it is harder to survive on your own. People will stick together better for support. They have to have a support group to survive. In richer countries people can get by easier living alone and being more independent.

* It is not as much countries as times. In other words in the past, people used to have fewer but closer friends anywhere in the world. And, say, in the last 30 years people started to become more isolated. Could be technology, or globalization (people have to move because of jobs).

* It is not the world it is you. You just got older, more paranoid, and more withdrawn. The perception is that there just aren't that many friendly people around. But maybe other people just don't want to be friends with "you" in particular. They are still people with very good close friends but because you don't have them now, it seems like nobody does.

This is not the norm, in my experience.

Worth noting that America is a big place, with lots of variety. You know this of course.

I can see what you describe being the norm in a large city. Where I live now - small town, middle of inner-nowhere - it's not.

Not to be an ass, but to recap your "rebuttal": in the places which are dying this isn't the case, but I could see it happening in the places that are becoming increasingly prevalent and important it might be.

I think the change is undeniable, you're just in one of the last places that will get hit.

In what sense do you mean 'dying'? 'Prevalent and important'?

I will allow this is the case for some areas. It it not universally true.

It sure isn't where I live.

Statewide statistics here: http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.wi.htm

I live in this met region: http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.wi_oshkosh_msa.htm

Is she what you'd call a close friend? Haven't seen her in years. And surprise! I'm a straight guy with a wife and 3 boys of my own.

And I've driven my tractor 12 miles to her place (when they lived nearby) to open her driveway after a snowstorm. And gave her a car when her middle boy needed a way to get to work.

So I guess it works lots of ways, not just the way it did in your home town.

I am sort of afraid that the last point holds for me and I just got paranoid and old and people don't want to be friend with me. To me, it might seem like it is a old-world vs US or other such things, but it could be just me rationalizing all along. That is why I am interested in getting others perspective on this.

Taken literally, this is a pretty absurd claim. I think your post would be more convincing without it.

Which might still be stretching it a bit, but I believe it to be mostly true

At my workplace, there are probably 30 or 40 women I come into contact with during the course of my job, out of maybe 60 or 70 people in my area. One or two are over 50, and hence not very attractive to me (I'm 40). One is probably over 400 lbs, and I am not especially attracted to her sexually, but as she's a great person otherwise, she may be the only example of a woman I get along with at work with whom I would not have sex (were I single, etc...). So, I'm sexually attracted to all these women, though of course I have no way to know which are attracted to me -- certainly I hope they have no way to know that I'm attracted to them... it's the workplace, after all.

So, my experience bears out the author's assumption that if circumstances permit, sex would almost always be "in the way" of a friendship between two mutually possible sexual partners. I can only imagine how much more this must be a problem for those who are bisexual.

My point is that with a very few exceptions[1], apart from the occasional mis-fire or unrequited crush, we go through our life sorting people into "romance target" and "not-romance target", we tend to be very discriminating in our sorting, and gender is not the only criteria used for sorting.

[1]: The exceptions mostly involve very high hormones and/or very poor social skills. Example: A heterosexual male, borderline Asperger syndrome, 19 years old, just off to university to study computer science, far far too shy to actually talk to a girl is very prone to being quasi-obsessively attracted to a large number of inappropriate targets[2]. But this is not really a typical human experience[3].

[2]: Yes, I do speak from experience. :)

[3]: At the risk of stereotyping, it's probably a little more common among the HN readership than elsewhere though. :)

That's partly because you're attracted to a cartoon. A star's media image is very carefully crafted. People like that are much less impressive in person.

And that's partly because Lazare is right. You can be eternally attracted to a media image because there's a broken feedback loop. If you were displaying your attraction to an actual person, you'd be getting either positive or negative feedback. Eventually things would either heat up or cool down.

Think about all the people you know that you once felt strong sexual attraction for. How many of them do you still feel that way about? For me, the percentage is tiny.

Also: continuing to display attraction signals to somebody who isn't interested in you? That comes across as creepy. As would fantasizing about someone you know who doesn't find you attractive. For your sake, I hope they don't find out.

If the author's black-and-white statement still is bothering you, go ahead and insert some nuance. E.g., "normally" or "for non-creepy people".

Agree.

In cultures with a greater social separation between men and women, men can have intense and emotionally intimate friendships with other men, because there isn’t the same kind of expectation regarding women, and because a man will understand what another man is going through in a way that women, living in a “separate sphere”, would not.

I personally don't really want that kind of intimacy from other men. The kind of association I want with other men is more of a "playing on the same team" sort of thing, like you'd get from playing sports together, maybe working on a side project together, or even just forming a group that always meets at the same bar on a certain night. The focus isn't on sitting around talking, it's half having a group identity and half working together towards a common goal.

What? The author of the article specifically addresses this and does not conclude that the sexual attraction is unavoidable: "But it doesn’t always get in the way." "I don’t see that platonic friendships are actually rare at all or worthy of a lot of winks and nudges." Etc.

> "it's a remarkably heteronormative idea"

Yes, the author agrees: "Close friendships between members of the same sex, after all, are also suspect." He specifically deconstructs the exact issues you seem to be worried about. I'll assume you did actually read the article, because you said you did, but you are radically misportraying the author's claims in order to make your own points as if arguing against his (when actually, he's already made many of them himself).

And yes, there is some porn aimed at gay men that shows 'straight' men engaging in gay male sexual acts, and there is porn aimed at straight men showing women engaged in same-sex sexual acts (just look for "girl-on-girl"), and there is porn aimed at straight women showing men engaged in same-sex acts (just look for "slash-fic"). The vast majority of porn consumed by gay men is gay male porn though.

It is completely wrong to presume that heterosexuals are constantly at threat of advanced from gay men.

Wait, what now? I mean, I'll be the first to admit that most of my ~250 Facebook "friends" are acquaintances of varying degrees, but there's a good 10-20 people who I'd consider great friends, who I feel a great emotional affinity for.

Are you saying this is rare in American culture? It certainly doesn't seem so to me, but of course all I have is my experience.

For example, the majority of the USA is white, and not black. It used to be the case that all TV shows would have fully white casts, and never really have black characters. Sometimes people make this mistake when dealing with homosexuals (etc.)

But in an article about male and female relationships and sexual attraction? It's a pretty bad sign that the author just assumes heterosexuality for everyone, especially when anything else would defeat (or at least greatly complicate) their argument.

I think that in any long-term business or personal relationship between two people, you're going to have a point where at least one of the two has some level of attractiveness to each other. Whether that manifests into a sexual relationship depends on the people and their circumstances.

I don't know. It seems to me that desire expects to met with desire. There were and perhaps still are quite a few men out there who thought that lesbians simply needed some attention from a good studly guy (themselves) to straighten them out.

I thought it was because we replaced our communities with networks, is that not correct?