[ChuckMcM]

My wife and I have this conversation a lot. I have a bazillion acquaintances and only a few people I consider close friends. She has a much broader group of friends.

I've identified that one of the characteristic of women interacting is a asking questions in an unprompted sort of way. Something I consider to be "prying", and yet it opens up other conversations which deepen the relationship.

My current position is that I was never exposed to good role models for building relationships with other men, and childhood homophobic sorts of taunts actually sensitized me to a notion of being "too close" to someone. While my wife has no trouble at all saying "love you" to her friends, my early programming makes that really hard for me with my male friends.

The process of building friendships is a process of developing trust and vulnerability, something which is hard to do outside of shared life threatening experiences. At some level in my younger days I always felt I was in competition with the other men around me. How do you make yourself vulnerable to your competitor? You don't of course. To get past that I've had to reassess a really large chunk of the structure in my brain about evaluating my own success and understanding whether or not I was under or over performing on my internal metrics of success.

Bottom line for me is that unpacking all the threads that were hindering my ability to make close friendships walked me back to kindergarten. That is a lot of unpacking to do :-)