[post_from_work]

Consider the opposite characteristics.

As a guy, I don't make time to hang out with other guys who are woefully out of shape / hideously ugly, broke, and with no Game(tm). Those people are not Force Multipliers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplication ), so why would I allocate my most precious resource, my time, to them?

[antisthenes]

There's a difference between what people describe their ideal friends as and who they actually have as friends.

It's not like the study actually brought in their friends and examined whether those preferences have anything to do with reality.

[fallingfrog]

If your friends abandon you because you gained weight, or lost your job, or burned your face- those people were never your friends.

[post_from_work]

You are shooting at strawmen. No one is discussing severing existing relationship bonds due to evolving life circumstances. There are undoubtedly far more variables in such an equation, with complex mitigating factors.

The article is about ideal preferences. Exercising those preferences, often towards objectively-superior utility characteristics, is not misanthropic.

That line of thought would make about as much sense as saying "all lesbians are inherently misandrist". Choosing A over B does not imply any hatred of {B}, or of {A+B} in general.

[fallingfrog]

The point flew entirely over your head.

If you would judge other people by such shallow standards, you should assume they are judging you by the same standards.

And: therefore you and they are not friends, you are merely using them as a social climber. If your relationship with all your friends is based on their utility to advance your status, you don’t actually have any friends.

[post_from_work]

>>>The point flew entirely over your head.

Funny. I'd say the same applies for you. The whole point of the article is that men and women have different value systems in how they evaluate interpersonal relationships, and your contribution to this discussion has only been: "While I put forth no evidence to the contrary, their conclusion is wrong....and any men who utilize such a value system are bad human beings." It's the same sort of overbearing, arrogant, intrusive shaming language used by religious conservatives in opposition to gay marriage.

>>>you should assume they are judging you by the same standards

I would absolutely assume that my friends are holding me accountable to the same standards to which I hold them. And if they didn't, then I wouldn't trust them as true friends. They should be able to share hard truths ("Hey, you are failing yourself right now") and also be willing to offer assistance to get me back on my path.

>>>If your relationship with all your friends is based on their utility to advance your status, you don’t actually have any friends.

What are the metrics underpinning your assessment of friendship? In order to achieve a status of !friend, there would need to be failure modes for evaluation of actions to drive that conclusion. What are those failure modes? And which of my friends have you evaluated against these metrics to support your assertion? We all know the answer to that: NONE.

Men are under no obligations to evaluate their friendships using YOUR mental model, and possessing a working model that is different from yours does not inherently make them misanthropes out of touch with reality. The level of uncomprehending arrogance needed to come into a discussion with that as a leading talking point is astounding.