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.<p>I&#x27;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 &quot;prying&quot;, and yet it opens up other conversations which deepen the relationship.<p>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 &quot;too close&quot; to someone. While my wife has no trouble at all saying &quot;love you&quot; to her friends, my early programming makes that really hard for me with my male friends.<p>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&#x27;t of course. To get past that I&#x27;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.<p>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 :-)