On Women: “How Do You Guys Know Each Other?”

April 8, 2004

Contrary to what has been suggested on popular television shows like “Seinfeld,” it has been my observation that the main question a woman asks a man upon meeting him is not “what do you do for work?” but is rather, “so how do you guys know each other?”

My friend the Spanner has known a great many women (here, I mean “known” in the Biblical sense) but was uncertain about my conclusion upon first hearing it a few years ago. In the time since, after I looked in his direction or nudged him on countless occasions, he has since accepted my view about how intrinsic this question is to female conversation.

What is so odd about the inquiry is that I can think of few men, myself included, who would ever wonder how two women met. It just wouldn’t matter to us and is not nearly as important a question as, “what are you doing later?”

On the occasions when I’ve traveled in a posse or brotherhood of six or seven, what I call “A Meeting of the Folk,” women have even gone so far as to ask me how I knew each of the individual guys I was hanging out with. Once my friend Dianabol became so annoyed with this particular line of questioning that he told his inquisitor that he was too weary of her discussion strand to go into any more detail but would be happy to fax her a short autobiography later that night.

It has provoked a good deal of humor on our part as the regularity of the question has become a common joke. In the past, if I’ve had too much to drink and the girls weren’t very appealing, I’d retort, “We met in a male brothel! We both worked the over 80 spinster crowd,” or I’d lisp, “he was lurking behind the stall last night when I went in to use the facilities. We’ve been fast friends ever since.” Although, my personal favorite is, “We’re both part of the Vietnamese mob” as none of us are even remotely of Asian heritage [incidentally, if a joke like this is believed it tells you a great deal about them].

Ultimately, one provides them with an honest answer which is why my friend Yakov, aware of the political nature of our acquaintance, steered me away from a woman he was talking to last Friday night after she asked as to the origin of our friendship. He pushed me a little in the back to get me out of there. The last thing he wanted was to let her know that we were both conservatives who met up at a pro-Iraqi war rally.

Yet you the reader should not take the word of myself or my friends on this issue; you should conduct your own social experiment. This way you can observe how frequently random women will ask you about the fellows stationed at your side. You’ll be surprised at the prevalence of this question preceding their vocational concerns.

After hearing this robotic query made again and again by a significant subgrouping of the overall female population, I have to wonder, “Why?”

It’s gotten to the point where I’ve even turned the question around and demanded to know, in a diplomatic tone, why they asked it in the first place. I was hoping they would have shared some insight but they rarely do. Occasionally, I have heard explanations that suspiciously resembled advertisements. They’ve said things like, “you can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps.”

Of course this well-known television proverb is unquestionably true to a certain extent, but, as was the case with Stalin and Molotov, continued affiliation does not equate with goodness or mental health. Duration of allegiance tells us little about the quality of the people involved as it may be that the only reason two men have kept close partnership for thirty or forty years time is that few others could stand them.

I have concluded that the underlying motivation behind “how do you guys know each other” involves the female’s desire to determine the nature of a man’s social bonds. Perhaps they hope to hear that you’ve known your friends for several decades and that this, in turn, is an indicator of how reliable you are. Obviously, disloyalty is not something to laugh about and is important, but the counter-indicator of “loyalty to what” is rarely considered. After all, most criminal organizations, before the RICO Predicate Acts, kept close ranks but this did not mitigate the criminal nature of the membership.

In the twenty-first century it is not easy to maintain one’s grade school connections. All of mine moved away from my hometown and, eventually, so did I. When a man is in his thirties or forties it is rare that he should have only long-term associates. Most of us have sat through numerous marriage ceremonies that resulted in our pal’s accessibility being restricted and their time becoming quite limited. Therefore, new affiliations must be forged but this in no way prevents new formations from being sincere.

My last point here is that if one only maintained ties with the old and barred oneself from the new, what would that say about him? Wouldn’t that hamper a man’s success in the world? Wouldn’t that hinder his social rank and power?

The undeniable conclusion to be made here is that, like many other mating strategies of contemporary women, this one seems to be rather misguided and poorly executed. Ironically, if they posed the same question to themselves they might discover that they vary little from us in terms of the length and character of their social bonds.

Bernard Chapin