Many people prefer their friends to be of a particular gender. Heterosexual cisgendered people tend to be homosocial.

The genders in a relationship define the characteristics of that friendship. Man-man homosocial friendships are typically characterized by activities. Woman-woman homosocial friendships are typically characterized by talking. Both of these friendships have distinct psychological benefits.

It turns out that man-woman heterosocial friendships are much more like woman-woman friendships than man-man friendships. As a result, men who make friends with women benefit disproportionately (because women already have lots of woman friends).

I’m a strongly gynosocial man. I have some good friends that are men, but I have trouble building and maintaining acquaintanceships. I’d like to think I’m gynosocial because I like talking more than doing, but maybe I’m just using chicks for the emotional intimacy?

On the surface, networking is about meeting people then moving up a connectedness ladder, from contacts to interaction to “deep rapport”. Instead, most guides say you should look at it as integrating people into your gift economy: when you meet someone, ask yourself what you can do for them.

This isn’t easy, but it’s at least straight-forward in a business context: find out what their chief challenges are and then keep an eye out for solutions. The classic examples are sending someone an article relevant to their interests or sending them a job posting to escape their current challenges.

It just occured to me that maybe a bit more of this sort of thinking would help be build my social network. I assume people mostly hang out with me for my wit and charm. When I do think about it, I focus on killer events: but maybe people don’t need more and better events to go to? I’d like to know what my friends need in their lives (besides money or a dancing monkey).

I have a handful of Facebook friends that I met in real life, hit it off with and then friended in the hopes that we could grow that relationship. As Stewart observes, this doesn’t work.

There’s always the chance that we’ll discover some obscure interest or connection in our profile info to build a friendship on (shared interests is the standard foundation of man-on-man friendship). But I think the more likely model is that I’ll have an event that fulfills these three criteria:

1. I invite a lot of people, including acquaintances
2. Is comfortable for attendees that don’t really know anybody
3. Is compelling enough that people attend despite the opportunity cost

Other people don’t seem to be involved in events that fulfill #1 (I don’t get invited to many events unless they need bums-in-seats). Since I’m actively working on this, I suspect #3 is where I’m failing. I’ve tried dinners at restaurants, park barbecues, daytime open houses and evening house parties – these tend to get low response rates from good friends and acquaintances alike, even when there’s free food.

Can you, dear readers, brainstorm event ideas that might fit those criteria? Or are we living in a narcissistic wasteland where nobody risks attending events that might not be fun?