You have a checklist as long as your arm when it comes to men, so why are you so unpicky with your mates?
Tanya Sweeney asks this very question.

I don’t understand why I can’t meet men when I can make friends with people at the drop of a hat,” complained a friend of mine recently. Most of us have felt her pain at one point or another, but she also did make a rather interesting point. When it comes to potential bedfellows, we have a checklist as long as Cher Lloyd’s eyelashes. Down to underwear preference, choice of Saturday night takeaway, and man-hours clocked on the Xbox, there’s not a tiny aspect of the men in our lives that goes unchecked.

Yet, when it comes to mates, we girls tend to be a lot more laissez-faire. We certainly don’t keep an eye out for potential pitfalls and red flags in our friendships the way we do in relationships. We put up with flakiness, lack of punctuality and neediness from our girlfriends in a way we never would from a boy. So what gives? Why is that we’re not so choosy when it comes to amassing friends? If boyfriends come and go, yet friends are for life, why do we put the former through their paces, while the latter get away with murder?

Our desire for a full and wide circle of friends stems from a number of variables. Shows like Mistresses and Sex and the City have conditioned us to believe that a gaggle of galpals is a marker of social success. That’s why

we keep amassing mates, and stress quantity over quality. Adding insult to injury, we think nothing of accepting friendships on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, resulting in a rather odd scenario whereby we have over 200 ‘friends’ that we know next-to-nothing about.

“I have what I call an A-list, and then a D-list when it comes to my mates,” says Rosemary, 27. “If you’ve earned your place on the A-list, by being a good and attentive friend, I’ll pretty much walk over hot coals all the way to Dingle for you. But then there are others who, for whatever reason, have not been dependable or fun to be with, or have become a bit toxic, and they get relegated to the D-list. It’s inter-changeable, so I like to think of it as a sort of spring clean, or a detox, for my group of friends. It’s about taking stock every so often to see who’s worth keeping in touch with, and who’s better off on the sidelines. And so the D-list and I just drift apart. Much easier than actually breaking up with a mate.”

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Picture courtesy of ONLY