Betty and Harold have been married for years. But one thing still puzzles old Harold. How

is it, he wonders, that he can leave Betty and her friend Joan sitting on the couch, talking, go out to a ballgame, come back, three and a half hours later, and they're still sitting on the couch.

Talking？

What in the world, muses Harold, do they have to talk about？

Betty shrugs. Talk？ We're friends.

Researching this matter called friendship, psychologist Lillian Rubin spent two years interviewing more than two hundred women and men. Like Betty and Harold, some were married, others single. They covered the gamut of what is chronologically called adulthood, twenty-five to fifty-five. They were blue collar, blue-blooded, and in between.

No matter their age, their occupation, their sex, their marital status, Rubin found the results were "unequivocal". Women have more friendships than men, and the difference in the content and the quality of those friendships is "marked and unmistakable".

More than two-thirds of the single men Rubin interviewed could not name a best friend. Those who could were 'likely to name a woman. Yet three-quarters of the single women had no, problem citing best friend, and almost always it was a woman. More married men than women cited a spouse as a best friend, most trusted confidant, or the one they would turn to in times of emotional distress. But even when a married woman named her husband to one of these categories, it was never exclusively his. "Most women," said Rubin, "identified at least one, usually more, trusted friends to whom they could turn in a troubled moment, and they spoke openly and ardently about the importance of these relationships in their lives."

In general, writes Rubin in her new book Intimate Strangers, "women's friendships with each other rest on shared intimacies, self-revelation, nurturance, and support." By contrast, "men's relationships are marked by shared activities." For the most part, Rubin contends, interactions between men "are emotionally contained and controlled-a good fit with the social requirements of manly behaviour."

"Even when a man claimed a best friend," Rubin wrote, "the two shared little about the interior of their lives and feelings." Whereas a woman's closest female friend might be the first to urge her to leave a failing marriage, "it wasn't unusual," Rubin discovered, "to hear a man say he didn't know his friend's marriage was in serious trouble until he appeared one night asking if he could sleep on the couch."

Women have more friends than men do,______.

A．but they have less intimacy in their friendships than men

B．but women rarely form. friendships with men

C．and women are more open with their friends than men

D．but women's friendships are more short-lived than men's