Recently I’ve been looking a lot at ads for people trying to find housemates. When I (hopefully) get a job I’m going to have to find somewhere to live, and rather than move into my own place and then try to find someone to share it with, I’m looking for a place already all set up with an open room. My criteria is pretty simple: I’d like somewhere that isn’t too pricey, with internet and cable TV, I’d like there to be some sort of public transportation to my workplace near-by, and I’d like my housemates to be male, or at least a combination of males and females.

I have no interest in living with only females. For most of my childhood my closest friends were all girls, but not always the same girls. I switched best friends about once a year. Ildiko and Summer moved away, Elizabeth ditched me for someone she found more deserving of her friendship; Nicole used me, betrayed me, and turned all my friends against me. Rebecca stayed behind in eighth grade while I moved on to ninth grade in a different school. When I got to high school my group of friends became slightly more co-ed, although it was still predominantly female. I ended up spending most of my time with my one close male friend and one female friend who was a self-proclaimed tomboy.

Here in college my closest friends are all male, and we’ve had a closer friendship than I’ve ever had with any of my close female friends of the past. I’ve been attributing this to that fact that I’m older now and able to have more mature relationships, and sometimes simply to bad luck and falling in with the wrong crowd in my younger days. However, according to the Associated Press, a recent study done at Brigham Young University has confirmed that the reason I get along better with boys is that girls are often inherently mean. This study found that, “girls as young as 3 or 4 will use manipulation and peer pressure to get what they want.”

So I’m not imagining it!

Researchers call this behavior relational aggression, and say that girls use it to maintain their social status, but until recently it was only recognized as a behavior of adolescent or older girls. In this study they asked 328 preschoolers which kids were more likely to start fights, which were the most popular and which were the most physically aggressive. They discovered that even in preschool there is a social hierarchy. I don’t remember preschool well enough to confirm whether or not this was occurring back in the 1980s, but as someone who has been working extensively with children for the past 10, and someone who was a child not so long ago, it doesn’t surprise me.

According to the Associated Press, co-author of the study, Craig Hart, said relational aggression can include such things as, “leaving someone out to telling their friends not to play with someone to saying, ‘I’m not going to invite you to my birthday party.'” In my past relationships with girls I have experienced all of that and more, and know many others who have as well. Although I have experienced conflicts with my male friends, I have never experienced anything quite like that. Even though someone may bother them I have never witnessed them deliberately leave someone out or hurt someone’s feelings without apologizing.

Granted, this is not the case with all males. Maybe I just found a particularly great group of guys. However, having experienced close friendships with people of both genders and compared them, the girls tended to be much cattier, and much more likely to deliberately hurt someone in order to teach her a lesson or gain power or control in a group. Furthermore, just as this type of aggressive behavior is found in some males it is also not present in some females. Although I have not had created any very close relationships with females in the past few years, I have certainly met some who were very kind to me and everyone that I saw them interact with. Although we did not develop an extremely close friendship, I saw the future potential for one, though given my past experience it would have taken some time for me to feel comfortable in the relationship.

So I’m willing to give girls a shot again and try a co-ed living situation once I find a job, but I’m not risking living with all girls. At least not yet, and not before I get to know them first. And it’s nice to know that all that “bad luck,” wasn’t just my imagination, wasn’t just me, and quite possibly wasn’t bad luck at all, but simply social scientific fact.