Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn’t seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.

The remark contrasts stereotyped social styles of friendship: men are portrayed as maintaining bonds through roughness, teasing, and infrequent but resilient contact, while women are portrayed as investing friendships with greater emotional delicacy and expectation, making them more vulnerable to perceived slights. The “football” image suggests durability through use and even abuse; the “glass” image suggests beauty and care that can nonetheless shatter. Read critically, the line can be taken less as a biological claim than as an observation about gendered norms of intimacy and communication in the early-to-mid 20th century—how different scripts for expressing affection, conflict, and loyalty can shape whether relationships bend or break.