(cross-posted at Oh, You're a Feminist?!)
Can men and women be (just) friends?
I first began thinking about this question years ago after watching the quirky and timeless classic, When Harry Met Sally. The movie revolves around the idea that men and women can never be just friends because "the sex part always gets in the way." They try to navigate through the conversation by setting obscure rules like they can only be friends if both are in committed relationships because then "the pressure of possible involvement is lifted."
Aside from being a heteronormative question, assuming that all men are attracted to women, it is also a question engrossed in strict gender roles and stereotypes. For these two reasons I hoped this would cease to be debated in 2009, when apparently we live in a post feminist society where men and women are equal and free thinking... (that was snark if you couldn't tell).
Fast forward to today as I engaged in my sleepy morning let's-get-the-day-started routine, pouring coffee and turning on the often trite Good Morning America. In the segment I linked they too discuss this "timeless question" of an impossible platonic friendship between men and women. The segment was an obvious scheme to promote Steve Harvey's new book, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man (which i won't link because of the strict gender roles and stereotypes that even the title doesn't fail to perpetuate). For 'empirical evidence' GMA referenced a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that found that an opposite sex friendship can end in an affair 15% of the time. (emphasis mine.) What about the other 85% of the time? That sure doesn't seem like enough statistical evidence to back up the claim to me...
The whole "timeless question" leaves me more than prickly. It assumes that men can't think with their appropriate brain and that they are sexually attracted to every woman they meet. It also ascertains that women are 1) naive and 2) not sexually driven. This sort of thinking is damaging for men because it sets men up to be the ultimate perpetrators. They are always on the prowl and are singly sex minded. It promotes the idea that it's always a man's responsibility to get into a woman's pants and it's solely a woman's role to guard her virginity, pureness, sex, whatever.
For women it's a double whammy. Not only are women once again regarded as naive, helpless, and meek, doing whatever they can to protect their one and only precious commodity, but they are determined to not have the same sex drive that their male counterparts posses.
Continuing to think in the heteronormative way in which this question is presented, I think that mature and responsible men and women can absolutely have platonic relationships that don't deteriorate into a let's rip each other's clothes off and make passionate love in the bedroom situation. I think the dynamic between opposite sex friends has to be different, and that your partners have to be involved in the friendship (for example, it shouldn't be a secret friendship because that sets up a sketchy relationship from the beginning). But all in all, i think it is entirely possible for heterosexual men and women to have close friends of the opposite sex.
Readers, what do you think?
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I have to call bullshit on this idea as well. I've had platonic male friends my entire life. Sometimes there was some sexual attraction--on either side--but (excepting my husband) it never developed into anything, and eventually subsided from inaction. It's not like the friendships went away either--I still talk to male friends from high school on occasion, and we're as close as ever.
Anyone who thinks straight men and women can't be 'just friends' has no idea what they're talking about.
Frankly, I can't even get myself into the heteronormative mindset necessary to seriously consider this question. This is probably because I'm queer and, you know, whenever I think about this I wind up wanting to hire a skywriter/climb up on a rooftop with a megaphone somewhere to go "HI I AM NOT ATTRACTED TO MEN OKAY".
I personally haven't had any close platonic friendships with men that didn't eventually become sexual (not that I think its impossible!), however this doesn't mean that the friendship became "degraded".
also, in some of those cases, we were platonic friends for several years before things ever became sexual. The fact that it became sexual later doesn't change that.
To be totally truthful, I'm a man and most of my friends are female. At times, with some, there is a degree of mutual sexual attraction between the two of us. Sometimes, I'm attracted to her and she's not attracted to me. Sometimes she's attracted to me and I'm not attracted to her. Sometimes, for whatever reason, the appeal is purely platonic in every way between us.
Again, stereotypes often end up sufficing for individual truth because of the ease of oversimplification. And if we advance a notion that each friendship between a straight or bisexual man and a straight or bisexual woman isn't necessarily dictated by some ulterior motive or sex, how do we keep others from selling into the stereotype? Some people just don't know enough or weren't raised to believe otherwise or don't have enough education to not embrace stereotypes, and through no fault of their own.
We are intelligent people and if the world around us was also full of thinking people, then I think issues like these would have been solved years ago.
I've had guys I was just friends with that were straight. But because of the belief that is impossible, it has caused much damage to my reputation. Most notably was when I first started at a new school. I made friends with this girl and then she introduced me to her boyfriend who I also became friends with. She was sick for a few days so I hung out with him. Rumors started that he was cheating with me and she believed them. So I lost a friend and got a reputation of a "boyfriend stealer."
Most of my friends are women. Sex hasn't gotten in the way in years.
You forgot the idea that women are attracted to men in relationships... its like they have already been quality checked and approved.
I think some go for people in relationships because they are insecure and it gives them that instant gratification of feeling like they are "one-up" on the person. I've seen guys do this too - so it's totally not something women only do. I know that my ex was totally insecure and whether he was in a serious relationship or not - he would try to sleep with me every time I was in a serious relationship (luckily I never caved)... but when I was single - he never tried.
My roommate's female. We're both single. Hooking up would be a godawful idea, but it's no problem because neither of us wants to.
I'm pretty much with Kevin on this. I had a ton of female friends growing up (not so much now, but not so many friends at all, really), and it wasn't unheard of for there to be some level of attraction one way or the other, or mutual. Even when it was mutual, it often didn't go anywhere because they always had boyfriends (damn the luck!). Nothing got screwed up by it because no one acted like sating our lusty hormones was the pre-eminent concern. And the friendships where we did hook up with to some degree weren't harmed because we took what happened and kept it in perspective.
It's really not that hard. It always stuns me when people act like it is.
You know, last year I would have said unreservedly that heterosexual men and women can be friends with none of that messy sexual or romantic stuff getting in the way. But the woman who was my best female friend is now my girlfriend, and numerous people in my circle of friends have "hooked-up" a few times... It's not that it's not possible to be platonic friends, it's just that it's not always easy to keep it that way if there is some form of attraction there.
I won't bore you with long anecdotes about how this stuff happened, but I think that you kind of have to want to stay vigilant against the emergence of sexual feelings if keeping an opposite-sex relationship platonic is important to you, otherwise it really can "just happen". I didn't plan it, I just remember being in her room one night as I'd been before, and I felt overwhelmed by an urge to kiss her. So I did, and we both liked it. But before then, every time somebody brought up the possibility of us being in a romantic or sexual relationship, I'd kind of raise an eyebrow and say "What? That's weird, she's my friend!".
In any case: Can men and women just be friends? I say Yes. Most the time.
Excellent piece and one I really really agree with.
I just want to question one little bit though: "I think the dynamic between opposite sex friends has to be different, and that your partners have to be involved in the friendship (for example, it shouldn't be a secret friendship because that sets up a sketchy relationship from the beginning)."
No friendship should be a secret friendship, we should be free to be friends with whoever we want. But I don't like the idea that the dynamic has to be be different. There is only this expectation problem because of this myth. If the myth is to be irradicated then we must feel free to interact with our friends in a natural way and not be bound up in trying to ensure that it is pervceived as platonic.
I say this as someone who lost a very important friendship, in no small part because I became paranoid that it might be perceived as not platonic. In the end I was badly affected by a mental illness that placed too much pressure on that friendship. But any non-professional (and even one of those) tried to imply that sexual tension was the problem and that I'd simply had my heart broken. This was decidely not the case. They simply couldn't compute that men and women could be very good friends, and that our feelings for one and other were not sexual. As you can imagine this was extremely unhelpful in treating the depressive illness I was suffering.
I have heaps of male friends and heaps of female friends. At one point I was attracted to one of my female friends, but nothing came of it because she is heterosexual. And it hasn't degraded our friendship one bit.
One of my very close male friends is an ex of mine. Hasn't degraded our friendship, we just realised that we didn't work as partners.
Honestly, a lot of my friends aren't what I look for in a partner, and besides, I'm not looking*. There's is nothing to say that men and women can't be friends. Especially if you don't consider male and female friends as somehow different. They're all just "friends" to me.
*whenever I try to think of what I look for in a man, my mind turns to LM and I can't think of anything else :P