Can men and women ever be just mates?
CAN MEN AND WOMEN truly ever be platonic friends? Ooph. It’s a big, complex question — one that couldn’t even be comprehensively answered in 10 whole seasons of the TV show Friends. My optimistic answer is yes. Yes, but with a caveat: it is likely that at some stage in your friendship, you will have to address the prospect of romance or sex. Even if you, the actual individuals involved in the friendship, can make it through years without hooking up, society will ultimately demand to know the exact nature of your relationship. You can protest as much as you like — ‘but he’s like a brother to me’, ‘I just don’t think about her that way’, ‘we’re genuinely just mates’ — but eventually someone in your lives will want to know why you haven’t bumped uglies. And let’s be honest, by that stage you’ve either already thought about it, or done it. At the very least, you assessed your buddy as a possible romantic partner and/or shag when you first met them. It’s what we’ve been programmed to do, as a species (always blame evolution). Even if you dismiss them as a sexual prospect straightaway, you end up spending all this time together and if you’re the right sexual orientation, you’re single and they’re single, a little ‘what if’ will creep in at some stage. Our social conditioning to think of humanity as an almighty pool of romantic possibilities is extremely strong; a platonic friendship is basically an act of rebellion between two beautiful renegades who don’t need an evolutionary reason to hang out.
This chapter, like all the others, required me to talk to scientists, psychologists, my mates and strangers from the Internet. Obviously it was also mandatory for me to watch When Harry Met Sally. For the time being, I’ve focused on heterosexual pairings of opposite-sex friends because I wanted to investigate whether sexual attraction interferes with friendship, but I want to make special mention of the beauteous love between other combinations of people, too. One of the reasons straight men and women have such trouble being friends is there’s a level of potential threat there, like the sexual possibility between them affects the authenticity of a friendship and even, in some cases, can make someone feel unsafe (see: the anger with which the term ‘friend zone’ is used by men to punish the women who made the perfectly reasonable decision not to sleep with them for an indication of how charged the friendship-or-intimacy dilemma can be). Whereas, between a woman and a gay man for instance, there’s often a sense of peace because that sexual possibility simply isn’t present. The friendship is left to grow on its own terms, quite liberated from any consideration of sexy times. Instead, there’s an implicit trust there, a sense of kindred safety. The same, I assume, is true of the friendships between gay women and straight men, or straight women and gay women, or gay men and straight men. Where there is no prospect of mutual sexual attraction, it can be easier to nuzzle into a new friendship and stay there. Not to mention there’s a sweet sort of alliance between people who don’t fall into the straight male category because there is the shorthand of knowing what subjugation feels like. I will love my darling gay friend Andre forever and a day and we definitely talk about sexuality, as well as every other facet of our lives, but it’s simply never been something that’s impeded or defined our friendship. We have been free to build our friendship on things like love, our lifelong allegiance to Britney Spears, takeaway Thai food, pink fizzer sweets, travel, advice, lying in the sun, cocktails, sleepovers, movie marathons and whispered (or WhatsApped) confidences. We are free from the complications that might arise from me, say, trying to be friends with a straight guy I kissed once.
For this chapter, I spoke to a number of surprisingly willing participants and they generously offered me a glimpse into their psyches — and for that I am extremely grateful. But I hardly thought it was fair for me to get away scot-free in the course of my own research. They say you must suffer for your art, and so I decided to interview one of my best straight male friends about whether we’ve ever fancied each other — knowing full well that we have.
It’s the kind of conversation that should happen over several wines. It’s not generally advisable to discuss matters of the heart/loins with one of your oldest mates without some sort of Dutch courage. But, as it is, my friend Bernard (I let him choose his own pseudonym and he identifies with Dylan Moran’s drunk Irish alter-ego, Bernard Black) lives 13,500 kilometres away from me and the time difference is 11 hours, so it’s breakfast time for me when we Skype. He, being the guest in this interview and it being night time where he is, is allowed to drink a big old glass of red. I’m not allowed any such social lubricant, which makes me a little nervous, to be honest. We’re extremely open with one another, Bernard and I, but we’ve never sat down to discuss the nature of our friendship before. If you’ll excuse our delusions of nobility for a second, we did it for every man and woman who’s ever had to defend or question their platonic friendship.
So I start our conversation by pointing out that Bernard and I have been friends for 16 years. We’ve been friends longer than we haven’t been friends, I say, with the sort of pride most people reserve for professional achievements or lifetime milestones. He’s not surprised; my friendship style is heavy on nostalgia and I like to frequently remind people how long we’ve been hanging out. He’s probably had a relatively recent update. But it does, for the purposes of our story, take us back to the age of 13. Bernard was a total cherub, as I remember: chubby with a Celtic afro and a lovely intellect, sucking on a joint at every possible moment and managing that teenage shyness that tries its hand at bravado in the company of the opposite sex. His first date was with a friend of mine, and she turned up at the movies with an entourage of at least eight girlfriends. These were not sophisticated times for romance. Bernard and I both went to single-sex schools, so we accumulated friends of the opposite sex by chance and liaised almost exclusively through MSN Messenger. At the time, I was seeing my very first boyfriend, whose main attraction was the fact that he was on his school debating team, like me. We flirted via predictive text on our Nokia 3310s as only high-school debaters could: with a deeply unsexy but very logical banter that bordered on being argumentative. Bernard, as he tells me now, couldn’t understand why I had chosen to feverishly make out with this debater guy instead of him. Bernard wanted a relationship with me, which I find really interesting because I’ve never really thought of Bernard as a relationship kind of guy. I think his criteria for a teenage crush was fairly basic at the time: I could maintain a satisfactory level of banter with him at parties and I wasn’t hideous to look at. It sounds as though he chose me relatively arbitrarily as an adolescent fantasy, or a way of testing out what it might be like to be with a girl without the bother of actually having a relationship.
For my part, I thought of Bernard as a close friend. He was funny and smart and I enjoyed having him as my confidant. I liked being in his company. He was, for many years, my authority on the male perspective, in that sweet way young people think talking to a couple of guys might provide insight into the entire experience of masculinity. I followed up my debater with my next boyfriend, a childhood best friend who had such cool taste in music and movies that I lied to him about every piece of pop culture I’d ever consumed. Bernard was still there, on the periphery, as a friend. It suited me to tell myself he didn’t have feelings for me because that way I got to keep him as a buddy.
By the final year of school, though, something changed. We were both single and Bernard had started wearing tank tops. I’d had my braces taken off and tentatively started feeling like a woman. He started looking like a man (he would continue, for some years, to behave like a boy). I noticed his biceps / plausibility as a romantic partner and we started being more flirtatious with each other. We ended up kissing one night — and we agree now that alcohol must have been involved in the incident. Neither of us had the kind of confidence required to touch lips with another person while sober, particularly someone you’ve called a buddy for years. As we confirm in this Skype call, it happened on a sofa at a house party, while the host was in the bathtub with a friend of Bernard’s. It was right in front of all of our friends and I’m pretty sure there was even someone sitting next to us on the sofa. We had no standards or illusions of privacy; we just made out in that awkwardly exhibitionist way teenagers do when they’re too young or too shy to actually get a room to kiss in. Later, Bernard would say that kissing me was ‘like putting my face into a festering wet mop’. He doesn’t remember saying it and insists it would have been his way of diffusing the tension between us. I must have retaliated; I think I told him that kissing him was like ‘making out with a sweat patch’. That was our way of making things normal again.
For three days after the kiss, we didn’t know what to do. Were we meant to date now? Could we pretend it didn’t happen? Did this mean we liked each other? For Bernard, it was what he’d wanted for a long time. For me, it was a new prospect with an old friend. But something was getting in the way: our friendship. As Bernard tells me, he’d spent years wanting to be with me, then when he got me, he didn’t know what to do next. I had no idea either. We kind-of wordlessly agreed not to do anything about it. It went unsaid (until this call), but we actually preferred our friendship to whatever future kisses we could have had. We’d become really close, we were allies, we shared secrets and we talked about everything and anything. Our friendship had become too important to risk on a possible romance. Bernard was not used to being in relationships and assumed, probably quite accurately, that I was prone to getting into quite serious ones despite my age. There was one particularly enthusiastic hug on a main road in Sydney many years later that made me think, ‘Is there something here?’ but apart from that Bernard and I never really entertained the idea of being together again. Not least because, by this stage, we’d spent too many years being honest with each other about what we wanted in a relationship and our expectations did not match, oh no, not at all. We drunkenly agreed to get married if we happen to be the last two unmarried people we know, and that agreement stands, disastrous as it could be. Other than that, any attraction between us just naturally disappeared and where it once was, now there’s just this lovely, close friendship. If anything, we know each other too well now to think of each other romantically. I know all his sordid stories and he knows mine. We’ve become close enough to rule each other out as romantic or sexual options. We know exactly what the other person would be like in a relationship and we politely decline, thank you very much.
As it turns out, that’s actually a pretty standard trajectory for a platonic friendship. There are a few academics who study this kind of friendship, and I tracked them down. First, I spoke to Dr Heidi Reeder from Boise State University in the United States, after reading her paper, ‘I Like You . . . as a Friend: The Role of Attraction in Cross-sex Friendship’ in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Reeder interviewed 20 sets of male–female best mates to find out how they felt about each other, then followed that by giving 231 college students a questionnaire about their close platonic friendships. She identified four different types of attraction between these pairs of people: romantic attraction, friendship attraction, objective sexual attraction and subjective sexual attraction. Romantic attraction is self-explanatory. Friendship attraction is obvious. Objective sexual attraction is covered by the phrase ‘I can see how other people would find him cute, but I’m not personally attracted to him’ or ‘I think she’s beautiful, but I just don’t feel anything sexual towards her’. It’s the acknowledgment that someone might be objectively attractive, but they just don’t do it for you. Subjective sexual attraction is when you are specifically, actively attracted to that person. Bernard and I have, at various times, felt all four types of attraction but we’ve finally settled into the most convenient combination: objective sexual attraction and friendship attraction (I acknowledge that Bernard does not aesthetically offend me and suspect some women find him quite attractive — I’m just not one of them. He, similarly, admits I am not repulsive, but does not personally fancy me).
The results of Dr Reeder’s research are very satisfying in the sense that, when you hear what they are, you feel as though you already knew them to be true. Forty per cent of her subjects said they became less sexually attracted to their friend over time, which certainly makes things easier. That tends to happen in romantic relationships too; that first flash of intense sexual attraction settles into something more comfortable and familiar. Only 20 per cent of the study said they got more sexually attracted to their friend over time, which is a bit awkward, but not insurmountable if it’s not reciprocated. Thirty-nine per cent of people said romantic attraction towards their mate decreased; only 8.7 per cent said it increased.
Dr Reeder says a whopping majority of the people she spoke to made a real point of being clear they didn’t want their friendship to become romantic. A number of them gleefully pointed out the flaws in their friend that they thought made them undesirable as a romantic partner, and I particularly love that. It supports my theory that the better we get to know someone in a friendship capacity, the less likely we are to think of them as a prospective partner — because we know too much. What makes an unsuitable partner can make a fabulous friend, and I love that our flaws belong somewhere. Bernard, for example, is mischievous and wild in a way that makes him great fun as a friend, but my idea of a total nightmare to date. Similarly, I bet he’s seen sides to my personality or quirks in my behaviour that make me undateable to him — and that’s the glory of friendship. Where we might start out trying to impress our romantic partners with all the loveliest elements of who we are, there’s something less filtered about friendship. We’re free to be our full revolting selves earlier on, and I think we all need that safe space to be fallible and weird.
Also, with regards to cross-sex friendships, I feel it’s often difficult to move someone between the genres of relationship in your life: once they’re a friend, they’re likely to stay a friend. We have mental categories for people and despite what romantic comedies would have us believe, it’s not easy to mess up our internal filing system. The exception to that rule is all the married couples who say they started out as best friends, but I’m inclined to think their backstory is more complex than a wedding or engagement party speech will tell. They’ve been through different forms of attraction, too, they just happened to land on romantic attraction at the same time.
And now we get to the good bit in the argument for cross-sex friendship: 71 per cent of Dr Reeder’s study group said friendship attraction got stronger over time. Only 18 per cent said their friendship attraction faded and that seems to largely be covered by people who don’t actually like one another and should probably stop hanging out. So, like what happened with me and Bernard, sexual attraction seems to diminish as friendship attraction strengthens. Time tends to dull romantic attraction and platonic affection ultimately replaces it. Which sounds as though it is entirely possible for men and women to be friends without having some kind of ulterior sexual agenda. Either they weren’t attracted to each other in the first place, or they just have to try something sexual and move on, or wait it out until the attraction naturally dissipates. Dr Reeder says friendships are a safe space where men and women can see one another as ‘not just mates or objects, but comrades and pals’. I like this very much. As a society we’ve always spoken about romantic love as being ‘more than just friends’ and I’ve always taken issue with that hierarchy of emotional connection. Cross-sex friendships can be important and elucidating. They’re also a product of increasing equality between the sexes.
But before we get to feminism, I’d like to talk about the sex thing for a little longer. It is a relief to me to find that sexual attraction wanes over time, because that does enable platonic friendship. But what of the people who don’t wait for the disappearance of chemistry? What of the ones who act on their initial attraction? That is, what happens when friends actually have sex? In a Penn State University study of 300 college students, 41 per cent admitted to having sex with a friend. Of that saucy group, 56 per cent said the relationship did not become romantic, which hints at that other relationship I haven’t mentioned yet: Friends with Benefits. There are certain people who are capable of being friends and having sex without it developing into a romantic relationship or a soul-crushing mismatch of feelings. I’m personally extremely sceptical of the Friends with Benefits arrangement because, to me, friendship and sexual chemistry make a romantic connection, and the decision to have sex but remain friends seems like a way of copping out of an actual relationship. That, and I’m just not convinced you can truly go back to being buddies after you’ve seen each other naked.
But, I could be wrong. In that same study, 67 per cent of people said sex improved the quality of their friendship. Sixty-seven per cent! Even the researchers were shocked by that result. It leaves me flummoxed because it goes against everything we think we know about the way this kind of friendship works. How many times have you heard of people abstaining from sex with a friend because they didn’t want to risk losing the friendship? What if, all along, the answer has been to shag and then get on with our lives? Maybe it really does make for better friendship if you’ve eliminated the sexual prospect and therefore any tension between you. Perhaps that’s why it’s possible to be friends with an ex. There’s another controversial incarnation of friendship that I believe in — friendship with an ex. I’ve made it a strong policy in my life to be friends with ex-boyfriends and with the exception of a few who didn’t really mean enough to keep around, I genuinely have remained friends with the people I once loved. It’s something I’m quite proud of, to be honest, like it’s an achievement to salvage something from a broken relationship. That doesn’t work for everyone — I think where there is still anger or resentment or even proper love, it may not be possible to stay buddies with someone who once had your heart. As my dad would say, ‘Matters of the heart, sweetheart, there’s nothing like them.’
I continue to find it fascinating that people tend to take a strong stance on the matter of friendship between men and women. Most people I’ve spoken to about the subject are vehement about their position either way, and I’m yet to speak to someone with a tepid view on the issue. It’s funny, really, that a particular type of friendship is something we believe in, or not.
My stepmother doesn’t believe in friendship between men and women. Just flat-out, straight up doesn’t think it’s a legitimate thing. She says inevitably one person will have feelings of a romantic or sexual nature towards the other and that will disqualify them from being friends. She’s not alone — a lot of people are very hardline on this topic. They tend to be the same people who say you can’t be friends with an ex and they do not like it when I put a personal joke on their boyfriend Charlie’s Facebook wall. The non-believers are essentially saying sexual attraction cancels out friendship and romantic fantasy makes it void. Wherever saucy fantasies lie, there can be no friendship.
But what if sexual attraction doesn’t preclude friendship? What if two people have mismatched desire for each other but are nonetheless loyal, kind and supportive of one another? Are they not friends? People in love are allowed to be friends, so we can’t say that friendship and attraction are mutually exclusive. We just, for whatever reason, get very caught up on this idea that you can’t fancy someone and be friends with them at the same time. Which, to me, seems limiting. I’ve fancied friends before, but staying ‘just friends’ with them has been a matter of circumstance, choice and discipline. Maybe they’ve been in a relationship, maybe I have been, maybe they’re wildly undesirable as an actual partner, but happen to be quite cute. Like monogamy is a conscious choice in a relationship, friendship can be something you opt into with a certain person. It’s another story altogether if one person is hopelessly in love with the other and it’s not reciprocated; I’m just talking about chemistry between two people. I could give you a list right now of people who have fancied each other and still had functional friendships, but I’d have to give them pseudonyms and that’d take the fun out of it a bit. My point is, why are we so insistent that attraction and friendship can’t co-exist? Why do we keep asking the question, ‘Can men and women be friends?’ when there’s evidence all around us that they can be?
Perhaps it’s because we haven’t had much time to think about the concept of male–female friendship. In the grand scope of existence, I mean. Friendship between a man and a woman is a relatively new phenomenon. For 99 per cent of human history — or, until 10,000 years ago — we were nomadic foragers fighting to survive. Primitive women hung out with their family and the man who impregnated them, and that was it — girlfriend had neither the time nor the instinct to befriend men just for the fun of it. Since then we’ve been segregated by sex in just about any historical context you care to name. Same-sex friendships have always been the primary type of friendship because, at first, we needed to make those connections to survive and later because social protocol said we had to. Practically speaking, where exactly would a lady in ancient times have met a prospective male friend? Could a medieval lass have escaped the restrictions on her gender long enough to make buddies with a man who was not a suitor? Would it have been proper for an unmarried man and woman to just hang out with one another in Victorian times? The very idea of friendship between a man and a woman throughout history is either laughable or dangerous. Indeed, in some cultures, it still is.
As recently as the 1950s, it would have been rare for a woman to have a friendly relationship with a man. Now, 80 per cent of adults have or have had a close cross-sex friendship. The advent of these types of friendships is partly to do with logistics. Since women have had access to education, gone to university and ended up in the workplace, they’ve actually been physically in the same place as men, which makes it a hell of a lot easier to befriend some.
Feminism has created a favourable environment for friendship between men and women. Aristotle believed friends must be peers and that any imbalance of power negates the friendship because one person always has something to gain from the other. If old mate Aristotle believes friends must be equals, then he’d probably be quite surprised to discover men and women can be friends now. Our work on gender equality is far from done, but we have come a long way in terms of levelling out the disparity in social status between men and women. Now cross-sex friendships can start on somewhat even ground. And where things are not yet equal — with regards to the gender pay gap, the pension gap, the burden of motherhood, the underrepresentation of women in power positions and various industries, the unfair division of domestic work and childcare etc. — women should now be able to depend on their male friends to lend their weight to the fight. A man who doesn’t actively want equality between the sexes ain’t no friend at all, and while I believe feminism as a movement belongs to women, with this relatively modern phenomenon of male–female friendship, I’d hope we’ve gained some allies in the battle. I truly think we disseminate ideas most powerfully friend to friend, and I like to think of all the fabulous women passing on feminist ideals to their male buddies.
And that’s the beauty of friendship between men and women: the glimpses you get into the other’s existence. Having one lady buddy does not make a man an expert on feminine existence, but it sure as hell helps. A woman with a man pal doesn’t have an authority on male experience, either. But I can only see that talking and hearing about different gendered experiences would breed compassion. Studies show that young boys behave entirely differently in a group of other boys to how they would in mixed company. With other boys their very maleness becomes exaggerated, they are more aggressive, more likely to take risks and generally more abrasive. Female company has a calming effect on boys, just as male company can have a galvanising effect on girls. Girls, left to their own devices, will chat, trade secrets and play games that generally amplify their gender roles. Growing up, we’re mostly socialised to stick to our own gender for friendship, but as teenagers and adults we start collecting members of the opposite sex as friends, and that broadens out our social circles beautifully.
I did a call-out on Twitter for people who have good friends of the opposite sex, and got an impressive response. Stories of male–female besties trickled into my email inbox and Twitter newsfeed for days. Obviously, having people self-report their friendship with someone of the opposite gender means they inherently believe in that type of friendship, so I don’t pretend my investigation into this matter was in any way quantitative or comprehensive. I simply chatted to a bunch of people about their friendships and it was a jolly lovely thing to do. Here’s what I discovered. There are a few mitigating circumstances that tend to make friendship between a man and a woman easier. One is when the man or woman is gay, which takes the sexual possibility out of the equation. Another is when the guy and the girl have grown up together and it’s more of a sibling relationship so the sex thing is totally off the cards and they just continue blissfully insulting one another like family members. And it seems to work between people who are determined to make it work. One man I spoke to — let’s call him Ray — had very serious feelings for his friend — let’s call her Rachel — when they first met at university, but she didn’t reciprocate. In response, rather than abandoning the connection between them altogether, Ray became doggedly committed to keeping Rachel as a friend so she would still be in his life. ‘When you get involved in a romance, you create more ways to lose a person,’ he said. And although I suspect he may have been infatuated with Rachel for longer than he admitted to me or in fact told her, he is now in a relationship with someone else and continues to cherish the friendship. This leads me to believe that, where there is emotional transparency as opposed to clandestine love, there is the possibility for real friendship.
I should say, though, that at the very end of our conversation, Ray mentioned he still thinks about what it would be like to kiss Rachel. When they have a few drinks together, sometimes they talk about it. Does that still count as friendship? Or have they entered a weird grey zone with the sort of sexual ambiguity that would give Ray’s girlfriend the jealous shivers? Does Ray still hope something will happen between them? I asked, he said no, I suspect yes. Perhaps he’s no longer in love with her, perhaps there’s simply some residual lust or even the frustration that he’s been rejected in the past and to be with Rachel would be validation of some kind for him. That harks back to the most common argument we hear against the legitimacy of male–female friendship: that the man ultimately can’t engage in a proper friendship with a woman because he can’t control his sexual impulses.
If men are routinely accused of holding out hope for something sexual with their female friends, then women are just as often accused of keeping a man on standby in case they don’t find a better romantic option. I spoke to women who said they’d happily marry their best mate, but only if they get to an arbitrary age like 35 or 40 and find themselves still single. I spoke to women who like to keep their flirtatious male friend around as a self-esteem boost, no matter what effect that might have on him. I spoke to people of both sexes who enjoyed the slight sexual tension in their friendship and actively wanted to preserve it. A study by evolutionary psychology professor April Bleske-Rechek found that men are more likely to believe their female friend is attracted to them and to generally be more cognisant of sexual tension between them. Whereas women who didn’t ‘feel that way’ about their male friend assumed said friend was not attracted to them either, which certainly makes it easier for them to continue the friendship. It’s almost as though women are defter with the concept of platonic friendship . . . Or that we wilfully deny suspicions that a man is attracted to us so we can keep them on as friends. I may have been guilty of this in my time.
American comedian Chris Rock did a stand-up bit in the ’90s about exactly this. He makes the argument that women get to have platonic friends, while men just have failed romantic prospects (as he puts it, ‘women they haven’t fucked yet’). He bemoans the existence of the ‘friend zone’ and suggests that women keep their male friends around just in case they can’t find a better romantic partner — as back-up, rather than as legitimate friendships in their own right. If you’d like his phrasing on that one, too, he calls male friends, ‘A dick in a glass case — in case of emergency, break glass.’ I’ll let you reminisce on your own experiences with male–female friendship and decide what kind of truth, if any, there is in Chris Rock’s take on the matter.
So, if we’re to believe the worst in everyone, men keep women as friends purely because they hope someday they’ll let their guard down and deign to sleep with them. Meanwhile, women keep male friends around on the off chance they won’t find a better romantic partner and, at a stage when they feel biologically desperate to settle down, they’ll go for the buddy who’s always been there. It’s a pretty stark way of looking at things, but has some truth, in that inglorious way comedy tends to confront us with our own uncomfortable realities. We will get to the way pop culture treats male–female friendship in a moment, but first, a few words on this idea of the ‘friend zone’.
The ‘friend zone’ is basically purgatory for a man who wants to shag a woman but ends up getting cast off as her buddy instead. Women can be put in the friend zone too, but culturally, men seem to have a more aggressive response to finding themselves there. There is no positive connotation to the phrase friend zone (even though it sounds like a frankly delightful place), and it’s always said with an eye roll or an empathetic sigh. To be ‘friend zoned’ is to be rejected as a sexual prospect and for some people, that’s the ultimate insult. For some men, friendship with a woman is the unforgivable rebuke. There’s plenty of offensive literature by Pick Up Artists (PUAs) on the Internet, instructing men to basically trick a woman into taking him on as a sexual partner. A frightening number of ‘how to get out of the friend zone’ articles recommend wearing down the woman’s confidence so she feels rejected, vulnerable and therefore interested, possibly enough to seek comfort in the form of sex. PUAs like the author of The Game, Neil Strauss, speak about the friend zone as if it is the worst possible outcome for a man, as though it is an affront to his masculinity and a sign of abject failure. It can be an extremely misogynistic conversation and I’d really rather not spend too much time repeating what men like him have to say. Suffice to say some men view women purely as sexual objects. To me, the friend zone is simply a figurative place people hang out in if a romantic relationship between a man and a woman is not possible, usually because one party just doesn’t feel the chemistry. It’s perfectly reasonable for a woman to decline a man’s sexual advances and, frankly, he should be so lucky to end up in the friend zone at all. Friendship between a man and a woman, as we have covered, can be perfectly lovely and important.
And yet. Pop culture tells us again and again that friendship between men and women is impossible. Romantic comedies have to be the greatest culprits because they’re specifically designed to make you see romance in everything, and perhaps the guiltiest rom-com is that rather fabulous Nora Ephron movie, When Harry Met Sally. It starts at the very moment when Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) first meets Sally Albright (Meg Ryan): it’s 1977 and they drive together for 18 hours from college in Chicago to New York, where they are both, separately, going to start their adult lives. They squabble most of the way — about death and naivety, sex and honesty, love and work. There’s chemistry there, if only the kind between a confident young man and the woman who has to tolerate his observations about life in a confined space. Harry is dating Sally’s friend at the time, but tells Sally that, objectively speaking, Sally’s an attractive woman. Sally takes this as a come-on and what follows is a now famous, acerbic little back-and-forth that perfectly sums up the main argument that men and women cannot be friends. Harry declares he and Sally can never be friends because, as it allegedly is with all men and women, his attraction to her cancels out their companionship. Sally is indignant, claiming to have several men friends without any sex being involved, and Harry informs her they all secretly want to have sex with her, essentially not making them friends at all, but lovers-in-waiting. Harry says it doesn’t matter that the woman doesn’t want to have sex with the man, that she just wants to be friends, because ‘the sex thing’ is already present and therefore the friendship is doomed from the start.
Despite Harry’s take on things here, he and Sally do eventually become friends. The third time they meet (serendipitously of course because this is a romantic comedy), they actually like each other and decide to go on a series of friendship dates. They hang out all the time, speak on the phone (landline — it’s the ’80s), go out to dinner and visit museums in a sweet little montage of platonic friendship. Both their best same-sex friends can’t understand why they’re not together; why would you spend so much time with someone if there isn’t a romantic pay-off? At this stage of the film, it could have been a delightful story about a platonic friendship 11 years in the making. It could have been a seriously great antidote to every other rom-com in the world. But, alas, no. Harry and Sally inevitably sleep together, he leaves quickly the next morning, she gets upset, they’re paralysed by their sexy mistake and they fall out of friendship. The film, even then, could still have been about an imperfect friendship. Instead, in the home stretch of the plot, it transforms from a perfectly erudite little fable about friendship into a love story. Oh, it’s lovely — this is Nora Ephron we’re talking about here, of course it’s lovely. It’s got all the trademarks of a romantic classic: frantic running across New York streets at night time, our lovers’ eyes meeting across the room at a glamorous party, the countdown to midnight on New Year’s Eve perfectly coinciding with a proclamation of love. It’s a great film, and Meg Ryan’s hair deserved an Oscar for its supporting role. But Ephron missed a chance to be revolutionary when she decided to write those two friends into a romance. We could have had an extremely rare tale of platonic friendship; instead we got another rom-com with a happy ending. Sorry to be such a Grinch about it, but I do wish Harry and Sally hadn’t ended up together. Their friendship was valid and moving as a standalone storyline, and it needn’t have all been foreplay for a romantic relationship.
Fiction has almost always matchmade its opposite-sex protagonists, presumably because romance is the most bankable outcome. The explicit friends-ending-up-together narrative happens in Cheers, The Office, Scrubs, He’s Just Not That Into You, No Strings Attached, Some Kind of Wonderful, Friends with Benefits, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton, Clueless, Spider-Man, The Ugly Truth, One Day, Starter for Ten and Love, Rosie . . . to name a few. We’re repeatedly being told our platonic friendships are not enough on their own; that they’re failed romances or a missed chance at love. The implication is that we’re all on a single-minded mission for romantic love and that any other story is not worth telling (the film and television rights to my 16-year friendship with Bernard are still available).
Just look at the statistics from the hit ’90s sitcom, Friends: two-thirds of the main characters end up romantically involved with another Friend. On a show ostensibly about friendship, we end up with several neatly resolved romantic endings. We started out the series with six friends — three men, three women. As it turned out, that was the perfect formula to tease out the minutiae of life as twenty-something adults trying to work out who they are. As one of the most lucrative TV shows of all time, it’s safe to say that it resonated. Over a decade, Friends played out just about every friendship scenario between its six main (conspicuously white, heteronormative) characters. We got the bromance between Joey and Chandler, the sibling relationship between Ross and Monica, the legacy friendship of Rachel and Monica, the college best-friendship of Ross and Chandler, the squad goals of the three girls, the bro code between the three boys, the friends-with-an-ex dilemma of Ross and Rachel, the unrequited love arc with Joey and Rachel, the slept-together-by-accident storyline with Monica and Chandler and the flirtatious but ultimately sexless friendship between Joey and Phoebe (and they may well have been paired off too, had Paul Rudd’s contract not been extended because he was so fabulous as Phoebe’s partner, Mike). The show lasted so damn long, the writers had to call on every possible incarnation of friendship to pad out the plot, and it was great telly. You won’t find anyone who has watched that show more than me.
But ultimately, if we look at the way the series ended, the majority of Friends had to end up together to satisfy us. Ross was always in love with Rachel, and they fell in and out of love with one another throughout the series, so I can forgive that one. It was one of television’s greatest will-they-or-won’t-they storylines and the messiness of their decision to have a baby and live together as friends for a while was surprisingly radical. But Monica and Chandler’s marriage was one of narrative convenience. Their romance was never plausible and their ending up together seemed to have been motivated more by what the writers thought people would rally behind than what would have made the most interesting story. Ideally, those two would have slept together drunkenly that one time and spent the remainder of the show making callback jokes to a very real, inherently funny scenario between friends. As it was, Monica ended up proposing unconvincingly to a fairly mediocre man with whom she was barely compatible (rather than marrying the loves of her life, Richard and his moustache). It was a plot device that put obvious romance before genuine friendship, and to me that seemed like a cowardly move on the part of the show’s creators. And if not cowardly, boring, which is almost worse.
That was eons ago in television years, though. More recently, we’ve actually had some rather sweet depictions of male–female friendship on TV, which might hint at our increasing acceptance of that kind of friendship. A couple of the best come courtesy of two television-dwelling goddesses of the highest order, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. Amy Poehler starred on a show called Parks and Recreation as Leslie Knope, glorious feminist queen and possibly the most enthusiastic local government employee to ever fictionally exist. She and her boss, a mustachioed man named Ron Swanson (played by Nick Offerman), are extremely close friends. There are no clues in either character’s personality that would suggest they might make good or even believable friends. She’s a ray of sunshine, he’s a cantankerous grouch. She’s a romantic, he’s a cynic. She likes waffles, he likes bacon. And yet, they develop a genuine friendship. There are moments of loyalty and solidarity between Leslie Knope and Ron Swanson that could make a person cry, they’re so good. They are capable of that urban myth: genuine, dependable and purely platonic friendship in spite of their biological differences.
When Leslie gets married, she asks Ron to walk her down the aisle. Ron is a manly man, a man of woodwork and meat products, a man of few words and even fewer emotional revelations, and yet, on the day of Leslie’s wedding, he makes possibly the longest sentimental monologue of his life: ‘You are a wonderful person. Your friendship means a lot to me. And you look very beautiful.’ Her response? ‘Okay, weirdo.’ They care about each other deeply but their most common way of expressing it is through insults, jokes and gestures. Which is typical, I find, of friendship with men. Compare that to the way Leslie treats her female BFF, Ann Perkins (played by Rashida Jones) and you have a neat demonstration of the difference between female–female friendship and male–female friendship. With Ann, it’s all compliments (‘Ann, you poetic and noble land-mermaid’), support (‘I believe in you, Ann’) and catchphrases about female solidarity (‘Uteruses before duderuses,’ ‘Ovaries before brovaries’). Ann amplifies Leslie’s femininity, where Ron brings out her brusquer, more traditionally masculine side. Leslie Knope has got her friendship situation sorted because she’s got both.
Meanwhile, Fey starred on a show called 30 Rock, as the head writer on a comedy sketch show based very much on Saturday Night Live. Her character, Liz Lemon, strikes up an unlikely but strangely authentic friendship with her boss, Jack Donaghy (played by Alec Baldwin). She’s a scrappy but talented career woman who lives in functional but endearing disarray; he’s a glossy, conservative mercenary who should logically be her nemesis. There is no obvious reason for them to get on. In fact, nothing about them is conducive to good, healthy friendship: there’s a power imbalance because he’s her boss, they’re opposed on virtually every political issue, they come from different backgrounds, they have no friends, interests or hobbies in common — and then there’s the matter of their being opposite sexes. And yet, they get each other, defend each other and need each other. Jack toughens up Liz’s resolve in life and Liz softens Jack’s misogyny. They find a way to be affectionate with each other in an asexual way (Liz: ‘It’s the hug plane coming in for a landing’; Jack: ‘Cleared for landing’) and have their own way of defining the terms of their relationship (Jack: ‘Our relationship is purely platonic, if Plato had an elderly, shut-in aunt’). They make each other better people and if that’s not a good rationale for male–female friendship, I don’t know what is.
Thankfully, Liz and Jack never hook up because that would be, frankly, ludicrous. Sure, they have technically touched lips one time, shared a bed and accidentally got married on a yacht because they misunderstood what a French man was saying, but there was never any real romance. It’s hinted at a few times, then vehemently rejected as a possibility. The writers of the show were too busy paying tribute to that strange, beautiful thing that can happen between a woman and a man when the time and circumstances are just right: friendship. Finally, blissfully, we are getting stories about male and female characters that realise the comedic potential of a platonic friendship.
And that, to me, is one of the most important traits of friendship between a man and a woman: comedy. My friendship with Bernard, now that we’re comfortably platonic, is a lot more brash than my friendships with women. We insult each other, tease each other and laugh openly at the other person’s life choices. If you could see what friendships were made of, ours would be a mishmash of personal jokes, high-school memories, shared history and gossip. We’ll openly criticise each other in a way that I just don’t do with women, because laughter isn’t the main currency of my female friendships. By the standards of any other relationship, I’m quite mean to old Bernard, and he can be to me. But it makes us laugh, and it works. I think it’s because we find each other ridiculous, in that way you sometimes just do not understand the opposite sex. It’s a perpetual eye roll. I also think we’ve quite deftly negotiated a compromise between a male and female version of friendship. He encourages me to interact with him in a more traditionally masculine way, with a lower maintenance emotional connection than I have with women. Whereas I would bet that he’s slightly more open about certain things with me and his other female friends than he is with some of his male buddies. That, and we’re more likely to gossip over brunch than most pairs of men are. He toughens me up and I soften him — that may not be the case with every friendship, but it is with ours. It’s a nice trade-off and now that we don’t fancy one another, he can actually give me dating advice from a dude perspective, which can be, ah, somewhat enlightening.
So, can men and women ever truly be friends? It’s a ‘yes’ from me. They can — but with probable complications. Let’s face it, sexual chemistry is persuasive and some people find it difficult to tame. I’d also say not everyone is made for friendship with the opposite sex. There are some people who, for whatever reason, whether it be an inability to control their sexual impulses or a hapless affection for someone they just can’t get past, are not destined to be proper friends with someone who arrived on this Earth with a different combination of chromosomes. Of course, if you don’t believe in the concept of friendship between men and women, you’re unlikely to practise any such friendships because it would be against your belief system. In some cultures, it’s simply not safe or wise to do so. And then there are men who believe that friendship with a woman would somehow threaten or diminish their masculinity, and women who just can’t tolerate male banter on a regular, voluntary basis. And that’s fine, but I do think they are missing out on something rather great and wonderfully unromantic between two people society would most likely prefer to see end up together. Like I said, people who befriend the opposite sex are evolutionary rebels and I salute them. The moral of the story, in both pop culture and real life, is that not every Harry has to marry his Sally. Not every Monica has to settle for a Chandler. Sometimes they could just hang out and shoot the breeze, making each other’s lives a bit more awesome without falling in love.