Are platonic relationships possible between men and women?

I am fortunate to have lots of fabulous women friends, but it occurred to me the other day that I don’t have any men friends – and I miss that. When I was growing up in a suburb of Durban, in the days when it was safe to be on the streets, all of us kids in the neighbourhood played together. We knew the names of every child in the neighbourhood and usually the parents too. I went to a co-ed primary school and had male friends. In high school my best friend was an English boy. A group of us hung out together at each other’s homes, getting up to all sorts of mischief, but my special friend and I would sit on my stoep, he playing guitar, me singing and both sharing our innermost thoughts with each other. This all went pear-shaped one sunny afternoon when someone brought some cheap wine over, we all got totally blotto, and my best friend kissed me!

Since at the time I was dating a Canadian friend of his (who happened to be there), chaos ensued. My Canadian boyfriend punched my friend, who landed in a flower bed with his broken glasses dangling pathetically over his nose. He then stormed off down the garden path and out our gate (forever) and I helped my poor befuddled mate up, brushed off the dirt and bits of foliage and we kissed again! My dear friend then made an impassioned (albeit slightly slurred) speech about how he had loved me for years, during which period I, oblivious, had been systematically moving from one boy to each other in our incestuous little group of friends. At the ripe old age of 18 I was really confused because I definitely loved my friend – just not in THAT way! We were best friends, but after trying to “date” him for a week, our entire relationship was turned upside down and inside out. I knew it wasn’t going to work because there was no chemistry, no sizzle at all between us. We were destined to be friends, not lovers. I had to tell him, and of course, broke his heart and ruined our friendship.

My point is that there’s a fine line between friendship and love in male/female relationships, and unless you take the attraction element out of the equation (i.e. one of you is gay or lesbian) is it actually possible to have a friendship without at least one of you having an agenda - even if it’s hidden? It should be able to happen – I mean, a man and a woman may have lots in common, without having any physical attraction to one another. We should be able to have a platonic relationship that revolves around our mutual likes, while not having any romantic feelings for one another.

Personally, I think once our adolescent hormones have kicked in, platonic relationships require dedication, discipline, self control and great communication. Although there may be temptations in the relationship, talking about these openly and refraining from acting on them should be an obtainable goal. Interestingly though, quite a few of the men I asked about this topic believe that no man is friends with a woman unless they have some sort of ulterior motive. They felt that women are friends with men (for the most part) just for the companionship, but it is not the same for men.

A study done at an American university seems to corroborate this. Researchers brought in 88 pairs of opposite-sex university students into a Science Lab. Friendship pairs were separated and each person was asked confidential questions related to his or her romantic feelings (or lack thereof) toward the friend with whom they were taking the study. The results suggest huge differences in how men and women experience opposite-sex friendships.

Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. They were also much more likely to think that their female friends were attracted to them, a clearly misguided belief. It seems the men assumed that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual, and were blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends. Interestingly, women were also blind to the mindset of their male friends – because they were generally not attracted to their male friends, they assumed that this lack of attraction was mutual. As a result, men consistently overestimated the level of attraction felt by their female friends, and women consistently underestimated the level of attraction felt by their male friends.

Men were also more willing to act on this mistakenly perceived mutual attraction. Even though both men and women were equally attracted to romantically involved opposite-sex friends and those who were single, they differed in the extent to which they saw attached friends as potential romantic partners. Men were far more likely to pursue romantic dates with female friends, even if those female friends were romantically involved, whereas women were sensitive to their male friends’ relationship status, and not interested in pursuing their romantically involved male friends. These results suggest that men, relative to women, have a particularly hard time being “just friends.” The study also clearly showed that two people can experience and perceive the exact same relationship totally differently. Men seem to see myriad opportunities for romance in their supposedly platonic opposite-sex friendships whereas the women in these friendships seem to have a completely different orientation—one that is actually platonic.

One would think that these vastly different views about the potential for romance in opposite-sex friendships could cause some serious complications, and this does indeed appear to be the case. In a follow-up study, 249 adults (many of whom were married) were asked to list the positive and negative aspects of being friends with a specific member of the opposite sex. Although both men and women agreed that attraction between platonic friends is more negative than positive, men were far more likely than women to list romantic attraction as a benefit of opposite-sex friendships, and this discrepancy increased as men aged (younger men were four times more likely than females to report romantic attraction as a benefit of opposite-sex friendships, whereas older men were ten times more likely to do the same).

Taken together, these studies suggest that men and women have vastly different views of what it means to be “just friends”— and that these differing views have the potential to lead to trouble. Although women seem to be genuine in their belief that opposite-sex friendships are platonic, men seem unable to turn off their desire for something more.