Men and Women: Just Friends?

With all the recent talk in class about relationships and dating, you have to mention the relationship between a man and a woman who are “just friends”. The relationship between a man and a woman is a complicated one, especially when there is sexual tension; and the idea of whether men and women can be “just friends” is something that’s so prevalent and comes up for debate so often that we see it all throughout popular culture.

This article, by Adrian Ward, details just how complicated this relationship between the two genders is when it comes to platonic friendships. The article focused on specifically how men and women who were friends view one another. They found that most of the miscommunication between the two was due to different views on the potential for something romantic in opposite-sex friendships. And this ties into one of the challenges of cross-sex friendships we discussed in class: sexual challenge. This challenge deals with the sexual tension between friends through miscommunication or complete lack of communication over the topic. Men in general were more attracted to their female friend counterparts than vice versa; and as simply stated by the article: “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.” And this relates to the emotional bond challenge. Men who are in cross-sex friendships attribute their emotional bonds more closely to a romantic vein than women and incorrectly attribute these feelings.

Another challenge is the public presentation challenge noted in this other article by Dr. Dylan Selterman.  This only adds to the miscommunication of cross-sex friendships due to false outward perceptions by others about the friendship. When others see the friendships, they can mistakenly assume they are in a relationship and causes problems: the male is more likely to see this as enforcing his belief of reciprocal feelings from his female friend while she denies anything, which can understandably result in confusion.

But through all these difficulties with cross-sex friendships, those that have them are ultimately in the end better off than those who don’t. Selterman states that opposite-sex friendships provide insight into the mind of the opposite sex that same-sex friendships cannot. You can learn so much more about the opposite sex by being friends with them and their complementary viewpoints. Not only that, opposite-sex friendships broaden horizons for networking and romantic partners compared to those who only have same-sex acquaintances.

So, opposite-sex friendships, even though challenging to maintain and confusing to understand, is worth it if the work is put into it. It’s not impossible for men and women to “just be friends” and can be an important friendship in your life. And who knows, maybe it can turn into something more than that.