Can men and women who are straight ever be “just friends”? Few other topics have sparked as passionate discussions, awkward family dinners, graphic literature, or memorable films. The query has not yet been resolved. Men and women live, work, and play side by side, and generally seem to be able to avoid accidentally falling asleep together, which shows that non-romantic friendships between the sexes are not only conceivable but also prevalent. However, there’s still a chance that this ostensibly platonic relationship is only a front, a complex dance masking many sexual urges boiling just below the surface.
According to recent research, although we may believe that we may be “just friends” with people of the other sex, the prospect of “romance”—or the perception of it—is frequently just around the corner, waiting to pounce at the most inconvenient time.
Researchers invited 88 pairs of undergraduate opposite-sex friends into a science lab to evaluate the viability of really platonic opposite-sex friendships, a topic that has been explored more on the big screen than in the science lab. For example, consider the repercussions if two friends realized that one—and only one—had romantic affections for the other throughout their friendship. Privacy was crucial. The researchers needed both friends to vocally and in front of each other promise to refrain from discussing the study even after they left the testing facility, in addition to following usual rules for anonymity and confidentiality, in order to assure honest results.
After that, these friendship pairings were broken up, and each participant in each pair was asked a series of questions on their love sentiments (or lack thereof) for the friend they were participating in the study with.
The findings imply significant gender variations in the friendships with people of different sexes that men and women have. Male friends of men were substantially more attractive than female friends of males. Additionally, males were more inclined than women to believe that their opposite-sex acquaintances were attracted to them, which is a demonstrably false assumption. In reality, men’s perceptions of their attractiveness to their female friends had little to do with how these women actually felt and a great deal to do with how the men themselves felt. In other words, men assumed that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual and were unaware of the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends.
Females were often not attracted to their male friends, therefore they felt that this lack of interest was shared by both genders; similarly, females were unaware of the thinking of their opposite-sex friends. As a result, men constantly overestimated how attractive their female friends found them, and women consistently underestimated how attractive their male friends found them.
Men were also more likely to take action as a result of this false mutual desire. Equally attractive to both sexes were their unmarried and romantically involved opposite-sex friends; regardless of their marital status, “hot” friends were hot and “not” friends were not. However, the perception of linked friends as prospective love mates varied between men and women. Women were considerate of their male friends’ relationship status and disinterested in pursuing those who were already involved with someone else despite the fact that men were equally likely to desire “romantic dates” with “taken” friends as with single ones.
These findings show that men have a harder trouble being “just friends” than women do. These findings are particularly intriguing because they were discovered within specific friendships (remember, each participant was only asked about the specific, platonic, friend with whom they entered the lab). This is concrete evidence that two people can perceive the same relationship in fundamentally different ways, defying clichés of sex-hungry men and gullible women. Men appear to find several chances for romance in their ostensibly platonic relations with people of the opposite sex. However, it appears that the women in these connections have a totally different orientation—one that is really platonic.
The opposite-sex community as a whole agrees that these radically divergent perspectives on the possibility of romance in opposite-sex friendships could lead to major difficulties. In a follow-up study, 249 individuals, many of whom were married, were asked to describe the advantages and disadvantages of having a particular opposite-sex acquaintance. Our connection could result in sexual feelings, for example, was five times more likely to be identified as a bad than a good characteristic of the friendship.
But even in this, there were distinctions between men and women. Males were significantly more likely than females to list romantic attraction as a benefit of opposite-sex friendships, and this disparity widened as men aged; younger males were four times as likely as females to report this benefit, but older males were ten times as likely to do so.
Together, these findings indicate that men and women have quite diverse ideas about what it means to be “just friends,” and that these contrasting ideas may cause issues. Women appear to really believe that friendships between opposite-sex individuals are platonic, whereas men are unable to suppress their yearning for anything more. Males are less likely than females to share this belief, despite the fact that both sexes generally concur that platonic friend attraction is more harmful than beneficial.
Can males and females be “just friends” then? Almost definitely, if we all thought like women. However, if everyone thought like a man, we would likely be dealing with a significant overpopulation problem.
