Everyone has at least one person of the opposite sex that he or she can count on. Think about your best friend of the opposite sex. The one you look at as your brother or sister and who you go to with all your problems for advice or comfort. You never think about that person in a sexual way and when someone mentions you two as a couple, you actually cringe thinking about it.
After “When Harry Met Sally” was released, people started questioning friendships between men and women. The infamous line, “Men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way,” is the pinnacle of this debate.
This morning I started to argue about this exact issue with a friend. As in “When Harry Met Sally,” he said that men and women couldn’t be friends and I completely disagreed with him. I have always had a ton of guy friends throughout my life. Some of my very best friends are males, and there have never been any romance or flirtations with any of them.
According to a poll by Psychologytoday.com, 83 percent of 1,450 people believed men and women can have platonic friendships. The traditional role of a woman staying at home and the man going to work made same-sex friendships more common. However, in modern society, men and women are constantly interacting together as equals whether it’s at work, school or even through common hobbies.
A friendship is one of the most important things you need for a real relationship. It’s healthy to be friends before you have a relationship. The problem is that the belief that men and women can’t be friends could lead to a bad relationship foundation.
Guys and girls can be friends if they are not attracted to each other. You don’t have to be ugly to have opposite-sex friends. My best guy friends are all great looking guys, but I am not attracted to them.
Although it’s harder to make and maintain male-female friendships when you are married, we should all be taking advantage of the fact that while we are in college we can have these friendships. It’s not only possible to have a close friendship with the opposite sex, but it’s important to help understand the opposite sex more.
The common stereotype is that women can be friends with a man, but a man only thinks about sex. When I asked many of my guy friends about this a lot of them said they had tons of friends that they didn’t think about in that way. Some of them said that they liked having girl friends they can go to with their dating problems because they couldn’t really talk to their guy friends about that kind of stuff.
Men who took the poll rated that they got more enjoyment overall out of their cross-sex friendship because men liked that they could talk to a women about emotional things.
Women said that they go to their female friends for that, but they still benefit by going to their male friends to talk about less sensitive topics. When I hang out with my male friends, it’s true. We mainly watch comedy movies and play videogames and I go to my girl friends for a good talk and a drink.
We always hear that men and women don’t understand each other. Maybe a cross-friendship would help that. It wouldn’t hurt to believe that people have intentions beyond romance.
Reach Lindsey at lskupfer@asu.edu
