Friends

In a movie made in the late 1980s called When Harry Met Sally, Billy Crystal's character (Harry) operates under the assumption that men and women can't be friends. His hypothesis is proven correct when Sally (Meg Ryan), who started out as his friend, eventually sleeps with him, and then after some more time, goes on to marry him.

Many people in the past, as well as today, will agree with the idea that men and women can't be friends. After all, a friend is someone you shop for a designer handbag with or you meet to go to the gym with in your Brampton condo, right? Or, they may qualify that by saying that a man and a woman can't be close friends (as in, sharing details about each other's lives, going out alone just to hang out, and so on). A recent article on the Psychology Today website (which also coincidentally uses the same movie reference - I didn't realize this until after I wrote my opening paragraph) states that this assumption is based on past sex roles; "women were at home and men were at work, and the only way the two could meet was romantically".

The thrust is that today, women are no longer just in the home, and the sexes tend to mingle a lot more than they used to. You see men and women working along side each other as everything from designing group collaboration software to selling homes for sale in Oshawa. Inevitably, this results in the formation of friendship. But is it real friendship, or will romance always get in the way?

Well, one way to make sure that a valued friendship stays a friendship is to do what probably led to the start of the relationship in the first place: talk things out. Sexual attraction can spring up out of nowhere, and part of the demise of many good male and female friendships comes from the fact that the two people involved try to hide it. One person feels embarrassed, the other starts to feel possessive, and the friendship starts to deteriorate.

Most (the figure in the PT article is 62%) male female relationships have some degree of sexual tension. Interestingly, men tend to feel that sexual attraction is part of the reason for striking up the friendship in the first place, although with time they say that attraction "deepens" into friendship. This counterweights with the feelings of women, who believe the sexual tension within a friendship is something that can get in the way and even get annoying.

So, if you are in a friendship type of relationship with a member of the opposite sex, it is likely that at some point attraction was an issue. Is it still? Well, if you think it might be there is only one thing to do, and that is ask. The answer will certainly help both parties define just how strong their friendship is. On the other hand, if you feel like there has never been a sexual element, that is certainly not impossible. A friend can be just a friend, whether it's someone whose strainer you borrowed when you first moved into your Toronto condo rental or someone who grew up next door to you in one of the many Oakville Homes.

In fact, getting the attraction issue out of the way has proven to strengthen friendships, albeit under strict circumstances (the people were friends in the first place, they were unattached to someone else, and so on). This was a surprising result of a survey conducted among college students, 67% of whom reported a sexual relationship with a friend. Over half of those intimacies did not go beyond the friendship stage afterwards. But all the scientific research in the world can't define each relationship.

The only way to get rid of romantic tension in your friendship is not to spend a night together coming up with some new secrets to talk about; often, a realistic exploration of each other as romantic companions can achieve the same results. You can do this without being mean and odds are it will strengthen your friendship. If there is tension in your male-female friendship, and it's one you value, then it is worth talking out.

The information cited in this article can be found here.