Friendship

Few other questions have provoked debates as intense, family dinners as awkward, literature as luridor movies as memorable. Still, the question remains unanswered. Daily experience suggests that non-romantic friendships between males and females are not only possible, but common—men and women live, work, and play side-by-side, and generally seem to be able to avoid spontaneously sleeping together. In order to investigate the viability of truly platonic opposite-sex friendships—a topic that has been explored more on the silver screen than in the science lab—researchers brought 88 pairs of undergraduate opposite-sex friends into…a science lab. Privacy was paramount—for example, imagine the fallout if two friends learned that one—and only one—had unspoken romantic feelings for the other throughout their relationship. In order to ensure honest responses, the researchers not only followed standard protocols regarding anonymity and confidentiality, but also required both friends to agree—verbally, and in front of each other—to refrain from discussing the study, even after they had left the testing facility. The results suggest large gender differences in how men and women experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. Men were also more likely than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to them—a clearly misguided belief.

We include products we think are advantageous for our readers. If you accept through links on this page, we may earn a small commission. Femininity and romance may come to attend to first, but intimacy plays a character in other types of relationships too! You might also be referring en route for the quality of the time you spent together.

This story is from The Pulsea glossy magazine health and science podcast. Steve Lehman was a college senior near Philadelphia when he started to realize a bite wonderful and terrifying. He was looking over at Katya Shipyatsky, a boss at a different, nearby school. He was afraid. But again, this was senior year, and life is abrupt. Things finally came to a advance one night as they finished examination a Bruce Springsteen documentary on Netflix. The Boss said something beautiful a propos life and love to end the movie. Both of them cried at the same time as the credits rolled, and she was struck by how moved he was.