Can men and women ever be just friends?
ROBYN SISMAN has written three best-selling novels about relationships - Special
Relationship, Perfect Strangers and Just Friends. An Oxford graduate, she lives in Somerset with her husband, biographer Adam Sisman, and their two children, Flora, ten, and Charlotte, eight. Here, she explains why she thinks men and women can never be just friends.
WHEN I started work at the age of 21, 1 had a friend called Adam. I was a paperback editor; be was a hardback editor. We were friends - nothing more.
I had a boyfriend in a different city; Adam had a girlfriend in a different city We used to fill in our spare evenings by going out together. We went to the pub, to films, to discos and restaurants. All just as friends. When he asked me if I was on the Pill, it wasn’t a come-on: only research for a book. Everyone knew there was nothing in it, even when they saw us dancing together. But it turned out there was something in It. In fact, Adam and I are now happily married, with two children. So, if you asked me the question can men and women ever be just friends, my answer would be: almost never. For a start, there is the very nature of friendship, which makes it too difficult for the different sexes to have meaningful, non-sexual relationships. Friendship demands trust and shared values. There’s too much distrust between the sexes, too much anxiety and insecurity on both sides for friendship to flourish. That’s because both parties know that there is always potential for a sexual relationship. They are never quite sure if the other person would actually prefer the relationship not to be platonic; and they are rarely open about their own feelings for fear of rejection and humiliation — and,perhaps, spoiling the friendship. SAMUEL JOHNSON said that men and women are so unsuited to each other that it takes all the forces society can muster to keep them together in marriage. The fact is that there is a permanent war between the sexes, and much of the skirmishing takes place in bed. Marriage is a truce, but it should not disguise the state of semi-permanent unease between sexes. Of course, many of those tensions are because of the innate sexual attraction between men and women. As the Channel 4 television programme Big Brother has shown, with the flirtations between the contestants, if you lock up a group of healthy, reasonably
That loving feeling:Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in the film “When Harry Met Sally”.
attractive, young people for any length of time, sex will become a factor. We may play it cool, but the biological fact is that we are born to have sex, and it takes all of society’s rules to stop us doing it in the street. We pretend otherwise. Men and women have been trying to deny their mutual attraction ever since Adam and Eve. Certainly it would be so much easier if they didn’t fancy each other. Think of the work and social tensions that could be avoided if men and women didn’t send out sexual signals. Yet, in the long term, sex is a force which cannot be resisted, only deflected. There are plenty of male-female friendships where both parties insist there is nothing sexual going on. But these men and women are in denial. Imagine, for example, going camping with a member of the opposite sex. Do you get changed in front of each other? Almost definitely not. But if you were the same
sex — and heterosexual, — it wouldn’t be an issue. That’s because there is a potentially sexual element to your relationship. And at night, as you lie next to each other in the dark, a man and a woman, can you honestly say that it doesn’t cross either of your minds that the other party might be hoping for more than just a good night’s sleep? Remember Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal In When Harry Met Sally? They try to be friends but discover that they like each other too much for comfort. Harry says at the outset that men and women can’t be friends, and Sally tries to prove him wrong. In this case - I’m sorry to say the man turns out to be right. This doesn’t mean there’s never a time when a man says he just wants to be friends and doesn’t mean it. But more often than not, the words ‘let’s just be friends’ are code for ‘I
don’t find you attractive’. The truth is - whether men and women want to admit it or not - that pure physical attraction exists and it is very powerful. Forget about brains, forget about a sense of humour - what all men are really interested in is sleeping with you. That’s why gay men are often a girl’s best friend. They can be impossibly handsome, even sexy, without being threatening or demanding sexually. With a straight man, on the other hand, even if you don’t fancy him there’s always a question in the back of your mind of whether he might desire you. And then you get to worrying that if he doesn’t, why doesn’t he? YOUNG people like to think they can be friends with everybody, they’re so idealistic they think that as long as everyone is nice to each other, everything will be all right. They also think they can sleep with anyone without making a big deal of it. But they will learn that not everyone can just have sex with someone and walk away with no repercussions. Aside from the matter of possible pregnancies, there is the matter of emotions being shaken. How can people do something as intimate as having sex and truly not care if they never speak to the other person again, and not feel some regret? Of course, everything changes when we become one half of a couple. Instead of trying to disguise our attraction to the opposite sex we can indulge it, albeit according to elaborate unwritten rules. Among us smug marrieds, dinner parties
are lubricated as much by flirtation as by alcohol. You can safely make eyes at the handsome man next to you, knowing that it is your husband who will be driving you home. Why else do we seat men and women alternately? It’s not dust to stop all the men talking together about sport, and the women about schools. Instead, we work up a little excitement by, as it were, having a bit on the side. Then there’s the issue of friendship with exboyfriends. As Anton Chekhov wrote in his bittersweet play, Uncle Vanya: ‘A woman can become a man’s friend only in the following stages — first an acquaintance, next a mistress, and only then a friend.’ It is true that your old boyfriends can sometimes become genuine friends —once you have both emerged from the fiery furnace of sexual frenzy. Of course, some people meet up with an old flame and it re-ignites. But often that is not that case and you can have the love and friendship without the passion. Kingsley Amis famously left his wife Hilly for a grand passion with Elizabeth Jane Howard. But when that relationship also foundered, Hilly took him back, even though she had married someone else, and Kingsley lived in their basement — cared for and loved to the end. The truth is sex is programmed into us all. There’s a bit of sex in every relationship. It’s just that if we acknowledged this publicly, life would become intolerable.
And so the unspoken undercurrent of sexual tension remains, but remain it does because while a man and a woman can be friends, they can’t be just friends. Source: Daily Mail Date: 29th Sept, 2000