Men and women can never be ‘just’ friends! Studies say so

There is a dare that girls of a young vintage tend to inflict upon each other. It is accompanied by hysterical giggling and an ‘eww!’ or two thrown in there. The dare is to go to a boy of the group’s acquaintance, and declare your love — real or dramatised — for him. Alternately the girl can opt for the more directly cringe-worthy ‘Will you be my boyfriend?’ The act is done; the traumatised boy melts into a puddle of humiliation and panic, and the blushing girl retreats to her triumphant tribe.

This ‘dare’ is the childhood version of a realisation that latent attraction is already thickening the air between the two sexes. Whether men and women choose to distance themselves by an ‘eww’, a rakhi, a declaration of being ‘bros’ or ‘buddies’, or maybe even a desperation-tinged designation as each other’s ‘wingmen’; we are simultaneously circumventing and playing with the elephant in the room that is idly wondering if we’re ever going to have sex with each other, and if we did, would it be any good?

Even if we’re not mulling this possibility — because one of you is hideously deformed or wears too-colourful socks or has questionable taste in music — popular culture just won’t stop dropping hints like cartoonish anvils on our heads that maybe, what we’ve been looking for has been right in front of us all along. Humankind’s scientific knowledge has not evolved to the point that we can put an exact number to how many friendships imploded following the release of the 1989 film, When Harry Met Sally. This ‘romantic comedy’ floated the bewitching idea that not only were men and women incapable of being friends, but if they were friends, chances were they were soulmates. Can you imagine the number of women who sympathetically told their single friends, ‘You and whatsizname are so meant to be. He’s like your Harry!’, only for their advice to result in the friendship crumbling after an awkward night together. Closer to home, there was Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, another ‘romantic comedy’ about how if you’re really, really good and wear nice saris, maybe the wife of the man you have loved for decades will drop dead.

And now, science has joined in the chorus, with a recent survey informing us, in gentle, it’s-me-not-you tones, that ‘men and women do want to be friends, they do want to engage in platonic friendships, but data...suggests that attraction can get in the way.’

So why does attraction get in the way of an innocent friendship? It can only get in the way if the participants want it to, and they want it to for very specific reasons. I’m going to make a gross generalisation about women now — don’t worry, I’ll make another one about men later to make up for it. For women, this idea of male-female friendships being destined for ‘greater things’, is the perfect mix of comfort, convenience and idealised romance. It’s Hollywood-sanctioned romance, but not the difficult kind, you know, the one where you’re supposed to end up with Ryan Gosling. The man of your dreams, with all his adorable quirks like too-colourful socks and eclectic music taste, can serve up a fairytale ending with minimum effort. And you get to tell everyone smugly that it was “meant to be”. Whereas for men (gross generalisation number two, as promised), it’s the perfect mix of the promise of a woman who can stand being around you for extended periods, and a woman who could therefore, possibly consent to sleep with you.

The more problematic situation is one of perceived attraction, which comes into play when only one of you wonders about the sweetness of love that could blossom from this friendship sapling, and the other is wondering just how much backslapping and bro-calling will wipe that dreamy expression off your face. According to the study, men ‘over-infer’ a female friend’s interest in them, and find this interest to be a ‘positive factor’ whereas most women view the same perceived attraction as a ‘negative factor’. I’m going to make a third gross generalisation about this — these really are flying thick and fast — and go ahead and say that men’s overestimation of a woman’s sexual interest in them isn’t limited to their female friends, and can expand to include interactions with female colleagues, carpoolers, bartenders, age-inappropriate figures of authority and that one girl who was definitely checking him out at that party last week. Therefore, their appraisal of perceived interest can be summarily dismissed. Whereas for women, their perception of male interest is based on whether they want it or not — a possibly even more unreliable barometer.

I should end with a solution. Maybe some pithy one-liner with both wisdom and wit, telling you how to draw your friendship back from the cliff of romance. But there’s no way out. Once you’ve both crossed that line — shared childhood traumas, embarrassing moments, bitched about common friends and spent more than thirty minutes in a comfortable silence — there is nowhere to go but over that cliff — for at least one of you.