…Or does sex always get in the way?“It’s possibly one of the most difficult questions of all time,” admits psychologist Tammy Epstein. Do platonic opposite-sex friendships really work?”And, according to Epstein, who conducts the Introduction to Psychology and Counselling Methods modules that form part of both the Bachelor of Psychology and Bachelor of Applied Social Science degrees at SACAP, it’s a question to which there exists no hard and fast answer.“Each cross-sex platonic friendship needs to be taken on an individual basis,” says Epstein. “While there are certainly many examples of such relationships that do work, there are as many cases where some form of sexual tension – whether acknowledged or not – is really the glue that holds that friendship together. When it comes to answers, then, the obvious place to start is to explore the nature of friendship itself. Studies in the evolutionary psychology of relationships show that cross-sex friendships are, in fact, a historically recent phenomenon. Consider the animal kingdom, for instance, where most mutually supportive alliances are either between genetically related individuals (kin) or reproductive partners. Does this mean, then, that men and women’s evolved mating strategies impinge on their friendship experiences?In a research project published in theJournal of Social and Personal Relationships, Dr April Bleske-Rechek, Associate of Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, attempted to answer this age-old question. The two-part study, which first surveyed opposite-sex undergraduate friendship pairs, showed that that men reported higher levels of physical and sexual attraction to their cross-sex friends than women, and also showed a tendency to overestimate their level of attraction to their female friends. In fact, men reported moderate levels of attraction and desire to date their female friends regardless of either their own or their female friends’ current romantic involvement…
Article: Platonic Friendships: How can men and women really be just friends? Feb 10, 2014 Reading time: 4 min
