Can Men and Women Really Be Just Friends?

The film One Day charts more than twenty years of Emma and Dexter pulling apart and coming back together — from the moment they first meet, each hoping something might happen between them, to becoming close friends, and finally falling in love. Across those two decades they each live lives they never imagined, all the while checking in on and caring for one another as friends. Just when it seems the faint spark between them is about to fade for good, Dexter hits rock bottom; and only when he is unlucky in both love and work does he realise that she is the one person who can bring a little sweetness to his hard, lonely life — that, all along, his heart still held the place of that irreplaceable best friend. So what exactly was the relationship between them: pure friendship, or a friendship laced with love? And how do psychologists view friendship within cross-sex relationships?

What kinds of cross-sex friendship are there?

Most people's view of opposite-sex friendship assumes that one party harbours romantic feelings for the other, giving rise to the popular notions of "the long game" or being "friend-zoned". But research by Laura K. Guerrero and Alana M. Chavez (2005) points out that opposite-sex friendships can be divided into four types: Mutual Romance, Strictly Platonic, Desires Romance, and Rejects Romance. Mutual Romance is where both people hope the relationship will move from friendship into love; Strictly Platonic is where both want it to stay at the level of friendship — in other words, the so-called "just friends"; Desires Romance is where one party wishes to become lovers with the other while the other has no such intention; and Rejects Romance is the reverse of Desires Romance. Desires Romance and Rejects Romance are what people commonly call being in the "Friend Zone", where one cannot win a response from the other and can only carry on keeping them company as a friend.

Why can a cross-sex friendship shift into so many different forms?

In fact, different kinds of attraction operate within opposite-sex friendships. Research by Heidi Reeder (2000) found that four types of attraction exist between men and women. The first, subjective physical attraction, is when you simply want a physical relationship with the other person. The second, objective physical attraction, is when you regard the other person as highly attractive but do not actually like him or her. The third, romantic attraction, is when you wish to become romantic partners rather than merely staying in a friendship. And the last, friendship attraction, is when you feel the two of you are better suited as friends than as a couple. Attraction between friends is not, by nature, romantic or sexual, and which kind of attraction it is varies from person to person. These forms of attraction arise the moment a man and a woman meet, and people often judge which kind exists between them based on their first impressions. Take Emma and Dexter in the film: they began with subjective physical attraction, hoping for a physical relationship, but as time passed it slowly turned into romantic attraction, taking root in both their hearts, until at last it broke through the barrier of friendship and lifted the relationship to another level.

Do you really like your opposite-sex friend?

Drawing on Green and Swets's work (1966) alongside the Error Management Theory put forward by Haselton and Buss (2000), the argument is that when an individual makes judgements under conditions of uncertainty, he or she is very likely to commit Type I errors (false positives) and Type II errors (false negatives) — and Error Management Theory can also be applied to romantic feelings between men and women. Haselton and Buss's study (2000) reached the conclusion that men and women are biased in how they read each other's intentions in cross-sex behaviour. They may, while each second-guessing the other's intentions, mistakenly assume the other is interested in them; observing how people's behaviour towards others changes can therefore help us judge another person's intentions more accurately. From a psychological standpoint, we can analyse this through changes in both behaviour and physiology. According to research by Nelisha Wickremasinghe (2020), our emotions prompt the body to take different actions, and all of our behaviour originates in the body. After we gain certain experiences in particular settings or with a particular person, the emotions that arise alongside those experiences lead us to behave differently.

On the behavioural side, research by Jeremy Nicholson (2016) points out that if you genuinely like that opposite-sex friend, you will notice, when you are together, your body naturally leaning slightly forward, forming a more open body language; you will be more interested in the topics of conversation and take part more actively, and you may also make more eye contact, giving the other person more of your attention. On top of that, you will find reasons to have a little more physical contact with the other person, and you will also welcome their touch, with the frequency and number of contacts between you growing over time. Beyond this, if you genuinely like the other person, you will introduce them to the friends and family around you, hoping all the more to become an important part of their life and treating this as a kind of commitment to them. In short, you will be willing to give to the other person, investing your time and energy in them, and you will take your own promises seriously.

From the physiological side, research by Maryanne Fisher (2013) mentions that dopamine boosts the release of testosterone, which in turn heightens sexual desire and drives you to pursue the person who triggers this response. Gradually, the brain's reward system also gets involved. This system is influenced by the central nervous system and by blood content, sending chemical messages through neurotransmitters to different parts of the body and then relaying them back to the brain. If the things the person you like does towards you feel like a good stimulus, your reward system will take in this message and, at the same time, lead you to seek out more of whatever makes you feel pleasure. Helen Fisher and her colleagues (2005), using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of people describing their own romances, found that their reward systems all became activated. This is because, in the early stages of falling in love, people carry their own particular expectations, and the reward system can be activated through some extremely simple means — for example, an accidental physical touch with the person you like, looking at their photo, or even simply picturing him or her in your mind — all of which can lift our mood, attention, and focus.

In closing

Of course, all of this is only general research by psychologists across the wider population, and most of these factors in fact vary from person to person. So even if we think our friend shows the behaviours above, we should not rush to convince ourselves that we definitely like them; we can give ourselves a little more time to observe and to think things through. In today's increasingly open society, love is not limited to men and women — some people, such as gay men, lesbians, and asexual people, all deserve a love of their own. That said, gay men and lesbians are essentially not drawn to the opposite sex, and asexual people are not sexually attracted to anyone. So whether you want to keep a friendship with the other person or hope to become a couple, what matters is respecting each other's thoughts and decisions. Even if, in the end, there is no way to be with the person you like, you can still accompany one another as friends, just as Emma and Dexter do in the film — and a relationship like that may well last longer. As for whether men and women can ever be "just friends", everyone has their own view: some people may act in ways that look very intimate and ambiguous yet in their hearts simply see the other as a friend, while others may seem cool and keep their distance yet may, deep down, be fond of the other person. But in this fast-moving society, we believe that whether you treat the people around you as friends or as lovers, you are sure to keep on supporting one another.

Adapted from HKUSU Social Sciences Society Psychology Society; the content and/or title have been edited. Original link: https://instagram.com/p/CL1jbAKBN_E/

Reference:

Fisher, M. (2013, February 12). The science behind falling in love. Retrieved February 23, 2021, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/loves-evolver/201302/the-science-behind-falling-in-love

Nicholson, J. (2016, March 31). 4 ways to tell whether someone is into you. Retrieved February 23, 2021, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-attraction-doctor/201603/4-ways-tell-whether-someone-is-you

Wickremasinghe, N. (2021, February 03). Beware the chemistry of love. Retrieved February 23, 2021, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/spellbound/202102/beware-the-chemistry-love

Wickremasinghe, N. (2020, April). The rise of the introvert-An opportunity to turn from toxic drive to reflective innovation. [PDF]. United Kingdom: The Dialogue Space Ltd.

Haselton, M. G. (2000). Error Management Theory: A New Perspective on Biases in Cross-Sex Mind Reading [PDF]. United States: American Psychological Association.