Friend Zone
Irradiated by LabRat
Hey Hershele, first time I noticed you had a byline at NSWATM. The article, for those who aren’t simply geekily pleased to see a regular commenter writing somewhere you read, is the curious attachment Hollywood has in promoting the cultural meme that heterosexual men and women can’t ever really be friends, and that all cross-gender friendships are sexual relationships waiting to happen or else arrangements in which one person is sexually frustrated and the other is either oblivious or getting some kind of arcane pleasure out of sexually denying the other.
Hershele goes over the basic assumption underlying this- that men and women are simply too alien, too different to ever have a real friendship, and the only point in having interactions with anybody of the opposite sex who isn’t a relative is the possibility of sex.
The part where I want to make a separate post about it rather than just commenting there or tipping my hat is that I think the same set of assumptions and memes do a lot more damage to relationships than just creating needless jealousy or reinforcing Nice Guy Syndrome; they create and reinforce the idea that the kind of relationship you have with someone you’re sleeping with, even ongoing and long-term and ostensibly love-based relationships, is something totally other than friendship.
One of the most common pieces of advice I’ve seen in advice and self-help aimed at improving or maintaining marriages, or other long-term relationships, is to check the kinds of things you say about, to, or do your significant others and ask the question would I say/do that to/about a close friend? If the answer is “no” and the case in point wasn’t something along the lines of “ask them for oral sex”, then it’s something you shouldn’t be doing and is damaging the relationship. It’s the kind of question that shouldn’t, in theory, need to be asked, but judging by the messages we get both from dysfunctional relationships in our lives and the media in general about how casual intersex warfare is “normal”, it very often seems to need to be.
Intimate relationships ARE friendships, or they should be if they’re going to last; not all friendships are intimate, but all intimate relationships that aren’t friendships are likely to be far more stressful than satisfying, seeing as intimacy involves vulnerability. If someone is too different from you for friendship to be possible, either pursuing a romantic relationship with that person is a bad idea straight out of the gate or you could stand some improvement in being able to relate to people who aren’t exactly like you, in general. Of course, the idea of two people who are even remotely different from each other being good friends as inherently WACKY is another meme that we tend to see a lot of through Hollywood.
July 29th, 2011 at 12:01 pm
Good post and good points LabRat, I personally think Hollyweird has a vested interest in tearing down all the ‘standard’ morals in the US, and especially those ‘relationship’ morals where men and women interact… Additionally, the feminazis are actively involved in the emasculation of the Male in all forms… sigh… Glad I’m too old to worry about the BS they are putting out.
July 29th, 2011 at 12:57 pm
Excellent blogpost, LabRat. The major difference is that friends (of any sex) put the friendship ahead of all other considerations. And, when one is happily married/committed, it actually makes it easier to have friends because you already have the “intimacy” side of your life taken care of and can draw that line. I’ve always had more female friends than male friends….mostly due to being in a highly-female-populated career field (social work/education). Being able to draw the distinction b/t friendship (philos) and the intimate (eros) is where wisdom and maturity take place….something I doubt we’ll ever see come from Hollywood….
July 29th, 2011 at 2:19 pm
Personally, I think there are actually two independent questions you may be combining:
One is about whether men and women are capable of friendship at all, and the other is whether they can have close relationships that aren’t sexual. The first, as you discuss, has to do with whether people are ‘too different’ and the second has to do with the nature of human sex drives.
Logically you could believe one proposition without the other. You could believe that men and women can have real friendships but that such friendships will inevitably end up also having a very strong sexual component (whether ultimately acted upon or not).
From my own experience both are possible (you can have friendships, and they aren’t always also sexual, e.g. one possibility is a more sibling-like relationship), but I don’t think the two propositions are actually logically dependent on each other.
July 29th, 2011 at 3:09 pm
Yes, but… the sheer number of people who aren’t attracted to every single member of the sex they’re attracted to, regardless of whether or not they think they’re good/interesting/whatever other positive qualities, makes it seem like it shouldn’t even be a *question*.
But then, “if you’re going to have an intimate relationship with someone you should at least be capable of simple friendship with them” seems equally obvious to me.
July 31st, 2011 at 5:26 pm
Sometimes being good friends means setting strong boundaries for yourself. For MOST of us, same-sex means the boundary against the relationship oversaturating is simply heterosexuality. My guy buds are in no danger of me “exploring” anything further with them. There’s a solid event horizon (or turned over, floor) beyond which can never be crossed.
This may be a reason why I and several other hetero male friends that I know are so very comfortable with lesbian friends. There’s no sexual tension, but we don’t have the male-male heterosexual need to exhibit unnecessary gruffness.
I had a very close friend in my mid-20s. We had worked together, admired each other’s intellect, and we worked out together a lot. She told me one day that I was her best friend, and I realized that’s what we were- two very hetero, very healthy, very sexually-compatible people… who realized that this was the time to create that artificial boundary. She asked me to accompany her to go live in Colorado. We could be roommates, and split the rent, and….
I refused. I had nothing going on here in Texas, but I knew that I would be threatening the barrier if we went down that road.
Now, years later, a boundary is my wedding ring, which I never take off. It provides me with a force field to be able to be pretty tight with hetero women-not-my-wife, with the clear understanding that Matt Is Not Availible on any other basis than Philia, and perhaps careful Storge.
(But this is such a minor limitation, when one considers what a wonderful world of friends it opens up.)
August 1st, 2011 at 12:59 pm
Matt strikes a beautiful chord. There’s a reason I don’t feel quite dressed if I’m out in public without my wedding band.
No, it’s not like I have to beat women off with a club, but having that visual cue there relieves a WHOLE lot of tension. (Keep in mind that I’m a guy who has generally had more female friends than male ones. I’ve also had gay male friends, and I’m not aware of any sexual tension between us in either direction — even though I’ve met gay gays who obviously had an attraction to me, none of them ever wanted to be friends.)
I have turned down “a sure thing” because I didn’t want to risk a friend turning into an ex-. On the other hand, I have also taken taken that risk — and had a great relationship, maintaining the friendship in most cases afterwards.
In just about every opposite sex friendship with someone remotely attractive (even lesibian friends), there was always at least SOME sexual tension in the shadowy corners; more an awareness of possibility than the Hollywood stereotype, but present.
But I can think of a couple of “obviously compatible” friends with whom that tension was not present.
Because of that, I can state that it is entirely possible to have an attractive, orientation-compatible, active libido, friend who SHOULD hit all the targets (that being why we were giving it a go), only to find ZERO “sex” sparks between us. . . but still had all the same “friend” sparks still. OTH, there is still that “shadowy” awareness, even though both of us would get more satisfaction masturbating with a cold, clammy, numb hand than we would find together.
August 1st, 2011 at 12:59 pm
2ns paragraph — “gay GUYS”. LOL