The next time your mom is all in your face like, "You should marry [your best platonic male friend]! You know you're perfect for each other," you have a respectable source to cite from to shut her up. (Love you, Mom.)
"LOLOLOL IT IS SOOOO FUNNY that we're not having sex."
An essayist and critic named William Deresiewicz has taken the When Harry Met Sally question to a whole new level in an article from the New York Times on Saturday: Can women and men be friends without sex getting in the way? Yup, a question older than we are, but it's not as old as we think. Men and women didn't really fraternize socially until feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft came and changed things up in 1792, says Deresiewicz. (Fun fact: Wollstonecraft's daughter Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.)
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Citing historical background, pop culture and personal experience, Deresiewicz suggests that there are far more platonic mixed-gender friends in life than there are on screen, and our culture continues to sexualize it unnecessarily:
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"So if it’s common now for men and women to be friends, why do we so rarely see it in popular culture? Partly, it’s a narrative problem. Friendship isn’t courtship. It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories about friendships of any kind are relatively rare, especially given what a huge place these relationships have in our lives. And of course, they’re not sexy. Put a man and a woman together in a movie or a novel, and we expect the sparks to fly. Yet it isn’t just a narrative problem, or a Hollywood problem.
We have trouble, in our culture, with any love that isn’t based on sex or blood. We understand romantic relationships, and we understand family, and that’s about all we seem to understand."
For the most part, it's dead-on, but this notion gave me pause (and I'm not sure it's Deresiewicz's point as much as it's Harry's point); maybe the best way to overcome any sexual tension between otherwise-platonic pals is to havesex first and be friends later, a la Seinfeld's Jerry and Elaine. Mm, I dunno about that. I think that may just complicate the friendship, considering sex often happens between friends when Party A really wants it and Party B is too lazy to say no.
