I watched When Harry Met Sally for the first time this winter break. I know -- it was a long time coming. After all, I'm a 20-something female. It's my duty to watch the entire library of chick flicks and move through life according to the chick flick code. After joining the rest of my sisterhood as someone who has seen the film, I talked over one of the major themes with a friend: can you truly be friends with someone of the opposite sex?
According to Harry, you can't; according to Sally, you can. My friend and I were decidedly "Team Sally," agreeing that of course you can be friends with someone of the opposite sex. It's 2013 -- soon to be 2014 -- men are not from Mars, and women are not from Venus. We may be different in some ways, but we are certainly not from different planets, and we most certainly can have a purely platonic relationship with each other. Men and women are just as capable as having a fulfilling relationship sans romance with each other as men have with other men and women have with other women. In fact, I think it's possible to have a friendship with someone of the opposite sex without ever wanting it to develop into something "more." These different-sex friendship function much in the same way that same-sex friendships do, and sometimes, the only difference between these types of relationships is in the sex of the friends and society's apparent bewilderment at how this friendship exists and prospers.
So we've established that men and women can be friends -- and good friends at that. But what happens when you misinterpret the joke of a long-time friend or mistake an intimate gesture to be more romantic than platonic? If a friend of the same sex offers to pay for your dinner or gives you a kiss on the cheek, you may not think anything of it. If that friend is of the opposite sex and does those things or strays from the firmly established norms of your friendship, suddenly, you question the motivations of your friend. When someone puts the bug in your ear, suggesting that this friend might feel something more, then what happens?
All it takes is for someone to plant the seed. A mutual friend might misread a text or a gesture from your "Harry" and propose that Harry wants fiery romance rather than friendly repartee. You might have never considered Harry as anything more than your friend, and you still might not be interested in pursuing romance, but all of a sudden, you're reading all of Harry's verbal and nonverbal cues as amorous. A simple text in the middle of the night might have previously been just another text from Harry, but now that the "seed" is there -- that little piece of doubt that your relationship isn't strictly platonic -- that text is a sign that Harry is in love with you. And that's how you begin to interpret your exchanges with this friend. Every actions seems to beg the question: "Does this mean that he likes me?"
He probably doesn't, and you probably still don't want to venture into romantic relationship territory, and yet, now that Pandora's Box has been opened, your previously neutral interactions are now seemingly sexually and romantically charged. And once that box has been opened, can you go back? Can you just shut off the filter -- you know, that sifter in your mind that filters everything your Harry or Sally says to determine whether he/she is more than just a friend? It's difficult, for sure, but then it just gets worse.
As my friend and I were discussing this phenomenon, the "friend-to-faux-flirtation" situation in which you begin to doubt this strictly platonic friendship, we wondered if it could wind up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. He and I have both been in situations when we have been friends with someone of the opposite sex for a really long time, never wanting nor being interested in pursuing something romantic. However, there came a point in those relationships when we began to question the motivations of our interactions with said friend, and started to question our own feelings toward that person in the process. I told my friend that he should set up his "Sally" with another guy, if he wasn't interested in her, so that he could divert her "imagined" romantic interest toward someone else. However, he made a valid point: what if he realized that her faux flirtation wasn't so "faux" at all, and decided that he wanted to move past friendship and onto a romantic relationship?
But is this a self-fulfilling prophecy? Could you start being interested in your friend as "more than" because of this "imagined" romantic interest? Perhaps we should consult the chicken and the egg for their take on situations of this sort of complication. Relationships are prone to living in that "grey" area -- regardless of the genders involved -- but it only gets more muddied when you're dealing with a Harry and Sally. Does this mean that Harry and Sally can't be friends? No. But I think what this comes down to is the basics of any good friendship or relationship: honesty and open communication. If you can be honest and truthful with your Harry or Sally, then you won't have any mixed messages -- even if those messages end up being that you do want something more than a platonic friendship.
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