Can Men and Women Ever Be 'Just Friends'? A Study Says It's Complicated

The short answer

In a 2012 study from the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, psychologist April Bleske-Rechek and her colleagues found that attraction is common in male–female friendships — and men feel it more. When 88 pairs of college-age opposite-sex friends rated their attraction to each other on a scale of one to nine, men averaged a five while women averaged a four. Friendships survived attraction all the same, but the feelings were real, and they had consequences.

What the researchers actually found

The study, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, looked at the question from two angles. First, the lab pairs: men reported slightly more attraction to their female friends than vice versa, and both sexes assumed roughly the same attraction regardless of whether they were already in a romantic relationship.

Second, the researchers asked 107 people aged 18 to 23 and 322 adults aged 27 to 55 to list the pros and cons of opposite-sex friendships. Attraction showed up far more often as a cost than a benefit — 32 percent called it a drawback, only 6 percent a plus. Women felt this most sharply: 47 percent of women aged 18 to 23 listed attraction as a negative, compared with 22 percent of men.

Why it can strain romantic relationships

The effects spilled over into the participants' love lives. Among the older sample, 38 percent of women and 25 percent of men said their romantic partners felt jealous about the opposite-sex friendship. And across the board, the more attraction someone felt toward their friend, the less satisfied they were with their current romantic partner. The researchers' hypothesis: interacting with the opposite sex can trigger mating instincts that evolved long before the concept of platonic friendship existed — "mating strategies," they wrote, "may influence people's involvement in cross-sex friendships to begin with."

What the headlines got wrong

Coverage at the time trumpeted the takeaway that men and women can't be platonic "even if they are not having sex." But the researchers' own data point the other way: the friendships in the study persisted in spite of attraction. Attraction was a complication, not a death sentence. People kept their friends and found the relationships beneficial overall — women in particular just wished the attraction weren't part of the package.

The takeaway

Can men and women be "just friends"? The evidence says yes — but "just" is doing a lot of work. Someone in the pair often wants more, men more often than women, and pretending that never happens is less honest than admitting it and managing it. Transparency, not avoidance, is what keeps the friendship intact.