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Can men and women be true platonic friends?
- Thread starter West Texas CEO
- Start date
ButchCat
Member
BFFs for life.
Yes but these are fleeting friendships. I am not going to get into the sexual attraction aspect which already makes the idea of a friendship an obstacle. Imagine doing the bro thing where you leave your wife and children to hang out with the boys on weekends, now replace boys with girl(s) who also have husbands and families of their own, and see if that flies with anyone.
The answer would be yes in your 20s when you are still going through the motions, but as soon as you knock someone up and you decide you wanna stick around for it, you are terminating these friendships because you'd be breaking social norms if you don't. Women who have families of their own feel more strongly about this unless the guy is gay.
It's much more plausible for guys (or women if you're a lady) to stay friends throughout most of their lives than it is with the opposite sex.
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chromhound
Member
Last time i tried to be friend with a fine lady, we got drunk and i turned her into a mozzarella stick
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newtypepilot
Member
It's complicated because while it's possible, it's definitely not sustainable. Eventually one of you falls for the other and things get awkward. Or you end up fucking
FunkMiller
Member
Beginning and end of discussion.
Works for both genders, obviously.
I’m friends with plenty of women I wouldn’t want to bang
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Insane Metal
Member
El Pistolero
Banned
If either one is attractive, NO!
DeafTourette
Perpetually Offended
3 of my best friends are women. None of them are crazy (I'm the crazy one, actually) but we all have mutual respect and they have always had my back. One was getting ready to fight someone when she felt I was disrespected! But they've all had significant others. One is in a LTR and pregnant and we still hang out.
I have always had female friends since I was little. So it's not hard for me. I can be friends with anyone!
It's harder for me to be friends with men because of some trauma in my past.
I have always had female friends since I was little. So it's not hard for me. I can be friends with anyone!
It's harder for me to be friends with men because of some trauma in my past.
Halo is Back
Member
Sure, not every guy and girl is going to be attached to each other romantically or sexually.
Nobody_Important
“Aww, it’s so...average,” she said to him in a cold brick of passion
Of course you can. As kids in high school or something it might be a bit harder because of hormones, but as adults? Yeah it's much easier. Especially if both of you are in relationships.
Just don't be weird or a horn dog and you'll be fine.
Just don't be weird or a horn dog and you'll be fine.
Zeroing
Banned
nush
Member
PumpkinPie
Banned
All my friends are girls, and no, I'm not a homosexual 
Zeroing
Banned
*takes a deep sniffAll my friends are girls, and no, I'm not a homosexual
My gaydar says you are indeed heterosexual!
GymWolf
Member
What kind of messed up sex do you practise??
prinz_valium
Member
It's rare, but certainly possible.
DeceptiveAlarm
Gold Member
Imagine hanging out with attractive women and not trying to fuck them. 
D
Deleted member 1159
Unconfirmed Member
JimmyRustler
Member
I would like to say yes but neither did I ever manage to do it nor did I ever see anyone successfully do it.
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SF Kosmo
Banned
Yeah, absolutely. I have several platonic female friends, including my best friend and former roommate.
When you meet a woman, there's a certain window where you're both trying to figure out what way things are gonna go. I'd say that window is... a few months at most usually. And wherever you land at the end of that, that's probably where you're gonna stay.
Mutual attractions is part of it, but also just a general romantic compatibility and chemistry, or not wanting the same things or whatever. Sometimes you even try hooking up and it doesn't seem like a good fit, as long as you're in that first few months it's not set in stone.
Guys who keep platonic friends around thinking they might hook up someday aren't doing themselves or their friends any favors. That shit almost never works out well.
When you meet a woman, there's a certain window where you're both trying to figure out what way things are gonna go. I'd say that window is... a few months at most usually. And wherever you land at the end of that, that's probably where you're gonna stay.
Mutual attractions is part of it, but also just a general romantic compatibility and chemistry, or not wanting the same things or whatever. Sometimes you even try hooking up and it doesn't seem like a good fit, as long as you're in that first few months it's not set in stone.
Guys who keep platonic friends around thinking they might hook up someday aren't doing themselves or their friends any favors. That shit almost never works out well.
DevilMayFlyForAWhiteGuy
Member
I think it’s really complicated. I don’t have a ton of friends in general because many have moved over the years, but I have tried to be platonic friends with girls/women before. It seemed to me though in those instances that the girl was always interested in me as more of a friend, so I ended up breaking things off.
I have a specific example, but it’s a somewhat long story. If you wanna skip this fine but it feels good to get it off my chest.
There was a girl I used to know in middle school who I was friends with as she and my mothers were friends. It was purely platonic because we were only in middle school, and we weren’t like best friends or anything either. I was friends with her brother as well, but then they moved to a different state. A long time later she tracks me down on Facebook and sends me some messages. We talk a little bit and I see that she’s married, so I assume she’s just catching up with people she used to know. We talk a little but not that much because honestly we didn’t have much in common/to talk about.
Periodically she would say stuff like “oh we should hang out and you should meet my husband.” But she still lived like 5 states away, and I didn’t know her that well, so I wasn’t about to take a potentially expensive trip just for that.
Then a few more years pass and she starts texting me again saying that she’s moving back to my state and says we should hang out sometime with her and her husband. I found it a little odd that she was so adamant about seeing me when it’s not like we were really close friends as kids, but I swept that under the rug as me just being paranoid.
So anyways after she moved here she kept asking me to hang out, and to be honest I didn’t really want to. I had just gotten out of a bad relationship with a really manipulative girlfriend, and really wasn’t in the mood to go and meet new people. I also didn’t want to tell her about my personal life, because I didn’t want to give her the wrong impression as if to imply that I was “available” or something. Plus I didn’t know her that well anyways.
A year goes by and she asks me again to hang out. I finally give in and agree to and then find out that she moved to the same damn town as me. Again I start feeling a bit paranoid about this, but I shrug it off. So I agree to go over, and the night before she sends me like this whole wall of text about how she and her husband had a huge fight and he left her and took one of their kids with him.
I try to sympathize with her, but I express that I’m fine not going over as I assumed she was cancelling on me. Instead she tells me she wants me to come over because she “needs someone to talk to.” Again alarm bells are going off in my head. I suggest that maybe I shouldn’t go over because I don’t see it as appropriate since her husband is gone. She waves that away and says that she really needs someone to talk to and implies I’m the only one around that she knows who she can talk to.
So I reluctantly reschedule it to the daytime instead of night. I talk with her and catch up, which mostly consisted of her telling me her life story and not really asking about me at all. She still had two other kids to look after so she did that too, sort of.
She really wants me to go over again and this time I go over with her friends there and there’s like 6 other people there, so her implying I was the only one she could talk to was obviously BS. But I get to see her brother again and catch up with him. I talk to her a bit over the next few weeks, trying to give her advice on her situation and you know, be a friend, but talking to her brother he implied that she was interested in me in another way, which I got the vibe of as well.
At that point I didn’t really want to be involved with her anymore, but didn’t want to be rude. I’ll also mention that at the time I was talking with a different girl I was interested in romantically (who would end up being my wife later), and that I had no intention of being anything other than a platonic friend to this girl who moved back. Because of that I was worried that talking with her would ruin my chances with the girl I was actually interested in, if the former tried to make a move on me.
I only went over one more time, and when I was over there she was all over some other guy that also wasn’t her husband, so at this point I’m pretty sure she was doing stuff behind her husband’s back to begin with. Whether or not she planned on trying that with me at this point was irrelevant and I tried to distance myself from her slowly.
Then her husband came back, and she starts texting me again. She tells me that she told him all about me and that I was there and that he wanted to meet me. Fucking great. If I didn’t go over, then it would probably look like I was guilty of something, but I didn’t really want anything to do with her because she was obviously a manipulative person.
So I go there and talk with them a bit, and everything seems fine, though he seems uneasy the whole time, and then like 30 mins in they both go in their room and start screaming at each other and I can hear him yelling something about “your boyfriend there,” and I’m like wtf. She texts me telling me to leave.
So I leave and never go back and I plan to just stop talking to her, because I really just didn’t want to deal with all that. She was obviously cheating on her husband and either intentionally or coincidentally used me as the scapegoat for it. And then like 3 weeks later she has the gall to ask me to borrow money out of the blue. She said she needed it for her kids food. I asked some guy I knew who was friends with her brother, and he told me not to do it because she was probably just looking for weed money.
On top of that some people I worked with knew her, and then gossip started about me trying to get with her because of course that’s what they assumed I was trying to do because I was the guy. So now some of the people I know think I slept with her and there’s a decent chance she may have propagated the rumor or at least egged it on. She also kept sending me more texts when her husband left again basically saying she wanted me to go over and sleep with her. At that point I had started dating my wife, and I straight up told her I had a GF and she needed to stop texting me.
All of this because I didn’t trust my first instinct of not getting involved with her. I tried to be the mature person who was a platonic friend, and the whole thing blew up in my face. Nowadays I have a good thing going with my wife (who I already had to tell this story, like right after we started dating) and I really just don’t see the point of fraternizing with other women. I know I wouldn’t do anything to ruin my marriage, but it really doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Even if I became friends with another woman platonically, let’s say she decides to make a move on me and I reject it; what if she decides to hurt me in response by lying and saying I tried something on her? I know it’s a “what if” but if it happened just that would probably ruin my life. Why take that risk in my situation now?
I would say that, at least in the guy’s position, being platonic friends only really works if you’re single. I don’t have a woman’s perspective on it so I’ll leave it at that. Sorry if TL;DR, but there’s my anecdotal firsthand experience on the topic.
I have a specific example, but it’s a somewhat long story. If you wanna skip this fine but it feels good to get it off my chest.
There was a girl I used to know in middle school who I was friends with as she and my mothers were friends. It was purely platonic because we were only in middle school, and we weren’t like best friends or anything either. I was friends with her brother as well, but then they moved to a different state. A long time later she tracks me down on Facebook and sends me some messages. We talk a little bit and I see that she’s married, so I assume she’s just catching up with people she used to know. We talk a little but not that much because honestly we didn’t have much in common/to talk about.
Periodically she would say stuff like “oh we should hang out and you should meet my husband.” But she still lived like 5 states away, and I didn’t know her that well, so I wasn’t about to take a potentially expensive trip just for that.
Then a few more years pass and she starts texting me again saying that she’s moving back to my state and says we should hang out sometime with her and her husband. I found it a little odd that she was so adamant about seeing me when it’s not like we were really close friends as kids, but I swept that under the rug as me just being paranoid.
So anyways after she moved here she kept asking me to hang out, and to be honest I didn’t really want to. I had just gotten out of a bad relationship with a really manipulative girlfriend, and really wasn’t in the mood to go and meet new people. I also didn’t want to tell her about my personal life, because I didn’t want to give her the wrong impression as if to imply that I was “available” or something. Plus I didn’t know her that well anyways.
A year goes by and she asks me again to hang out. I finally give in and agree to and then find out that she moved to the same damn town as me. Again I start feeling a bit paranoid about this, but I shrug it off. So I agree to go over, and the night before she sends me like this whole wall of text about how she and her husband had a huge fight and he left her and took one of their kids with him.
I try to sympathize with her, but I express that I’m fine not going over as I assumed she was cancelling on me. Instead she tells me she wants me to come over because she “needs someone to talk to.” Again alarm bells are going off in my head. I suggest that maybe I shouldn’t go over because I don’t see it as appropriate since her husband is gone. She waves that away and says that she really needs someone to talk to and implies I’m the only one around that she knows who she can talk to.
So I reluctantly reschedule it to the daytime instead of night. I talk with her and catch up, which mostly consisted of her telling me her life story and not really asking about me at all. She still had two other kids to look after so she did that too, sort of.
She really wants me to go over again and this time I go over with her friends there and there’s like 6 other people there, so her implying I was the only one she could talk to was obviously BS. But I get to see her brother again and catch up with him. I talk to her a bit over the next few weeks, trying to give her advice on her situation and you know, be a friend, but talking to her brother he implied that she was interested in me in another way, which I got the vibe of as well.
At that point I didn’t really want to be involved with her anymore, but didn’t want to be rude. I’ll also mention that at the time I was talking with a different girl I was interested in romantically (who would end up being my wife later), and that I had no intention of being anything other than a platonic friend to this girl who moved back. Because of that I was worried that talking with her would ruin my chances with the girl I was actually interested in, if the former tried to make a move on me.
I only went over one more time, and when I was over there she was all over some other guy that also wasn’t her husband, so at this point I’m pretty sure she was doing stuff behind her husband’s back to begin with. Whether or not she planned on trying that with me at this point was irrelevant and I tried to distance myself from her slowly.
Then her husband came back, and she starts texting me again. She tells me that she told him all about me and that I was there and that he wanted to meet me. Fucking great. If I didn’t go over, then it would probably look like I was guilty of something, but I didn’t really want anything to do with her because she was obviously a manipulative person.
So I go there and talk with them a bit, and everything seems fine, though he seems uneasy the whole time, and then like 30 mins in they both go in their room and start screaming at each other and I can hear him yelling something about “your boyfriend there,” and I’m like wtf. She texts me telling me to leave.
So I leave and never go back and I plan to just stop talking to her, because I really just didn’t want to deal with all that. She was obviously cheating on her husband and either intentionally or coincidentally used me as the scapegoat for it. And then like 3 weeks later she has the gall to ask me to borrow money out of the blue. She said she needed it for her kids food. I asked some guy I knew who was friends with her brother, and he told me not to do it because she was probably just looking for weed money.
On top of that some people I worked with knew her, and then gossip started about me trying to get with her because of course that’s what they assumed I was trying to do because I was the guy. So now some of the people I know think I slept with her and there’s a decent chance she may have propagated the rumor or at least egged it on. She also kept sending me more texts when her husband left again basically saying she wanted me to go over and sleep with her. At that point I had started dating my wife, and I straight up told her I had a GF and she needed to stop texting me.
All of this because I didn’t trust my first instinct of not getting involved with her. I tried to be the mature person who was a platonic friend, and the whole thing blew up in my face. Nowadays I have a good thing going with my wife (who I already had to tell this story, like right after we started dating) and I really just don’t see the point of fraternizing with other women. I know I wouldn’t do anything to ruin my marriage, but it really doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Even if I became friends with another woman platonically, let’s say she decides to make a move on me and I reject it; what if she decides to hurt me in response by lying and saying I tried something on her? I know it’s a “what if” but if it happened just that would probably ruin my life. Why take that risk in my situation now?
I would say that, at least in the guy’s position, being platonic friends only really works if you’re single. I don’t have a woman’s perspective on it so I’ll leave it at that. Sorry if TL;DR, but there’s my anecdotal firsthand experience on the topic.
nush
Member
DevilMayFlyForAWhiteGuy
Member
Yeah I figured
Banjo64
cumsessed
I have one legitimate friendship with a girl that I have absolutely no sexual interest in at all. She’s very pretty but I view her as a sister, so the thought of anything like that never crosses my mind. So yeah, it can happen.
However in my lived in experience 99% of men’s interactions with women are sexually motivated. It all boils down to ‘I want to fuck, but can I fuck?’.
However in my lived in experience 99% of men’s interactions with women are sexually motivated. It all boils down to ‘I want to fuck, but can I fuck?’.
TheInfamousKira
Reseterror Resettler
I mean, yeah. Even if you got past the first line of logical defense, that we aren't base animals wholly subject to primal impulses, the second line of defense usually works:
Be friends with ugly chicks.
I mean, I've had hot friends, as well, but I'd either ignore it and suffer or make light of it. Then again, my current partner was my best friend for ten years, so maybe not.
IT DEPENDS.
Be friends with ugly chicks.
I mean, I've had hot friends, as well, but I'd either ignore it and suffer or make light of it. Then again, my current partner was my best friend for ten years, so maybe not.
IT DEPENDS.
bajouras
Member
I do think it works sometimes. But your story reminded me of one I went through a few years ago.
Started talking more with this girl because “she needed some advice with what she and her bf were going through” because I had just went through a breakup myself….
Sure I don’t wish anyone to go through what I did. Let’s help I thought.
1st, she weirdly never tells me who the bf is, but I don’t need to know the guy to help I guess. A week later she breaks up with her bf even when I tried making her patch things up… Only days after she tried to bone me (witch I refused cause “I JUST WENT THROUGH A FUKING BREAK UP AND YOU ASWELL?”). So days later she just bones another random dude and tells me about it. Ok then! Never even knew what I should’ve answered her, never did.
Later found out who the mysterious bf was and I actually knew the guy.
Bought the dude some beers, said I was sorry if I actually helped fuk things even more. He said I helped him dodge a bullet and are now best friends.
SF Kosmo
Banned
I think the issue here is not so much being friends with girls but being friends with shitty people.
Javthusiast
Banned
One and done.
DragoonKain
Neighbours from Hell
Yes, but when you hang out and theyre looking really hot sometimes you gotta rub one out later to keep even keel. I mean at home by yourself, not in the car like Louis CK
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Pegasus Actual
Member
Hey Louis asked permission it's not like they said "no" and then he whipped it out anyway 
DevilMayFlyForAWhiteGuy
Member
That’s part of it. But I like to give people the benefit of the doubt before deciding if they’re shitty. In my example my initial impression was she was maybe not a great person since she kept going out of her way to contact me despite being married. Then I disregarded that because that line of thinking was “old fashioned,” but my initial impression was proven true later on. The whole girl aspect just adds a layer of complication because of sexual attraction whether it’s one sided or not.
I used to have a guy friend that I stopped talking to because he just became a worse person over the years. He got a girl pregnant and became a dead beat dad who never kept a job, and he got addicted to adderall. Another friend of mine tried to get him back on track with his life but the guy just wouldn’t take either of our advice to better himself and eventually we just cut him out. He screwed over my other friend so many times and took advantage of him and it was really sad because they were like best friends in Highschool, but they had a huge falling out. So I know what you mean.
Some people are shitty and don’t want help they just want to be enabled one way or another.
bushwookie
Banned
Nice try. Your veiled attempt to throw everyone off your virgin scent didn't work.
Pretty funny that the very comment you posted to throw everybody of your virgin scent trail, just so happened to prove your virginity.
bushwookie
Banned
I can't judge. I got kicked out of the cub scouts for eating a brownie. Go figure.
bender
What time is it?
'
Seems like I struck a nerve with you. I wonder why?
DragoonKain
Neighbours from Hell
I think the mystery of what GRRM has been writing instead of Winds of Winter has finally been revealed.
DevilMayFlyForAWhiteGuy
Member
Maybe I can make the lore in the next From game! That would be sweet. I already like feet so I should get along with Miyazaki just fine
RavenSan
Off-Site Inflammatory Member
Yeah, age is a pretty big factor in how easy it is to be "just friends" with someone of the opposite sex.
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