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Can men and women be true platonic friends?

Can men and women be non-sexual friends?

  • Total voters
    236
March Climber

March Climber

Member
chromhound said:
Even married...
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That's why I had to specify by saying happily married, not just plain married. I know some men(and women) personally who have settled down or ended up with someone who isn't quite fully to their desire, and they give a few wanting looks here and there to others. Those aren't the people I'm talking about. I'm talking about the ones who've found exactly what they've been looking for with a significant other and you can see it even when they argue.
 
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R

Revoh

Member
I have some female friends, ranging from "I wouldn't put my dick in that not even if I have a gun pointed to my face" to old acquaintances from old jobs and so, that if given the opportunity I would fuck no doubt. So, I think it entirely depends on attraction and not being in the right place and the right time to fuck it up.
 
jadedm17

jadedm17

Member
Yes, as long as neither is attracted to the other.
My ex Crystal still loved me, just as I still loved my ex Jessica; Neither worked because attraction was still there.
If there's no attraction to act on then yes, otherwise no.
 
anthony2690

anthony2690

Member
nush said:
Being married is one of the variables that makes being platonic friends with women easier has already been discussed in this topic.
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I didn't scroll, I clicked results and was legit surprised at the results and commented :p

I guess it's just young dumb dudes that want to hump everything.
 
anthony2690

anthony2690

Member
nush said:
You're only 2 years away from the 7 year itch my friend, you assume the userbase here is younger than it actually is.
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The seven year itch? What is that? Haha

I guess a bunch off horny lonely single old men that want to hump everything then :p

I think I saw the age poll a while back and was surprised as it turns out I was one of the younger users at 31 XD
 
teezzy

teezzy

Banned
DevilMayFlyForAWhiteGuy said:
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.
Click to expand...

Shut the fuck up
 
Zeroing

Zeroing

Banned
anthony2690 said:
The seven year itch? What is that? Haha

I guess a bunch off horny lonely single old men that want to hump everything then :p

I think I saw the age poll a while back and was surprised as it turns out I was one of the younger users at 31 XD
Click to expand...
Age is just a number! What counts is how you feel! Most people here behave like horny teenagers so their mental age is younger! Even I do it with my stupid jokes.
Although I’m a man of 69 years old!
 
Mato

Mato

Member
Nope. A man and a woman, alone somewhere quiet and late night, just talking. Sooner or later things will eventually get awkward. Even if they don't act upon their urges, there's always going to be a deeply subconscious attraction if not more.
 
Velcro Fly

Velcro Fly

Member
I voted yes. I definitely can. I've become really good friends with a coworker this year. We eat lunch together every day and share dumb or funny TikToks with each other. They are a lesbian so I know they aren't interested in me that way. I'm 100% good with being friends. They are definitely attractive, but I'm not attracted to them. We've done late movie nights and stuff and nothing weird or awkward has happened. Platonic friendship (and love) is definitely possible.

edit: neither one of us is in a relationship either.
 
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DeepBreath87

DeepBreath87

Banned
Where I work the large majority are women. I met my wife of nearly10 years there. My experience is that you can be friendly with women in a platonic way. But a close friendship with a woman tends to come with feelings for at least one of the participants or at least the risk of them developing, which to me is off limits. I don’t need or want either to catch feelings for someone else or to have them develop feelings for me. It’s just not a risk I want to take.

Doesn’t mean it’s impossible for me to develop a platonic, close friendship with a woman. But it would come with certain risks I am unwilling to entertain. I am friendly with plenty of woman, but there are barriers that I maintain in all of those relationships to make sure they don’t interfere with my family life that prevent those relationships from being as close as the ones I have with my male friends.
 
Kamina

Kamina

Golden Boy
I agree that it depends.
The more you are attracted to them the harder.
Some of my colleagues are arguably pretty gals, but i am not attracted to them and we get along nicely, so friendship could be a possibility.
But as soon as it is one you find super hot i doubt a true friendship is really an option.
 
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Tams

Tams

Member
Mini me decides for me.

If he perks up, then we're not going to be friends as the sexual attraction will eventually cause issues. Friendly acquaintances who I'll greet if I bump into them, though are fine.
 
darrylgorn

darrylgorn

Member
duh-uhhyeah.gif
 
Zeroing

Zeroing

Banned
Tams said:
Mini me decides for me.

If he perks up, then we're not going to be friends as the sexual attraction will eventually cause issues. Friendly acquaintances who I'll greet if I bump into them, though are fine.
Click to expand...
elephant avatar makes me suspicious that is not so mini!

My people can feel the big D energy!
 
boutrosinit

boutrosinit

Street Fighter IV World Champion
Yes.

However, society's conditioning trained me to believe otherwise so my answer would've been "no" for a few decades.

The amount of crap we've been told is true is quite staggering and it's impact on our psyches and nervous systems, even more so.
 
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