[snarf21]

It is definitely hard to make friends as an adult male. Most of mine at this point are ex-coworkers. I think the one under appreciated place is in a hobby. I design and play board games. There are lots of meaningful ways to build relationships around that. Most other hobbies are the same, however you have to really get into the hobby, not go once a month. Running clubs, photography groups, cooking classes, hiking clubs.... just find something and dive in until you find the right thing for you.

Also, When Harry Met Sally was right. Men and women can't be friends. Eventually the sex gets in the way. Speaking for my self, men tend to confuse all closeness with romantic intimacy. I've never seen even explicitly sex buddies work either, sooner or later someone gets jealous or serious.

[yojo]

I (straight male) have several close friends that are women, some going back two decades. I’ve been happily married for 12 years, they’ve all been in stable relationships, and our partners get along.

It is possible that some men or women cannot be just friends with the opposite sex, but I have at least one counterfactual for the universal claim.

[kibwen]

Same here. An important aspect of attraction for me is character, and I would harshly judge the character of anyone who, knowing that I was in a relationship, tried to lure me out of it; it would demolish any attraction that I felt for that person. In addition, I feel no dissatisfaction in my relationship that would tempt me to leave it, and in any case if it made sense to leave it then I would do so regardless of outside temptation.

Maybe some people need to impose this sort of restriction on themselves, in the same way that a recovering drug addict shouldn't keep drugs in the house if they have any hope of not relapsing. People should do what's healthy for them. And for such a person, perhaps it's alien to consider that others don't suffer such a temptation.

[openknot]

>And for such a person, perhaps it's alien to consider that others don't suffer such a temptation.

The idea that temptation out of a relationship can be celebrated is reinforced by Hollywood movies. There's a lot of celebrated cheating in both classic and modern popular films like Casablanca, The Lady Vanishes, The Notebook, and Sleepless in Seattle.

Your view is admirable and I hope to share it, but popular movies are a strong force for people taking the opposite view as it normalizes the behavior of leaving a committed relationship for other people.

[llampx]

> It is possible that some men or women cannot be just friends with the opposite sex, but I have at least one counterfactual for the universal claim.

From my experience and observation, I would say that it is possible for _some_ men and women to be friends, but it is not the rule rather the exception.

[colmvp]

> Men and women can't be friends. Eventually the sex gets in the way.

I have MANY female friends who have been in my life for decades and I have zero sexual attraction to them (and likewise they have zero sexual attraction to me). I have no idea why people perpetuate this stereotype that women and men cannot be friends. It's entirely possible to separate the people who you want to be friends with and the people you are sexually attracted to. Obviously, the women who I am sexually attracted to I don't attempt to be good friends with for fear of risking my long term relationship.

[barry-cotter]

> I have MANY female friends who have been in my life for decades and I have zero sexual attraction to them

You may be at one extreme of a spectrum. I have certainly known men with higher libidos than me and I find a great many of my female frinds and acquaintances attractive

> (and likewise they have zero sexual attraction to me).

That nothing has ever happened is extremely weak evidence of this if you're as committed to the idea that sex is as important to you as you write.

> I have no idea why people perpetuate this stereotype that women and men cannot be friends.

Because they're from cultures where it isn't or because their personal experince suggests it isn't.

> It's entirely possible to separate the people who you want to be friends with and the people you are sexually attracted to.

This suggests a level of control over feelings that normal people do not posess, not being around people you are attracted to, or very low libido.

> Obviously, the women who I am sexually attracted to I don't attempt to be good friends with for fear of risking my long term relationship.

This completely cuts against everything you wrote above about how it's possible to separate friendship and attraction to the appropriate sex(es).

[thereare5lights]

> I have certainly known men with higher libidos than me and I find a great many of my female frinds and acquaintances attractive

Having a high libido does not translate into wanting to have sex with your close friends.

> I have certainly known men with higher libidos than me and I find a great many of my female frinds and acquaintances attractive

> level of control over feelings that normal people do not posess

Normal is only normal within a culture. I've yet to see any evidence that this is biologically inherent to human beings.

> This completely cuts against everything you wrote above about how it's possible to separate friendship and attraction to the appropriate sex(es).

Given that the original claim is

> When Harry Met Sally was right. Men and women can't be friends. Eventually the sex gets in the way.

I don't see how this contradicts anything. The original claim is that sex will inevitably get in the way. The person you're replying to is claiming that there are women that they will not inevitably become sexually attracted to.

[elisbce]

That's just because you separated the less sexually attractive ones (to you or vice versa) into the "friend zone" and you don't want to mix them with the ones who you might want to have a sexual relationship with.

But fundamentally, friendship (getting along, having similar tastes and views, etc.) can be viewed almost orthogonal to sexual attractiveness. So there is a group of people who are both friend material and sex partner material. You have to deliberately suppress your natural feelings of having a friendship AND having a sexual relationship, and make a choice due to fear of social norms. You might be able to do that, but the desire is still there. That's why there is no real friendship for a lot of people because it is hard to ignore the sexual desire. A moment, a spark can lead to a night of romance between two close friends who are sexually attracted to each other. And this whole friendship thing could collapse.

[pdpi]

I’m a straight man, one of my best friends is a straight woman, and we’ve known each other for 20 years. By best friend, I mean we talk almost daily, go to each other for advice and emotional support, and are comfortable discussing very intimate details about our personal lives.

The idea of a sexual relationship with her is just gross, though, in the “I’m screwing my sister” sort of way.

[gnicholas]

Are either of you married? That doubles the number of people who might be uncomfortable with the relationship.

[voisin]

Not sure why you are being downvoted. It is an excellent point that while two people may have no issue with it, their significant others wouldn’t be out of line to feel awkward about their partners turning to members of the opposite sex for advice and sharing intimate details.

[pa7ch]

Definitely is a problem. I've had close relationships with women that had zero problems that faded pretty fast once they had a serious partner. I don't blame them, a partner comes first, but I really wish it wasn't quite so normalized for it to be OK for significant others to isolate partners from opposite sex friends. I know a lot of it happens naturally due to relationships taking up time and some people handle it no problem, but it seems far too common.

[standardUser]

If there is a toxic level of jealousy and a lack of trust in the relationship, then yes.

[gnicholas]

I don't think it requires a toxic level of jealousy to be wary of an opposite-sex friend with whom your spouse talks daily and discusses "very intimate details about our personal lives".

But hey, that's just me! I recognize other people have different types of marriages and don't judge them or consider their relationships toxic.

[koolba]

Not putting yourself in tempestuous situations is the social equivalent of not stocking your pantry with candy when you’re a diabetic.

[Godel_unicode]

Which is to say, some people have a problem and need to take steps. Others don't and shouldn't be restricted by other people's issues.

[gnicholas]

I think we're in agreement, but just FYI "tempestuous" doesn't have anything to do with temptation.

The above situation could certainly lead to tempestuous arguments, though!

[thereare5lights]

> tempestuous situations

But given this

> The idea of a sexual relationship with her is just gross, though, in the “I’m screwing my sister” sort of way.

There is no temptation

[standardUser]

I have such a hard time understanding this perspective. Either you know your partner will be faithful and there is nothing to worry about. Or, you know your partner will not be faithful, and you need to let them be non-monogamous or end the relationship.

In any in-between scenario, you don't know your partner well enough to judge and should probably break up immediately on those grounds alone. Imagine not knowing your life partner well enough to know if they will have extra-marital sex? Inconceivable to me.

[greggman3]

That's not how real life works. In real life (for many people), familiarity breeds desire. To put it another way, it starts off innocent. One dinner, 2 dinners, 3 dinners, a movie, and the married partner keeps telling themselves "I'm still faithful and I'm not doing anything wrong and have no intent to be unfaithful". But, it's like a tension building up and when it finally crosses some threshold, suddenly your feeling change. You want the relationship with the other person.

Many people recognize this pattern. There are countless stories, novels, books, movies, tv shows on it. People writing from personal experience. If you truly value your monogamous marriage then you'll avoid letting that tension build in the first place. That doesn't mean you'll never go out with a friend of the opposite sex. But you will avoid doing it too much. O course many people aren't even aware of this pattern so they let the tension build and then lose their marriage.

You can fully trust your partner. And your partner can trust themselves. That doesn't mean if they put themselves in that situation over and over that nothing will come of it. Further, you have no idea what the other person's intensions are, and even if the other person's intensions are platonic, they'll have the same tensions building.

[Ancapistani]

Toxic? I don’t think so - it’s possibly a very different dynamic, but that doesn’t mean it’s toxic.

The GP stated: > go to each other for advice and emotional support

The way I intended my marriage vows, this would violate “forsaking all others”. I go to my wife for emotional support, not someone outside the marriage. I would consider doing otherwise “cheating” at the same scale as a sexual relationship.

[pdpi]

I met my ex-wife at roughly the same time I met her. There was never a hint of jealously (nor was I ever jealous of her male friends)

[syntheticnature]

Poor bisexuals, no friends -- only prey.

[moravak1984]

Not sure if you are being sarcastic or not, but as a bisexual man I have this short phase of attraction at the early stages of friendship with another guy. Then there usually comes this disenchantment phase when I realize my feelings are unrequited and I need to swallow my disappointment.

[syntheticnature]

Mostly sarcastic in the direction of "you can't be friends with people of a gender to which you are attracted", with direct borrowing from old bisexual community jokes in the process.

[pessimizer]

> Men and women can't be friends. Eventually the sex gets in the way.

I think this is true when men have one close female friend, but if you have three or four, not so much.

From the other direction, I haven't found it to be true at all in my personal experience; when it's happened, it was clear that the women began the friendship intending for it to develop as a courtship, and I just didn't notice until it became blatant.

[base698]

I always fall back on hobbies for friends. Certain times in my life I've gotten the idea I should make friends the normal way. This led to forced meetups and social gatherings I had no real interest in.

Obviously that wouldn't work And it always led me back to things I had a general and natural interest. Which ultimately led to more natural relationships.

[Hermitian909]

> Also, When Harry Met Sally was right. Men and women can't be friends. Eventually the sex gets in the way. Speaking for my self, men tend to confuse all closeness with romantic intimacy. I've never seen even explicitly sex buddies work either, sooner or later someone gets jealous or serious.

This has not been my experience as a 30 something male. I have female friends who are "good looking" in some societal sense but for whom there has been zero attraction for over a decade, so far as I can tell they feel similarly. Perhaps the reason this is my experience is that I find making male friends fairly easy, and my relationships with my male friends tend to be close and emotionally vulnerable (indeed, this seems to be why it is easy for me to make friends).

[Findecanor]

I've never had any problem making friends with women. There has been like a time limit for when a new female acquaintance could become a romantic prospect. Once that is up, we have either become lovers, friends or neither.

I have often found it easier to make friends with women that I've found too young or too old for me. Of course there has been sexual attraction, but you'd have to learn to cope with that to function as a human, anyway.

And yes, in a few cases, women I've only wanted as friends have misinterpreted my intentions ...

[johnny22]

it doesn't actually HAVE to be that way though. You can have closeness without romantic interest if you realize that's what's happening. It's a learnable skill. Having a nice cuddle is good to recharge your batteries.

[bigiain]

And you can have romantic interest in someone, while at the same time knowing that’s just not going to happen and behaving accordingly.

I have at least half a dozen close woman friends, all of whom I have or have had “romantic thoughts” about, but for various reasons have either not tried, or tried and been rebuffed but stayed close friends with.

One example, a girl I met in ‘99 (I still remember the day) and fell head over heels in lust with. She had a boyfriend, so that was out of the question. In the next 15 or so years we were never in a position where both of us were single at the same time. That situation happened about 5 years back, and we ended up in a drunken flirty conversation, where we both agreed that we weren’t going to do this, because we both valued the friendship too highly to risk losing it over a hookup. (Neither of us have great track records of staying friends with exes…)

Others had/got boyfriends/partners/spouses, and while all of them involved awkwardness and sometimes outright distrust, I totally understand and acknowledge that’s a normal human reaction to a girl having very close guy friends they’ve known a lot longer than “new boyfriend”. You need to earn trust in those situations, and all you have to do is behave like a rational and respectful human being. It can take a long time though, the girl from the example above got married, it took 3 or 4 years before her husband go ok enough with our friendship that we can go out together alone. And that’s Ok, I reckon I’d have acted exactly the same were the positions reversed.

[biztos]

> She had a boyfriend, so that was out of the question.

I’ve always found this “blocker” interesting. I’m that way too but many, many men and women do not treat a significant other (on either side) as some kind of natural and impenetrable barrier to pursuing the object of their lust. Sometimes it goes nowhere, sometimes it blows up, sometimes it gets them what they (both) want.

I’m sure there’s a lot of cultural variation, but for myself, I think when I was younger this was way more about a lack of confidence than it was about morality. And now that I’m older I’m pretty sure it’s 99% “don’t want the hassle.”

[bigiain]

> many, many men and women do not treat a significant other (on either side) as some kind of natural and impenetrable barrier to pursuing the object of their lust

If they'll cheat with you, they'll cheat on you.

I don't need that sort of complication or grief in my life. And I respect myself too much to be the sort of guy who cheats on his girlfriends, or the sort of guy who cheats with someone else's girlfriend. It's probably cost me some hookups, it has never cost me a relationship I'd regret, because who wants a relationship with that kind of person?

Having said that, I'd also never let someone having a SO be something that stops me from working at kindling a friendship. For me at least, while finding a "life partner/soul mate" is an extremely worthwhile objective, making good friends is a more important thing for me than hooking up with every available (or unavailable) woman possible. So I'll still pursue a friendship, just being rational enough to think with my head not my dick, and keep the "lust" in check.

[biztos]

I see the same combination of utility and morality in your reply as in my own experience, and that’s exactly what I question.

You don’t want the complication, but you also think of yourself as a better person if you don’t cross that line.

But I’m not at all sure that the people who do cross it are any less self-respecting. In the case of my friends who I know have done so, I kind of doubt they would have lived better lives had they been more monogamous from say their 20s to mid 40s. It’s not like they were trying to hurt anyone. It’s not like they didn’t have good relationships. And compared to myself, I look at their less sentimental, more realistic view of sex and love as possibly healthier.

If someone cheats on you and you never find out, does it mean anything?

[Viliam1234]

> It’s not like they were trying to hurt anyone.

I'm curious: what exactly they imagined would happen as a result of their actions? Or did they just prefer not to think about it?

[bigiain]

> But I’m not at all sure that the people who do cross it are any less self-respecting.

I get that. It's just that their idea of what's "respectable" and mine differ. That's not to say either of us are right or wrong, but I stand by my version of respect and self-respect amongst the people I chose to spend timer with and I will judge them and the people they cheat with accordingly. If they've got a circle of friends who share their views, they won't give a flying fuck about my judgement of them.

In my view, and amongst my friends, cheating is a demonstration of untrustworthiness. The same as stealing. It doesn't matter to me if you've stolen from me or from someone else, if I know you've stolen at all, I know I can't trust you not to steal from me or my friends. If you're happy to fuck around with someone else's wife or girlfriend, you'll probably be happy to do the same with mine if it suits you. We will not be friends. You will, at very best, become an acquaintance that I do not trust.

> If someone cheats on you and you never find out, does it mean anything?

Yeah. It means they lie to you and are untrustworthy, just you don't know about it yet. Maybe you'll never find out about that specific instance of cheating, but you still have someone you should have been able to trust who'll break that trust and lie to you in your life, and these attitudes will eventually reveal that, even if you never find out she fucked the best man at your wedding (or whatever). Thats what I meant when I said "I don't need that sort of complication or grief in my life."

(I will add though, that this was not nearly as strongly a developed outlook on life in my 20s, and I will cut some slack for "kids being kids", but if you're still fucking around on your girlfriend/wife in your 40's, you will be judged harshly and very firmly moved from "a friend" to "an untrustworthy acquaintance that I probably need to warn other actual friends about" in my life.)

[openknot]

I believe the lack of a moral element is due to Hollywood movies normalizing cheating. I mentioned it elsewhere in these comments, but there's a lot of celebrated cheating in widely popular movies (both classic and modern) like Casablanca, The Notebook, and Sleepless in Seattle.

Perhaps the behavior came before the movies, but I'm skeptical because it seems to be the natural behavior to avoid pursuing people in relationships (it will probably cause emotional trauma for the person in a relationship, as it would be natural to feel guilty about cheating, though I indirectly know of a person in a relationship who seemed to have felt no guilt about cheating at all).

[biztos]

Maybe in America?

When I think of my friends who treat monogamy as situation-dependent, I think that’s more normal in Europe than the US, but I haven’t made a study of it or anything.

[thereare5lights]

> Men and women can't be friends. Eventually the sex gets in the way.

Might be true for you, but this is not true in general.

[edgyquant]

I think this depends. I’m a male but my two best friends are women who are in a relationship with each other. I think that it’s true that most straight people of the opposite sex can’t really be friends long term without one of them becoming infatuated with the other.

[amanaplanacanal]

This is so heteronormative. The implication would be that gay men and women can’t have friends of the same sex.

It’s also mono-normative. For poly people this isn’t a problem at all. If you develop feelings, why would that be bad?

[bigiain]

Even polys have a problem with "cheating". At least all the ones I know (and have talked about this sort of stuff with).

They're open to sex outside of a monogamous couple, but instigating that without consent of all existing partners in the relationship is still problematic. They either have open pre agreed consent to sleep with anybody and everybody, or there's an agreed consent negotiation process on a case by case basis. Sleeping with other people without consent of the partner(s) is still cheating.

(I'll also note that "developing feelings" isn't a problem, at least not for me. You have feelings, and you have intellect, and feeling do not drive behaviour, intellect does. I have deep and lustful feelings for Kate Bush. My girlfriend knows this. She totally understands why and how I'm so head over heels in love with her (or, more realistically, in love with her public persona). Those feelings in no way diminish my feelings for my girlfriend, and even given the opportunity to act on those feelings I would not. In that vanishingly small chance I ever got to meet Kate socially, I'd do my very best to kindle a friendship with her. But I would not leave my girlfriend to "take a shot at her", or cheat on may girlfriend with her no matter how much opportunity I had to do so.)

[DarylZero]

"underappreciated"... it's the most common "making friends" advice ever.

[scotty79]

> Eventually the sex gets in the way.

It can be done if you just text, never meet, rarely speak.

[bigiain]

It can be done if you respect them and yourself.

It’s pretty rare for me to not know if I’m gonna hook up with a woman in The first 6-12 months of knowing her. By then I’ve either raised the idea, or at least had the “if we were both single…” conversation and got a pretty good idea if they’re open to the idea of considering it later if the situation allows.

(Having said that, I’m in the older end of the demographic here, and I know for sure I didn’t have this worked out when I was in my 20s and still had teenaged hormones rushing around my brain…)