Can Men and Women Be Friends? Revisiting an Evergreen.

When my mother was young and Truman was president, her mother and father explained to her how car seating arrangements could unintentionally reveal social class.

According to my grandparents, if two working-class couples were riding in a car together the men would sit up front and the women in the back. What mattered to the working class, my ancestors opined, wasn’t just male dominance. It was the presumption among the poor that men and women had very little to say to one another, living as they did in separate spheres, and so the only possible friendships were with one’s same sex.

If two middle-class couples were riding in a car, the wives would sit next to their husbands. To be bourgeois (and a reminder, bourgeois means middle class, not anything higher), is to have companionate marriage on a high and shaky pedestal.

When “our kind of people” ride in a car, however, the couples are mixed. Whether she rides in front or back, the wife sits next to the other woman’s husband. This, my grandparents said, is NOT an invitation to sexual infidelity, but rather a reminder that to be upper-middle class – unlike the less fortunate – is to be confident that men and women can and should be wonderful friends regardless of marital status.

To believe that men and women occupy entirely different realms and have little to say to each other? That’s working class. To believe that marriages are fragile, and sin lurks at every door, and any friendship with someone of the opposite sex outside your marriage is threatening and inappropriate? That’s tiresomely middle-class.  Or so we were told and believed.

As a diagnostic of other people’s upbringings, the car example is loaded with all sorts of presumptions and snobberies and oversimplifications. (It didn’t stop Vance Packard from using it in his infamous 1959 book on class in America, The Status Seekers.) Yet there’s a smidgen of truth here – particularly in the insistence among my family that “well-brought-up people” considered it normal and desirable to have opposite-sex platonic friends before and after marriage. Both of my parents had opposite-sex friends of whom they were fond and with whom they were not romantically entangled. The same was true of each of their parents.

To put it more plainly, well-brought-up people assumed that men and women could and should have overlapping interests that weren’t just based on sexual desire.

It was a big shock when I went out into the world and met people who thought that close, opposite-sex platonic friendship was impossible, or unwise, or immoral, or something that could only be practiced by the monumentally self-deceived. It was always a deal-breaker in dating. If a woman had no platonic male friends, or didn’t believe that it was appropriate for me to have female friends, we would not work out. If she had been raised to believe that men and women were so different as to have no common ground other than sexual interest, then the gulf between us could not be bridged. I learned the hard way it was better to choose partners who not only were attracted to the opposite sex, but who genuinely liked spending time with them as friends.

Throughout my life, my closest friends have invariably been women. In the overwhelming majority of cases, these are women with whom I have no romantic or sexual history. Our friendships are not undergirded by the thrill of “what ifs” or “if onlys” or “I wonder what it would be likes.”  Some of these friends are married. The husbands know me, and the husbands trust their wives, and my goodness, these friendships sustain me. Especially now, as I have decided on celibacy, I am comforted by friends with whom I can sip coffee and eat cookies and discuss the ups and the downs; the hopes and the disappointments; the worries about aging parents and moody adolescent children. 

I am quite confident that none of these women are about to confess their longing for me, and I am absolutely certain that the emotional intimacies we share will not automatically kindle a craving for physical intimacy on either of our parts. And even if the thought did briefly cross one mind or another, so what? Feelings are not facts, and they are not impetuses to actions (or at least declarations) liable to be regretted.

I read these words and I think, um, this sounds arrogant and presumptuous. Perhaps you think I protest too much? Perhaps someone who has been divorced five times ought to show a little bit more humility, or at least a little bit more respect for human frailty?  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. I do note that none of my marriages ended because of boundaries crossed with a platonic friend. I cheated aplenty, and that was wrong, but I never had affairs with close friends.  I might betray my marriage vows but there were certain lines I wouldn’t cross.  I attribute that less to virtue than to the strange alchemy that ensures that the closest friends are not desirable as lovers. 

Jeepers, I’m not helping my case here. “Strange alchemy” is poetic, but I fear it may not jibe with your lived experience.  This is the thing about having a brain injury, or mental illness – I start out making a case for something, and then try to draw on examples from my own past in order to bolster the argument, and halfway through I realize that I just sound… weird. Or delusional.   You may be thinking of  instances you know where a married person found an opposite-sex friend in which to confide, and gradually those confidences became intimacies, and those intimacies became infidelities. 

Perhaps you believe that marriages must be guarded like citadels that are made of eggshells rather than stone. Even if one particular platonic friendship outside the marriage might not be a threat, why take the risk?  Why arouse jealousy or anxiety in your spouse, or allow yourself to be a potential source of conflict in someone else’s relationship? It’s playing with fire, you say, and you tell me that the little house in which your family dwells is made of wood. You say to me, firmly but not unkindly, that you believe this not because your own marriage is especially unstable, but because you have no illusions about human weakness. You think I do still suffer from those illusions, and ought to know better by now.

Fair enough. You are like the people interviewed by Sarah Wheeler, author of this piece yesterday in The Cut: Where Have All My Guy Friends Gone? Wheeler notes that even among the youngest married folks, this suspicion of cross-sex friendship is intense, and possibly even growing: “Once people have monogamously partnered up and had children, many people become arch-conservatives who are terrified about the sanctity of family life. Sexual monogamy is apparently not enough to protect couples — social monogamy is also demanded.”

“Arch-conservatives. “Terrified.” “Demanded.” These are pejoratives. (So too is “bourgeois,” at least the way my family used it.) Is it fair to be hard on folks who are wary about the possibilities of platonic friendship?

I am not in a position to give advice on marriage. Marriage is very hard, and I have proved to be very bad at it, and it’s ridiculous for me to propose that those who are better at it than I was loosen strictures that they believe serve them well.

And though I do like telling the car-and-social class anecdote, I recognize that it offends and oversimplifies as much as it elucidates.

And yet. I rejoice in my female friends. I would not have lived this long without them, and I am grateful that whatever my many failings, I was given the capacity to sustain and nurture warm, kind, patient, and entirely unerotic relationships with several dear and brilliant women. 

To use a saying also associated with automobiles, your mileage may vary.