I believe, 100%, that men and women should develop friendships. I've heard some people argue that it's nigh impossible to do without high potential for terrible complications. If one party should start to want to be more than friends, but the other party doesn't reciprocate, then lots of anxiety, confusion, hurt feelings, and hard conversations are inevitable. Platonic friendships just aren't worth the risk, some might say (though I've no idea what Plato has to do with any of it. I assume he must have some treatise on friendship between the sexes, but if so, I haven't read it. No, I'm sorry to inform you, these musings I'm typing out here are all coming straight from my own head.)
So let's go ahead and grant the premise: platonic friendships between heterosexual men and women are highly subject to being plagued by the hardships of unrequited attractions. Does that automatically mean they are not worth the effort? Certainly not automatically. Whatever we end up concluding, we can't reasonably make the argument that because something presents challenges, we shouldn't do it. Most people would agree that just about anything worth doing comes with challenges (except eating ice cream; that's always worth doing, and there could hardly be anything less challenging).
So the more pertinent question is, do the unique challenges that come with male-female friendships warrant avoiding them altogether? Is the reward gained by good male-female friendships worth the risk of damages wrought by bad ones? Well, I kind of already gave my answer in my first sentence, so you already know my opinion. My friendships with women have played too important a role in shaping who I am today for me to possibly think otherwise.
But this is not to say that I take the risks lightly, and I do think I have learned some important things along the way. Here's a few (note these are coming from my--a man's--perspective. I don't make any claims about how well they apply to the other side of the aisle.)
1) Everyone has a different set of boundaries, and everyone's boundaries are worthy of respect. What's acceptable when interacting with one friend may be completely unappreciated by another. That's okay. Pay attention to responses, learn the boundaries, and heed them.
2) Avoid overly romantic gestures. As a man, I find it much easier to be sentimental and expressive towards my female friends than my male friends. Sometimes, I get notions to express something deeply personal or make some grand gesture to show my appreciation for them. Such things can feel really great in the moment, but might end up sending the wrong signals. So, I try to strike a balance in my behavior. I challenge myself to not be overly expressive towards women, and to be more expressive towards men. If I find myself wanting to say things to and do things for the ladies in my life that I know, in a million years, I would never say or do with my guy friends, I usually take that as a sign I should temper myself. It's at least a good impetus for checking my motives: "Why do I really want to do this?" If it's just for sheer emotional indulgence, it's probably not the right thing to do.
2, a) I say all this with the caveat that some "romance" between two single friends can be healthy. I put "romance" in quotes because what I'm talking about is not really romance, but it might resemble it in some regards. Like everything being considered here, context is everything. It's so difficult to lay down principles that apply to a majority of situations. But to use a specific example--one out of a million potential examples--let's say two long-time, good friends are at a wedding, and one asks the other to dance? In at least some contexts, that could be a nice, sweet, but completely platonic moment between two friends just having fun together, even though it's something that, in a million years, I personally would not do with my male friends. (Not to be hyper macho or anything, I just can't picture that being something that me or any of them would enjoy.)
3) I may be old school in this way, but I believe it's always the woman's prerogative to respond or not respond to me in the way that I wanted or expected. Because of the different power dynamics between men and women, I just think that men should go out of their way to avoid making women feel pressured or forced to respond in a particular way. "Hey, I smiled at you, you should have smiled back." "Hey I texted you yesterday and you never responded." "I did this for you, you should do that for me." That's not friendship, it's contract negotiation. At any point, of course, a guy has a right to say, "I don't think she's reciprocating the friendship as much as I'd like, maybe I'll back off a little bit." But she doesn't owe you anything. Personally, I'd rather let the girl's response be the weather vane to indicate which way the friendship is blowing.
4) Friendships between sexes can play a key role in romantic development and emotional maturity. Some people find love through matchmaking, blind dates, online dating, etc, which is great if that's what works. But a small segment of people, myself included among them, don't really develop romantic feelings until becoming friends with a person first. For my purposes here, by the way, I'm drawing a distinction between romantic feelings and sexual attraction. You can be attracted to a person without wanting to pursue a deeper relationship with them. But you need both of those nutrients for a proper romance to bloom, and for some people, the romantic feelings develop most readily, or maybe even exclusively, in the environment of friendship. And some guys just need good female friends before they'll ever even have a fighting chance in the dating arena.
4, a) This is decidedly NOT to say that the goal of friendships between sexes is romantic relationships! It's fine to hope for that result. Maybe that's your ideal scenario, where one of your best male or female friends develops into your lifelong romantic partner. But if you use friendship as a tool for dating, you're doing it wrong! The problem is, you'll end up discarding every friend whom you don't date because that was the only value you saw in them. Pursue friendships for friends, and you'll have genuine, honest, supportive love and care around you for a lifetime! If you get a husband or wife out of the deal, too, that's lagniappe.
5) Lastly (for this article anyway. There is much more that could be said I'm sure), if/when one or the other party begins a serious romantic relationship with someone else, you might want to have a conversation about it. Could be awkward. Lots of things are. But one of the things I will never forget is what one of my closest female friends did for me years ago. She started dating a guy who she had previously dated when they were both in high school. They had a pretty long-term relationship before, and really liked each other, so she knew right away that there was potential for this to be a serious relationship. She had always been someone who had close guy friends. One day, she pulled me aside to tell me she and this fellow had rekindled their romance. And she said to me, "I just want you to know, I really value our friendship, and I told him that if he's going to be jealous of me having good guy friends, then this isn't going to work."
I felt so valued by my friend in that moment. Truth be told, I would gladly fade into the background for any of my gal pals, if that's what needed to happen for them to successfully pursue a good dating relationship and/or marriage. The only thing that means more to me than their friendship is their freedom to pursue the life that they feel called to and what's most valuable to them. But in this particular context, with this particular friend, she knew herself and her own boundaries, and what she would tolerate and would not tolerate in her relationship/potential marriage, and she decided to take a stand for our friendship. I thought it was pretty cool, even though I acknowledge that it wouldn't work for a lot of couples. It worked out fine for all of us.
I'll conclude by noting my disdain for a phrase that I was guilty of using earlier in this very article: I don't like the phrase "more than friends." When we use it, surely we don't understand the power of friendship. Of course, in this day and age, romantic love is the more charged and explosively emotional power of the two. But for Christians, shouldn't we consider what Jesus said, that in the world to come we will not be given in marriage? So between friendship and romance, which will be the more enduring?
