Can Men & Women Be Friends?

**Dr. Alok Kanojia** (0:00)
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Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer GG podcast. I'm Dr. Alok Kanojia, but you can call me Dr. K.
I'm a psychiatrist, gamer and co-founder of Healthy Gamer.
On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.
Today, we're going to talk about one of the internet's favorite questions. Can men and women actually be friends? Now I'm of the mind that the answer is absolutely yes. People can be friends. But it requires a skill set that not all of us were taught. And on the other side, there's people who believe that men and women can't be friends. And there's always going to be some kind of attraction that carries a risk because you guys may have heard of this scenario, right? You're dating someone who is your romantic partner and they have a friend. And you're kind of worried about their friend. You can sort of tell that their friend is into them, but they're like, oh no, they're friends. We've been friends for years. There's nothing going on. And then after y'all break up, three months later, six months later, lo and behold, they're actually in a relationship. And the scary thing is there's a lot of truth to that as well. So in order to navigate this question of can men and women be friends or not, we're actually going to explore both of those paths. What is a friendship, what is a platonic friendship look like, and what's the deal with all these people in the friend zone who end up dating later on? Let's start with the side of men and women can be friends, but this requires a skill set that is different that not everyone has. Now some people grew up with parents who had a good template for cross sex relationships. We're assuming a heteronormative perspective here, okay? So if you grew up with your mom having male friends that she was close to, or your dad having female friends that he was close to, there's a good chance that you internalized a lot of the skills that they utilized. And this may be subtle things, right? So you notice that your mom, while she may have had female friends and male friends, she was way more touchy with her female friends than she may have been with her male friends. There are all kinds of subtle boundaries that are a part of this template of a cross sex relationship, which explains why it's so easy for some people and so difficult for others. Because a lot of this stuff gets baked in when we're growing up. So what kinds of skills do these entail? The first thing that I think is really important is actually emotional regulation. I'm a psychiatrist and on this mental health channel, we always talk about emotional regulation, but let's understand what we mean by this, okay? So why can't men and women be friends? Well, because at some point, someone's going to catch feelings, right? That's the main argument. At some point, you're going to start getting attracted to this person. You'll start maybe falling in love with them. And this is a key thing to understand. If you fall in love with someone, what are your options? So this is what I mean by emotional regulation. Love is an emotion, right? At its core, for the most part, there's at least an emotional component to it. And so if you can manage your anger and not give in to your anger, so I'm pissed at someone, but I'm going to go ahead and hold my head up high and not sink to their level. If I'm feeling sad or depressed and I don't feel like getting out of bed, but I'm able to regulate that emotion and be able to get out of bed anyway, then those emotions do not dictate my life. And this is where love is no different, right? So if we kind of think about it, everyone's all for emotional regulation of sadness. If I feel ashamed, Dr. K, how do I hold my head up high? If I feel like I've got low self-confidence, how do I build that self-esteem? What are the techniques of emotional regulation to deal with these emotions? But when it comes to love, I don't think about this as something that needs to be emotionally regulated. And in the same way that I can regulate my anger, it no longer controls me. I can also regulate my love and it no longer controls me. So a huge deciding factor is when you catch feelings, what is the way that you deal with those feelings, right? Some people will pull away, which can be a healthy thing to do because we don't want to foster those feelings. Another important skill that you can have is having a conversation about it. So can you go to this friend of yours and have a mature conversation as friends and say, hey, I noticed that I'm starting to have some romantic feelings towards you. This is important to understand. If you're truly friends, this does not have to be like a confession, which is what a lot of people default to. I think it's a terrible move. Just going to your friend and saying like, hey, I'm catching some weird feelings, wondering if you're experiencing anything similar. We as friends, how are we going to navigate this? And you're not trying to tell them, hey, I want a relationship with you, which by the way is another really basic skill. If you catch feelings, do you need to follow them? If you feel lust, is that something that you're defaulting to gratifying? And what I find in a lot of people who struggle to have cross-sex relationships is that they're not able to have conversations. They're not able to regulate their emotions. And if they catch feelings, that means they need to act on them. But then we have another problem, which is that we sort of think that, okay, once I'm in love, then I will stay in love, right? Like this feeling will grow and grow and grow, and this will be torture, so I need to pull out of this relationship. Totally fine to do that. But this is where we also have to understand something else about emotions, which is that they tend to equilibrate over time. One of the biggest problems with relationships is that we fall in love and then we fall out of love. The spark from the relationship disappears. And in fact, that is more common than the spark staying, right? So the average person will date several people that they feel some degree of chemistry, some degree of attraction, but then over time that attraction will kind of putter out, will wane. I work with a lot of married couples who have been together for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and they've started the process of falling out of love. About 50%, 40 to 45% of relationships and marriages end in divorce. And a big part of that is that people fall out of love. So just because you are catching feelings, doesn't mean that those feelings will continue to grow. You can talk about it, you can manage those feelings, you can do some meditation, you can spend some meaningful time with your significant other over here. There are a lot of things that you can actually do to manage those feelings. Second thing to keep in mind is that over time, generally speaking, if you catch feelings for someone, the research on love shows that it usually requires investment on your part to maintain that feeling of love. The first stage of love is governed a lot by dopamine, right? So their presence is, oh my god, the thought of them, I'm so, like you just get this dopamine trickle in your brain when you're in their presence, just being in their presence feels amazing, oh my god. I can't, the touch to just brush against them is electricity in my skin, oh my god. That feeling is dopamine, but when people are in a relationship for 20 or 30 years, that feeling usually does not persist. What we know about long-term relationships is that you need to add other kinds of love, oxytocin love, which is a sense of bonding, a sense of connectedness. There's also types of love that involve sacrifice, planning together, living together, having nurturing things that kind of tie you together, like having kids or starting a business or whatever. So we know from the science of love, which you guys can see more about in Dr. K's Guide to Love, Sex and Relationships, is that there are several different kinds of love, several different phases of attraction. And actually the most common thing is for us to catch feelings for someone and then over time, those feelings will wane just like any other emotion will. So if you're able to regulate your emotions, if you're able to have conversations with your friend, if you're able to observe boundaries, so this is also something that I'm kind of careful about, which is that if I'm attracted to a friend of mine, I'm very careful about the kind of time I spend with them. And I'm not going to engage in behaviors that foster the growth of that attraction. So if I have a friend that I'm attracted to, I'll go to lunch instead of dinner. If we go to dinner, we'll have maybe one or two drinks, but generally speaking, I try not to drink around people that I'm attracted to. And the other really important part is that when I have friends that I could be attracted to or we feel some kind of connection, I've noticed they do this too, we'll also include our partners in our relationship. So we'll do like a double date or something, we'll hang out with our kids or whatever. So we sort of encourage sort of a more platonic energy by bringing other factors into it. And so it may not be surprising that actually, if you pull people who have friends of the opposite sex, both men and women, people actually consider physical attractiveness between friends to be a cost or burden of the relationship, not an advantage. Well, if you ask, is this a benefit or a cost to be attracted to your platonic friends, would you consider that a benefit? 6% of people say, yes, it's a benefit to have an attractive friend. 32% of people, five times as many people will say that being attracted to your friends is a cost or a burden on the relationship. So it does get complicated if you're into them, but generally speaking, a lot of people are capable of having platonic relationships without any romantic involvement. But what's the flip side of the argument, right? Because there are a lot of people who say men and women can't be friends and there's the one that your boyfriend or girlfriend told you not to worry about, which you know you should worry about. So this is what's really fascinating. If you look at the way that most relationships form, this is kind of not counting online dating, because that's a different kind of environment, but if you look at the organic way that relationships form, in one study of 1,857 people, 70.3% of these people said that they were friends first before they engaged in a romantic relationship. So over two-thirds of people, over two-thirds of relationships start as friendships, okay? Other interesting thing is that the average duration of friendship is 21.9 months. So these people are usually friends for about two years before they start dating. So it kind of tracks with your experience of you're dating your, let's say, your girlfriend, and then you guys date for a year, there's a friend that you're worried about, they break up, or y'all break up, and then eight months later, they are dating the friend that you were worried about. The data behind this stuff actually absolutely tracks with that. But if we want to understand, you know, how does this happen? What's the deal with the friend zone? The moment that we say that there is a pathway, and by the way, in the literature, this is called the friends to lovers pathway, which is the most common way to enter into a romantic relationship. Now we've triggered all the friend zone people, right? So like not in a bad way, but like there are a lot of us who have romantic feelings for a friend, or maybe they have romantic feelings for us, and we've been told, oh my God, the friend zone is a terrible place to be. We've been told that you should express your romantic interest early. Like don't get slotted into the friend zone. Don't get friend zoned. Stay in the girlfriend zone or the boyfriend zone. Like that's the zone we want to stay in. And so then people are going to be wondering like, okay, how do we navigate this, right? So what determines whether someone winds up as a friend, whether you maintain a platonic relationship, or you sort of board the on-ramp onto the romantic relationship. And this is where we've got to dig into a little bit of biological research, okay? So big disclaimer here, we're going to talk about basic science research around mating. But a big thing that I want to point out here, there's some really interesting stuff here, but there is biological research about mating and mate selection and things like that. A key thing that I want y'all to understand is just because there is biological research about dating, does not mean that all men or all women are this way. So biology is about the observation of whole scale trends within populations. What I've noticed as a psychiatrist is that the individual variability within people is incredibly high, right? So if we look at things like mating behaviors of snow leopards, snow leopards to my knowledge, don't have a very complex mind. They're solo creatures that when a female is in heat, a male will seek her out. Their total engagement will be one hour every 365 days. So with a primitive biological organism, they may be driven by their biological factors. But if we look at humans, humans have this thing called a mind. They have a very complex psychology. We're shaped by adverse childhood experiences. We're shaped by our templates. We're shaped by traumatic experiences. We're shaped by media and literature in society. We're shaped by our prior relationships. We have a lot of genetic variability. So even though we're gonna dig into the biology because I think it's important to understand, please don't take this as deterministic for all women will behave this way because that's not even what the study shows. We're gonna look at studies that show trends within genders. This is a paper that's looking at ancestral men and ancestral women. So let's kind of adopt their viewpoint. So let's say I'm an ancestral man and I'm attracted to an ancestral woman. Now that woman is sending me signals. Those signals could be pro-attraction or anti-attraction. And the ancestral man has an interesting mathematical kind of approach to this, which is that if the woman is interested in me and I underestimate that, then I lose an opportunity to mate. If I lose that opportunity to mate, my genes aren't passed on. So the cost to me to under interpret a signal, if I missed a signal, that cost to me is really high. So the prime mating strategy for an ancestral man is to amplify whatever signals the woman is sending my way. So if she's kind of in the middle and I interpret that as, oh, she's so into me, then it encourages me to try to engage in mating behavior. And so even if I make a mistake and she's not that into me, my cost is not super high, right? This also explains why we're talking about ancestral men because in today's world, the cost of rejection is very high, right? You can mess up your situation at work, you can feel terrible about yourself, but none of those things matter for the ancestral man. So if they express interest and they get rejected, really no big harm. Whereas if I underestimate their interest in me, I'm missing out on a mating opportunity, which is a huge cost. So if you take this error management theory approach, you would predict that men are more likely to over inflate a woman's interest, okay? Because biologically from an error management theory perspective that is favorable to them. Now for the female perspective, it's actually the opposite. So I'm a woman, there's a dude who appears to be into me. If I amplify that signal, he's not actually that into me, but I think he's really into me. If I make a mistake, this is called a positive error, where I believe he's into me, but he's not that into me. And then we end up engaging in mating and he's not committed to me and then moves on, then I'm left with a huge problem because now I'm a solo mother, very hard to survive. Whereas if I underestimate their interest, oh, he's not really that into me. What that actually encourages the male to do is demonstrate their commitment in an amplified way. So there are 10 dudes who are all into me. I don't think any of them are really that into me. And the signal that I'm actually going to receive is the guy who goes the furthest, the guy who gets me flowers, gets me a box of chocolates, really demonstrates their commitment in a hyper elevated way. Okay, so error management theory would predict that women will underestimate attractiveness and men will overestimate attractiveness. And they actually did a study to test this hypothesis and they found exactly what error management theory would predict. When we're looking at a man, we are likely to underestimate their commitment, to hypothetically induce amplified signals of commitment. And when we are looking at a woman, men are likely to overestimate her interest, even where there is none, right? And there's some really creepy videos about, you know, men approaching women in weird places. They're not suggesting that that behavior is justified or fair should continue, but it sort of tracks with the biology, okay? And I think this study sort of gives us some insight into a common thing that I see with my patients, which is my female patients complain about getting girlfriend zoned, right? They're like, the default is to be friends. I don't know why I keep on getting girlfriend zoned. And the male patients that I have will complain about being friend zoned. Their default goal is to be with this person, but they end up getting shunted over to the friend zone. And so then that leads us to the other study that I talked about at the beginning, which is that there's a study of 1,800 people that found that two-thirds of them, over two-thirds of them, started their romantic relationship as a friendship. So how does that interface with this idea of can men and women be friends if the majority of relationships that are romantic start out as friendships? And the answer is I think that we can absolutely be friends because of the skill set that we said, but I think it's important to consider this pathway. So how does this work, right? Even if we're friends, what determines whether we graduate to a romantic relationship or not? So these are not like we've been friends for six months. This is usually someone I've gotten to know over the course of years. And then it kind of makes sense that we have an opportunity to kind of date, right? Because now I know this person. And if we look at the main challenge of starting to date without knowing someone, it's like I don't know if this person is right for me. I don't know what their values are. I don't know what their finances are. I don't know how ambitious they are. I don't know what their religion is. I don't know what their kids are like. And then dating creates a huge problem because now we're trying to assess all of this stuff with people right at the beginning, right? How much money do you make? How tall are you? Do you want to have kids? What's your religion? And so dating is starting to feel a little bit more like an interview process for a job. And when we have that interview process, because we're trying to assess whether this person is right for us or not, it doesn't really foster a spark or a connection. And then we have this other problem where like, if we feel a spark or a connection with someone, but they're not right in some of these dimensions, then we're kind of stuck, right? So both of these situations are bad. I am interviewing them for a job process, therefore there's no spark, or I feel a spark and they may not be right in some of these dimensions. Both of these are problematic situations, which is why the friendship to lovers pathway is so appealing because I actually know this person for a couple of years, how likely are they to cheat on me? I may have observed that with their prior girlfriend, their prior boyfriend, I know what their values are, I know how we get along. We're clearly able to maintain a friendship, we have a healthy amount of trust and connection, so we're actually checking a lot of those boxes ahead of time and then we graduate to a romantic relationship. And then the question becomes what determines whether we graduate to a romantic relationship? And this is where I think a lot of the people in the friend zone get really frustrated because they're missing one or two really important points. If you look at studies on the friendship to lovers pathway, what we tend to find is that both parties consider each other quite datable from the get go. So there is attraction from the get go, right? Which is kind of scary. But one of the things that's really important as we look into the research is that if this person would not consider you as a potential partner, then it seems like there's very little that you can do to change their mind, right? So if you are not the right religion for them, if you maybe don't have the right aesthetic for them, if you don't have the right kind of humor for them, if you do not qualify as a partner, then the likelihood of converting from friend to romantic partner is lower. And this is what I see a lot of frustration with, which is like if I'm into you and you're not into me, I may emotionally invest or even financially invest in the relationship to try to get you to like me. I'm sort of intentionally trying to get you to like me, whereas what we see from the friends to lovers pathway is that a lot of those boxes are inherently checked. So the scary thing is it's not clear that you can invest in the relationship to get this person to like you, which is a lot of the advice that we kind of hear. The other interesting thing is we see the merit of a lot of the advice that we hear as well, which is kind of work on yourself. So the right move for the friends to lovers pathway is not to try to get this person to like you, but to try to become something that people find attractive. So I started having this friend, we've been friends for three years, and over the course of that three years, how am I investing my time? Am I investing it in getting you flowers, picking you up from the airport, being there for you all the time? And am I investing in the relationship or am I investing into becoming something that people find attractive? Am I spending my time at the gym? Am I becoming ambitious? Am I becoming career driven? Am I developing as a human being? Am I doing some looks maxing, fixing my hair, upgrading my fashion, cleaning my apartment, you know, wiping down the countertops, wiping up all the hair in my bathroom? Am I becoming someone who is datable? And basically when people do that, when they have a relationship where someone feels safe with us, they know us, and I work on becoming someone attractive, that's what really crosses the bridge. It turns out that men and women can be friends and also that men and women who are friends frequently end up in relationships. To understand more about chemistry, attraction, the stages of a relationship, check out Dr. K's guide to love sex in relationships.