Overcoming sex: can men and women be friends?

If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, it may explain at least one of their shared beliefs: Men and women can't be real friends. Blame the sexual tension that almost inevitably exists between any red-blooded, heterosexual man and woman.

Point to the jealousy that plagues many rational people when a significant other befriends someone of the opposite sex. Boil it down to the inherent differences between the sexes. It just can't be done. Right?

WRONG, SAY RELATIONSHIP EXPERTS. "THE BELIEF THAT MEN AND women can't be friends comes from another era in whick women were at home and men were in the workplace, and the only way they could get together was for romance," explains Linda Sapadin, Ph.D., a psychologist in private practice in Valley Stream, New York. "Now they work together and have sports interests together and socialize together." This cultural shift is encouraging psychologists, sociologists and communications experts to put forth a new message: Though it may be tricky, men and women can successfully become close friends. What's more, there are good reasons for them to do so.

Society has long singled out romance as the prototypical male-female relationship because it spawns babies and keeps the life cycle going; cross-sex friendship, as researchers call it, has been either ignored or trivialized. We have rules for how to act in romantic relationship (flirt, date, get married, have kids) and even same-sex friendships (boys relate by doing activities together, girls by talking and sharing). But there are so few platonic male-female friendships on display in our culture that we're at a loss to even define these relationships.

Part of this confusion stems from the media. A certain 1989 film starring Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal convinced a nation of moviegoers that sex always comes between men and women, making true friendship impossible. "When Harry Met Sally set the potential for male-female friendship back about 25 years," says Michael Monsour, Ph.D., assistant professor of communications at the University of Colorado at Denver and author of Women and Men as Friends: Relatioships Across the Life Span in the 21st Century (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001). Television hasn't helped either. "Almost every time you see a male-female friendship, it winds up turning into romance," Monsour notes. Think Sam and Diane or Chandler and Monica. These cultural images are hard to over-come, he says. It's no wonder we expect that men and women are always on the road to romance.

But that's only one of the major barriers. In 1989, Don O'Meara, Ph.D., a sociology professor at the University of Cincinnati-Raymond Walters College, published a landmark study in the journal Sex Roles on the top impediments to cross-sex friendship. "I started my research because one of my best friends is a woman," says O'Meara. "She said, 'Do you think anyone else has the incredible friendship we do?'" He decided to find out, and after reviewing the scant existing research dating back to only 1974, O'Meara identified the following four challenges to male-female friendship: defining it, dealing with sexual attraction, seeing each other as equals and facing people's responses to the relationship. A few years later, he added a fifth: meeting in the first place.