The Likelihood of a Bisexual Friendship
Can Men and Women be friends? Yes… with a really big BUT at the end. I decided that it would be interesting to see what my friends and family had to say on the subject, so I started a thread on Face Book and got some pretty interesting answers. While the answers were many and varied, they only fell into three categories. The first was the flat out “no way in hell”. Not surprisingly this was mostly voiced by men. The other extreme was “yes, absolutely!” with no strings attached. This came from women and, for the most part, they are kidding themselves. Don’t get mad at me yet, I’ll explain more fully later. The third group was pretty much in agreement, with a few discrepancies. This group of people said “Yes, but”.
The first thing you have to consider when trying to be “just friends” is that there is no way the friendship will be the same as an only women or an only men friendship. Don’t even try. All you’ll do if you go down that road is get into a huge mess and be asking yourself how you let this happen. Perfect example comes from a friend of mine we will call Mr. B. Mr. B’s wife is a nurse and has a man as a patient that she really likes a lot and started hanging out with him as a friend. She asked Mr. B if she could go clothes shopping with her patient so she could be his fashion consultant. Mr. B said “go ahead, but you're going to end up disappointed real soon if you think he just wants to be friends". She even bought him, and a few of her other patients without family, a Christmas gift. A few days later she was moping around the house and Mr. B asked her what was wrong. She said "I don't know why guys just can't be friends with girls." He said "your buddy has the hots for you doesn't he?” She nodded and told Mr. B that the patient had confided in another nurse that he had feelings for her and was asking about the state of her marriage. Most of the time we befriend the opposite sex because we are interested in them sexually. If you go into a friendship and don’t even consider the possibility that the other person is attracted to you it’s going to end in a mess. You can’t just assume the ease of friendship the way it is with those of the same sex.
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