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Men and women can't be just friends

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Men and women can't be just friends

#21

Post by throwaway91111 »

wsc981 wrote: post #13
thescriptkiddie wrote: post #6

Ya, I don't buy this. I know this is just my experience, but I've had plenty of "just friends" who were members of the opposite sex, and nothing bad ever happened.

Just speaking for myself: I have never persued a friendship with a woman if I was not at least attracted to her. I don't see female colleagues at my current job as friends and I feel the same about the girlfriends of my friends. Those are just platonic relationships to me that I am not interested in deepening in any way.

That is so odd to me. Why would you pursue (platonic) relationships with men if there's no attraction? Are you only attracted to women? (I'm assumig you're male.)

Or are you talking about sexual attraction? Do you view women as only sexual? I am simply trying to figure out what men provide that women can or do not.

Personally (as a man) I can't make heads or tails out of how to interact with other men outside of work; I am precisely the opposite of you.

Re: Men and women can't be just friends

#22

Post by rustynails »

About 1/2 of my friends are female. Over the years, I've had a few of my expressions of interest rejected. However, I've had quite a few female friends "give up because I didn't get the message they were interested". I've been abused, called stupid, asked if I was gay, etc by female friends who were interested in me. I once had to ask a mutual (female) friend what happened because I couldn't get a word out of one woman. "You can't be THAT dumb, can you?".

I call bs on this one. I've had too many instances of being explicitly hit on (about 1 in 3 of good female friends at a guess) to believe the "women aren't attracted to male friends".

However, I have plenty of female friends who I just like because they are amazing people.

Re: Men and women can't be just friends

#24

Post by matz1 »

wsc981 wrote: post #13
thescriptkiddie wrote: post #6

Ya, I don't buy this. I know this is just my experience, but I've had plenty of "just friends" who were members of the opposite sex, and nothing bad ever happened.

Just speaking for myself: I have never persued a friendship with a woman if I was not at least attracted to her. I don't see female colleagues at my current job as friends and I feel the same about the girlfriends of my friends. Those are just platonic relationships to me that I am not interested in deepening in any way.

Let say a particular woman is not sexually attractive to you but get along very well with you, would you still not interested to be friend with her?

Re: Men and women can't be just friends

#25

Post by azakai »

bullsandabears wrote: post #8
kbenson wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a follow-up study, 249 adults (many of whom were married) were asked to list the positive and negative aspects of being friends with a specific member of the opposite sex. There was a follow-up study, but it doesn't say how much, if any, of the original research was tried again.

This is what passes as science in 'scientific american'?! There's not a single absolute number reported aside from the laughingly small sample size of 400 adults in a world of 7,000,000,000.

A random sample of 400 is enough to give a good estimate, regardless of the size of the population.

This is a non-intuitive result from statistics. The standard deviation - the average expected error - does not actually depend on the population size. It could be 7 billion or 7 hundred. The standard deviation only depends on the sample size, and is O(1/sqrt(n)).

In this case, with n=400, we have O(0.05). If we are testing a random variable with two values, then the true deviation is less than 0.5, so the expected error is 0.025 - we expect no more than 2.5% of mistake. That's very good!

(The bigger question is whether the sample is random or not.)

Re: Men and women can't be just friends

#26

Post by autokad »

wsc981 wrote: post #13
thescriptkiddie wrote: post #6

Ya, I don't buy this. I know this is just my experience, but I've had plenty of "just friends" who were members of the opposite sex, and nothing bad ever happened.

Just speaking for myself: I have never persued a friendship with a woman if I was not at least attracted to her. I don't see female colleagues at my current job as friends and I feel the same about the girlfriends of my friends. Those are just platonic relationships to me that I am not interested in deepening in any way.

>"I have never persued a friendship with a woman if I was not at least attracted to her."

if that is the case, it doesn't sound like you are actually pursuing friendships

Re: Men and women can't be just friends

#27

Post by bt4u »

matz1 wrote: post #24
wsc981 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just speaking for myself: I have never persued a friendship with a woman if I was not at least attracted to her. I don't see female colleagues at my current job as friends and I feel the same about the girlfriends of my friends. Those are just platonic relationships to me that I am not interested in deepening in any way.

Let say a particular woman is not sexually attractive to you but get along very well with you, would you still not interested to be friend with her?

Invalid premise. If not sexually attracted, they would not get along that well

Re: Men and women can't be just friends

#28

Post by MiddleEndian »

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #6

Ya, I don't buy this. I know this is just my experience, but I've had plenty of "just friends" who were members of the opposite sex, and nothing bad ever happened.

Me either, although as mentioned elsewhere in the comments the ratios (male:female) were mentioned but not the magnitudes. Also they only applied to pairs of friends who were willing to attend a study like this together.

Personally, I have plenty female friends with whom I know there is no attraction.

Re: Men and women can't be just friends

#29

Post by bt4u »

thepaulstella wrote: post #17
wsc981 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just speaking for myself: I have never persued a friendship with a woman if I was not at least attracted to her. I don't see female colleagues at my current job as friends and I feel the same about the girlfriends of my friends. Those are just platonic relationships to me that I am not interested in deepening in any way.

Wow, that's sad.

"sad" is being naive about the relationship between men and women

Re: Men and women can't be just friends

#30

Post by manicdee »

Apparently the writer of the article can not comprehend the difference between attraction and action.

I can find someone attractive without trying to have sex with them. Men and women can be "just friends", and this is not incompatible with "men are more likely to find friends sexually attractive."

Whether this is due to biology, sociology, culture, or space aliens is anyone's guess.

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