For some, male-female friendship is the stuff of science fiction. Some are unable to conceive of an unambiguous relationship with a person of the opposite sex. So passionate is this subject that it was even the subject of a mythical scene on How I Met Your Mother. But what does science have to say?
The sexes have trouble understanding each other
In a study published in 2015 in the scientific journal Evolutionary Psychology, scientists from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology looked at how men and women display attraction.
Spoiler alert: signals are clearly interpreted differently, depending on gender. In fact, this is one of the aspects that most differentiate men and women, as Eureka Alert points out:
In most areas of psychology, the differences between the sexes are minimal, if not non-existent: mental capacities, intellectual performance, food preferences, men and women are all more or less identical. But when it comes to reproduction and the challenges of finding a sexual partner, the differences are sudden.
Clearly, men sometimes interpret gestures and words from the opposite sex as signs of sexual attraction, when in fact they (often) are not. Conversely, women decode signs of sexual attraction as friendly gestures. In fact, in this dynamic, nobody understands each other, and the distant culprit is… evolution.
The need to reproduce dictates our actions
When it comes to reproduction, men and women are not equal. For a man, securing offspring can be a matter of minutes: theoretically, he can have sex with multiple women and get them pregnant without any repercussions on his life. We’re not talking about ethics or alimony here.
For a woman, reproducing has a far greater impact. This would explain why the game of seduction does not obey the same rules, depending on the sex:
A woman risks pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding and child-rearing, as well as the loss of the opportunity to reproduce with others. Over thousands of generations, women’s psychology has evolved to set the bar higher, which means they need much clearer signals than men before considering a sexual relationship.
This would happen unconsciously, but women would choose their partners more seriously than men. In other words, men are more often attracted to members of the opposite sex than women. This imbalance is the cause of many awkward situations.
But does this mean that a man and a woman are incapable of being friends? Not necessarily. Our ways of interacting with our contemporaries are evolving, and according to Mic.com:
Millenials are much more likely than previous generations to view male-female friendships as normal
