Can a man and a woman really be “just friends?”

A new study says the way human brains are wired for mating can make it difficult for a person to be “just friends” with a member of the opposite sex. (AP)

A new study says the way human brains are wired for mating
can make it difficult for a person to be “just friends”
with a member of the opposite sex.

“Human mating strategies are pretty strong,” says April
Bleske-Rechek, a professor at the University of Wisconsin
who worked on the study, in a discussion on 97.3 KIRO FM’s Ross and Burbank Show.

“We know that in the modern world, men and women do
engage in friendships and what they think of as platonic
relationships, and I would never say that platonic
relationships can’t exist, we were just making the case
that those evolved mating strategies do impinge on these
relationships.”

The abstract of the study, just published in “The Journal
of Social and Personal Relationships,” says that they find
attraction in cross-sex friendships is common, and
oftentimes negative, in terms of the health of the
friendship and their other romantic relationships.

Luke Burbank said he doesn’t find it surprising that
attraction in one or more people in a cross-sex friendship
is common.

“When I heard this research to me, it sort of jibed with
the way that I figure the world typically tends to work,”
said Burbank.

Bleske-Rechek says the attraction complication is rooted
in the strength of the human mating impulse.

“The default is […] when you see a member of the
opposite sex who is of reproductive age, who is
attractive, or sending ambiguous signals, and is not kin,
the primary activation is going to be mating,” said
Bleske-Rechek. “My graduate advisor is very fond of saying
we’re stone age brains operating in a modern environment.”

The study also found that people in cross-sex friendships
rarely talk about their feelings for one another, and
there is a lot of ambiguity in the relationship.

“There wasn’t a whole lot of understanding about what’s
going on,” said Bleske-Rechek. “Other researchers have
documented that people in cross-sex friendships engage in
a variety of little tests, trying to figure out what’s
going on in their relationship.”

But as all relationships change, Bleske-Rechek said it is
possible a cross-sex friendship that began with attraction
on one side or the other, could eventually move more
toward a real platonic relationship if it begins
resembling the kin category.

“We know mateships change over time. They go from very
passionate and co-dependent to sometimes very companionate
and not passionate,” said Bleske-Recheck. “So it’s quite
possible that people in cross-sex friendships after
sharing a long history, after perhaps addressing issues of
attraction, they may become more like kin.”

By JAMIE GRISWOLD, MyNorthwest.com Editor