(How) Can Women and Men Be Friends? The Fragility of Nascent Cross-Gender Friendships

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 12. Dating, Friendship, and Intimate Boundaries

Abstract

There are a number of reasons that cross-gender friendships between women and men are less common than same-gender friendships, but one explanation has been overlooked: challenges in establishing the platonic nature of the relationship in its early stages. Drawing on interviews about how people express interest in relationships with 62 Wisconsinites, I show that people rarely communicate their intentions for either friendships or romantic relationships directly. Strikingly, the most common strategies used to signal interest in a friendship—initiating conversation and suggesting one-on-one activities—are identical to those most commonly used to signal romantic interest. Although additional indirect signals may be used to differentiate platonic versus romantic intent, idiosyncrasies in how people use these strategies limit their interpretability. On the other hand, directly expressing romantic disinterest may rupture a friendship, and methods for indirectly expressing romantic disinterest overlap heavily with those for expressing disinterest in any friendship whatsoever. Thus, if one person perceives—rightly or wrongly—that the other is signaling romantic interest, they lack a dependable way of declining it while preserving a friendship. The widespread presumption that romantic desire occurs between women and men makes nascent friendships between women and men particularly fragile. Consequently, many potential cross-gender friendships may be prematurely abandoned due to interpretive uncertainty and a lack of effective cultural scripts for expressing an interest exclusively in friendship.

Author

• Chloe Grace Hart, University of Wisconsin-Madison