What else can there be between men and women besides having sex?

A crazy man and a resentful woman once asked freelance writer Shen Hongfei: "Are confidantes based on ambiguity or friendship based on ambiguity? Without this layer of ambiguity, can they still be confidantes?"

Shen Hongfei replied: "What are 'female confidantes' and 'male confidantes'? They are all used by women to deceive themselves, or made up by men to deceive women. In a man's mind, his 'female confidantes' and his 'male confidantes' are actually automatically classified as 'to be fucked' from the beginning."

So, in fact, is there pure friendship between men and women?

If you want to be friends, women have the final say?

In fact, Gao Xiaosong once gave an answer to this question, but in his opinion: "Whether you can have pure friendship or not is up to the woman. If the woman wants to go further, you may become a couple; if the woman is not interested, then you will always be just friends." His statement seems a bit sarcastic, but it actually has a scientific basis.

By studying 1.95 billion mobile phone calls and 489 million text messages, Oxford University anthropologist Robin

Dunbar found that men and women follow different patterns in their relationships throughout their lives, with women’s friendships driving both finding a partner and raising children, for example.

Throughout life, women look for confidants of the opposite sex before men do, and then men reciprocate. This romantic relationship remains a priority for women throughout their childbearing years, until they begin to care about the next generation of young women.

What's the point of friendship without sex?

There was once a foreign experiment that specifically investigated college students' feelings about opposite-sex friendships. They recruited 400 college students and asked them to write down 10 benefits of opposite-sex friendships and 10

The disadvantages were analyzed and the results were statistically analyzed.

Judging from the results, many advantages and disadvantages are the same between men and women; for example, both men and women who make friends with the opposite sex will gain partners for dining and conversation, their self-confidence will be improved, and they will also be able to obtain more information about the opposite sex, as well as social status, respect, and resource sharing.

In addition, there will be some similar disadvantages, such as jealousy, ambiguous relationships, unrequited love; and, because of the relationship of friends of the opposite sex, their attractiveness in the eyes of potential dating partners will be affected.

However, men and women responded very differently on several key items regarding opposite-sex friendships.

When it comes to opposite-sex friendships, men are more likely to consciously connect them to sex and romance. Therefore, when friendship does not turn into a sexual or romantic relationship, men often feel used and abandoned, while women feel embarrassed about this unequal relationship; on the contrary, when friendship does turn into a sexual or romantic relationship, some men still think that the other party is "just a friend."

This has caused many tragedies.

In opposite-sex friendships, women enjoy the pleasure and sense of security when going out with opposite-sex friends, while men often only want to see the time and money spent behind it. Women also like the social connections they make through male friends, but at the same time, they don't like being bothered by male friends when dating.

Can there be pure friendship between men and women?

In Aristotle's eyes, pure friendship only exists between men of high moral character and has nothing to do with women. In ancient my country, where "men and women should not touch each other", friends of the opposite sex were rare. However, considering Aristotle's extreme discrimination against women and the low status of women at that time, the emergence of such remarks and phenomena is not surprising.

However, with the improvement of women's social status and the increase of social activities, it is easier for the opposite sex to become friends. But we have to admit that opposite-sex friendships among heterosexual people are often more difficult to maintain, but such friendships are very precious in many ways.

For example, if one or both parties in a friendship feel sexually attracted to each other—which is quite common—then maintaining a platonic friendship can be tricky because of the inevitable sexual tension. You know, many friendships between opposite sexes are based on some degree of sexual attraction.

From this, it can be seen that whether the friendship between your girlfriend and her male best friend is pure depends on what their purpose was when they first got to know each other.