Gonzaga Witness

Issue date: 2/15/06 Section: Opinion

I was told that I came highly recommended to write about friendships between men and women, and I'm still trying to figure out exactly what that recommendation means. I've been accused in recent years of two seemingly contradictory errors: one, having nothing to do with lady friends except my Heybaptu (who, if you don't know, is my sun-burned-goiter-bearing-hula-dancing-dashboard-companion), and two, not being able to focus my vibe enough to keep female friendships on a platonic level. Either way, I was surprised to hear that I'm also recommended for the present article.
Qualified or not, as a philosopher-in-training my first inclination is to approach the question with more questions. First, it seems to me that the question of whether men and women can have platonic friendships hinges on other questions like the following: Can men and women be friends without any sexual tension? Can men and women friendships have the same character as same-sex friendships? Can friendship bracket the genders of the friends involved? The first question I'll deal with later. To the second question, I give an emphatic no. Men and women are simply too different emotionally, psychologically, and biologically for mixed-sex friendships to be the same thing as same-sex friendships. Moreover, those differences are so thoroughly part of who we are as men and women that gender cannot be bracketed as a non-issue in mixed-sex friendships, if ever. Like it or not, admit it or not, we can't skirt around our sexuality and pretend that we don't know how attractive our friends of the opposite sex are, nor can we pretend that we haven't formed judgments about whether or not we have romantic interests in those friends. Are such friendships platonic? Again I'll play a philosopher's card and say, that depends.
Answering whether men and women can be platonic friends depends on what we mean by the label "friend." According to common usage, the term "friend" itself is not value-laden, so that we use it both for those we make a point of spending time with and those we just happen to spend time with. A distinction is therefore in order. Aristotle distinguished between three types of friendship: friendship of utility (study-buddies), friendship of pleasure (beer-buddies), and friendship of virtue (bosom-buddies), which he also calls perfect friendship. Aristotle said that the first two types of friendship are easily formed, easily dissolved, and are especially found in young people. He even thought that nearly all of human friendships are based on utility or pleasure. Perfect friendship, however, is both enduring and rare. Happy is the person who has but one in a given life. I don't need to carefully and critically explicate Aristotle's position here, but I think we use some similar, though far simpler, distinctions when we define people as acquaintances, or casual friends, or close friends.

Continued...

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