Can guys and girls be justfriends? If you’re like me and you like to snuggle up in bed with a couple of your closet friends and watch a good girlie chick flick then you will inevitably have noticed a pattern. There’s the hunky guy chasing after an extremely leggy blonde throughout the entire movie until the very end when he realises that his best friend is really his one true love. So what is this saying to us? That we can’t just have boy friends? Or girl friends similarly?
Turning to Google for some assistance on this subject matter, it turns out this is a subject that has been discussed for years from trashy magazines to high-brow psychological experiments. The times are changing. When women were seen as the ones that stayed at home and men went to work, the only time they encountered one another was really on a romantic basis, making it next to impossible to form a relationship that is purely friendship. But now, with men and women working, socialising and living together, can we just be friends?
So I asked this question myself, and thought about the mind boggling number of times I had discussed it in the past. Last Christmas, my Grandpa bought my Granny a charm for her charm bracelet that reads ‘Best Friends.’ He said it was because that’s what they are more than anything, best friends. My Gran has always said that’s what you have to do, marry your best friend for it to work. A friend has always said that boys and girls can’t just be friends because there is always something more there; attraction, jealousy, and who knows what else.
But I disagree. I have always had boy friends that have been nothing more than that- friends. Growing up with two sisters, meant it was a nice escape to have male company where the conversation didn’t revolve around clothes, make up, or boys themselves. It is a different type of friendship. Boys and girls work in such different ways and we worry and think about different things. It’s great to have a male perspective on a problem, because to a girl it may seem like the ‘be all and end all’ but they can see it in a completely different way.
Coming to university, everyone finds themselves living and working with the opposite sex. At this time in our life, it would be nearing on impossible not to be friends with one another. I have met a couple of my best friends at uni who are both boys, and I wouldn’t change that for the world. Regardless of what anyone else says, or what magazines, films or experiments say, I do believe that boys and girls can be just friends and those friendships are some of the most important ones you can have.
