Can men and women really be close platonic friends?

Ladies do you think you could possibly get along with a guy just as well as you do with your female friends?  Not in exactly the same way, but on the same level without it changing into something romantic. And fellas, do you really think the “friend zone” exists with a woman or is that just her way of getting you off her back.

Japanese bridal information site Bridal Soken conducted a study last March asking 3096 single men and women between the ages of 20 and 50, “Is a friendship between a man and a woman real?” According to the results many more men and women think it is than isn’t, but the deeper we go we can see that gender is but a single piece of a bigger puzzle.

When asked the question, 44.6% of men and 57.9% of women said it was “highly” or “somewhat” possible for men and women to become close friends and close friends only. On the other hand, 21.7% of men and 16.6% of women said there was “absolutely” or “very much” no way that men and women could become true friends.

So overall it would seem that women are a little more optimistic when it comes to men and women intermingling on a sincere deeper level. If we look at it in terms of age, men clearly steadily feel bleaker about inter-gender friendships as they get older, sliding from 52.9% of believers in their 20s to only 32.6% in their 40s. Conversely, the number of non-believers steadily rose from 17.6% to 30.3% in the same period.

Women, however, only drop slightly in believers from 20s to 40s slipping from 62.1% to 51.9%. In addition, the number of women who don’t believe in real friendship actually dropped off a little too, from 17.3% to 14.1%. From these responses we can figure that men clearly get more jaded with age while women just get a little more uncertain about true male/female friendships.

Considering the relationship status of the single people surveyed, for men, having a girlfriend or not didn’t seem to impact their feelings about friendship between a man and a woman. Yet for women, the presence of a boyfriend seemed to significantly affect their views on real friendships between guys and gals. Of women who were believers 38.4% had boyfriends, whereas 47.8% of all women who don’t believe in such true friendship have boyfriends.

From this data one could deduce that if you’re a guy, and you think have a close female friend, the moment you get a new girlfriend, there is a one in ten chance that one of the ladies has got to go.

Japan Today

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