Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship,” noted Oscar Wilde in Lady Windermere’s Fan. In Bollywood speak, that would be “Ek ladka aur ladki kabhi dost nahin ho sakte” — a dictum generations of Indians have grown up with and that has been the default script for friendships between men and women in films and IRL: Doomed, delicate, and perpetually flirting with something “more”. But a recent NYU Stern-Meta study, which analysed 1.8 billion friendships across nearly 200 countries, finally bursts that bubble. It turns out that men and women do forge genuine, deep friendships, especially in societies where gender equality is strong. And the more liberated a culture is from old-fashioned gender roles, the more natural it becomes for men and women to simply enjoy each other’s company without a romantic subtext.
The implications are more radical than they appear — and rooted in the long arc of feminism. Given the deeply entrenched gender inequality, in the 18th century, early feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft recast friendship between the sexes as a revolutionary force — the emotional and intellectual bedrock of equal relationships, and the foundation of a happy marriage in which partners enjoyed more than just physical compatibility. It would take another century and another wave of feminism to get sex out of the way and push it into the realm of the platonic — not very successfully, going by popular culture. To paraphrase Nora Ephron’s blockbuster When Harry Met Sally, “the sex part” still “gets in the way”.
