It’s one of the oldest questions known to man (and woman): Can truly platonic relationships ever exist, or will there always be some bit of attraction there?
When it comes to the burning question, everybody has an opinion and an anecdote to share. You would never think that there could be science to answer the age-old question, but there always is.
Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology surveyed 308 heterosexual undergrad students between the ages of 18 and 30, asking them about friendships, sexual attractions, and experiences with misread social signals.
The result: men commonly over perceived sexual interest from women, with the female participants saying they’d had their friendly actions misunderstood by men about 3.5 times over the past year on average. On the flip side, women reported under-perceiving sexual interest from men.
The research falls in line with many different studies. In a 2009 study conducted at Northern Illinois University, researchers found that males observed women to be more seductive, promiscuous, and flirtatious than females observed men to be.
Another 2012 study further supported that one-sided feelings are common. Men are more likely to be sexually attracted to their female friends than their female friends were to them.
On the other hand, Scientific American noted, “Women, too, were blind to the mindset of their opposite-sex friends; because females generally were not attracted to their male friends, they assumed that this lack of attraction was mutual.”
It is clear to see how misreading a friend’s sexual interest in you can compromise a platonic friendship. After all, it took Harry and Sally and Rosie Dunn and Alex Stewart years of stress and separation to really figure things out (and it’s only because it was a romantic comedy that they were guaranteed a happy ending).
That said, misread signals or not, cross-sex friendships do exist. According to Michael Kimmel, millennials are far more likely than older generations to see friendships between women and men as normal.