Friends and Lovers

Can platonic relationship turn passionate? Would you want it to?

Pop culture abounds with examples of friends who’ve navigated or tried to the path to romance
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Chandler in friends, Laurie and Jo march in Little Women and Harry met Sally…which explores sexual tension to determine if, in fact, men and women can be friends.
Can men and women be friends? I mean, can they really be just friends?

All friendships, even same sex ones, have ambiguous and changing boundaries. You may think somebody’s a best friend but and they just consider you a casual friend. Perception is not always the same.

In other words your perceptive can shift. Suddenly you see a friend as desirable but he or she still sees you as only a friend. Which leaves you with two choices, you can try to change it to a romantic relationship or you can learn to live with it so that there’s flirtatious banter.

It’s sexual attraction without acting on it. And the primary reason many of us don’t act is fear: the worry that if our friends rebuffs us or move from platonic to romantic fails, friendship is irrecoverable.

It is shame but there’s a comfort to friendship that often gets destroyed when romantic feelings are raised, an awkwardness that accompanies the transition into and out of these feelings.
It feels very uncomfortable when somebody likes you more than you like them and making transition is always a risk. You should be really sure you want to take that risk before you make the move.

The right timing often is paired with the maturity to understand the difference between what makes friends compatible and what makes romantic partners compatible. Do you both want kids? Where do you want to live? These kind of talks, so pragmatic are imperative to saving a relationship.

“The friend definition very different from the romantic one” Kathy Werking says, “Flaws that are OK in a friendship may not be OK in a romantic relationship.”
But if the flaws are benign and there’s a spark, that’s a great place to be.