Well, I find that I’m able to be friends with men when there is no sexual attraction, so I don’t see why I wouldn’t be able to be friends with women when there is no sexual attraction. Friendship means that you enjoy their company and you want them to do well and be happy in life, and that you’re willing to lend a helping hand if and when needed and can hopefully count on their (non-sexual) help when you need it.
(CVM had a nice way of putting it earlier in this thread - people can be fun to hang with, even if you don’t want to bang them.)
Then the question for a straight guy is whether it is possible to be friends with a woman you are sexually attracted to. To this, the answer is yes, but the fact that you’re attracted does make it more complicated.
So the real question is whether being sexually attracted to someone will mess up your friendship and make it somehow less friendly or genuine. And the answer to this depends on how deep your frienship is versus how deep your attraction is. Shallow friendship + deep attraction is probably incompatible. Deep frienship + mild attraction isn’t. And in the end, one hopefully finds someone with whom there is deep friendship + deep attraction.
And it also depends on the whether the same levels of friendship and attraction are reciprocated on the other side.
So, there are definitely times when the attraction is so strong that it makes it hard for you to be a real friend. But once you realize that it is not possible or practical to bang every person you are attracted to (particularly if you are a man, and therefore attracted to many many people - thanks testosterone), then you start to realize that you bang some, and friend others, even though maybe you happen to be attracted to lots of your friends.
There is no doubt that being strongly attracted to a friend means that the friendship is harder to manage, because you are tempted to do things that can easily make you re-evaluate the person. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t or can’t be friends. It just means that the friendship takes more work to manage and you have to decide whether that extra work is worth it or not. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t.
Then there is the question about making new friends. When presented with the opportunity of “here’s a woman who wants to be your friend,” vs the opportunity of “here’s a woman you might get to sleep with.” Most men would rather spend time with the woman you might want to sleep with. But that doesn’t mean that men can’t be friends with women… it just means that when the choice is framed that way, the possibility of sex is much rarer and more attractive. So maybe that’s why married women don’t get hit on as much (though I think married women simply get hit on more subtly than single women, in practice).
Ultimately, we generally find that our friends just evolve out of our conversations and activities, whereas our sex partners generally have to be chased, charmed, and seduced. That’s why you see men chasing women for sex, but not chasing women for friendship. That doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate friendship when we find it: we do, but just make a face when we’re being offered frienship as if it is a consolation prize after being turned down for sex, in part because even if we accept being friends, our friendship now feels “false” because we’ve already made our attraction known.
Perhaps one of the more helpful things women can do in this situation - assuming that her offer to be friends after a failed pass is genuine, and not simply out of politeness - is to reassure the man that she is not offended that he made a pass and doesn’t think less of him for doing it, but simply is not interested or in that frame of mind. Of course, this assumes that the guy didn’t make his pass in a crude, offensive, or derogatory way.
Finally, when we have girlfriends and wives, they typically try to reign in our availability to other women. So even when we are “just friends” with a woman, our girlfriends don’t typically like it, especially if the woman is attractive. So that complicates things in a way that makes it extra challenging to be friends with an attractive woman when we are in a relationship. Often times, we decide that friendship isn’t worth the bother of trying to defend it from our girlfriends and wives, but that is different than saying we can’t be genuine friends simply because of the fact that we’re a man and she’s an attractive woman.
