There's No Such Thing as a Platonic Friendship

I have been visiting other blogs over the past couple of days - mostly to see what else is going on out there. Call it (un)professional curiosity. I've found some terrible stuff and some comedic brilliance. You'll notice that we're now keeping track of some of our favorites over there on the right side of the page. Lots of folks call it a blog roll. We'll try to think of something better.

I stumbled across a pretty funny post about people hooking up with or even dating their friends on the best named sites I've found: Burt Reynold's Mustache. This reminded me of a point I have long held and vigorously defended in many an argument: there's no such thing as a purely platonic friendship - pause for gasps of righteous female indignation.

I've gotten into some pretty big rows over this - all with women vehemently claiming that they've had "lots of platonic guy friends." Unfortunately, that's just not the case. With two exceptions, in ALL long running friendships between men and women, at least one of the two parties has wanted to, wants to or will want to hook up with the other one. This can manifest itself in a variety of ways from long pining, hidden love to a drunken "let's not let this make things weird" moment.

As I mentioned, there are two exceptions to the rule. First off is the "we used to take baths together" rule. In my case, this would by my Mom's BFF's daughter. We were raised essentially like siblings thus precluding us from the rule. Exception number two is the "you've had sex with my best friend" rule, which should speak for itself.

Outside of those two exceptions though, ALL male/female relationships have been influenced by sex at some point, and if you think they haven't, chances are you're the one giving the "we're just friends" stiff arm.