“Half Of Women Have Had Sex With Their Best Friend”
CChris Williamson
MarriageMental HealthVideo & Computer GamesBeauty
Transcript
00:00:00Sixty percent of romantic relationships begin as friendships.
00:00:04Is this making the world harder to date in?
00:00:06Well, given that there's fewer and fewer cross-sex friendships, I think it should be celebrated
00:00:12that this is an avenue towards relationship formation.
00:00:16And, you know, the age-old question of can men and women ever just be friends?
00:00:20We've just got a new paper accepted that shows that we call it courtship and cross-sex friendship,
00:00:25where men provision financially to their cross-sex friendships that they're interested in mating with.
00:00:32Fifty percent of people say they have romantic interest in a cross-sex friend.
00:00:36The same number have had sex with at least one, particularly young people.
00:00:41So I do think it's a good pathway to relationships.
00:00:44And if you formed more cross-sex friendships, it would be a direct route to relationships
00:00:50because attraction grows over time, you get, you know, proximity breeds intimacy,
00:00:56but also you get to display a lot of the same qualities that make for a good mate,
00:01:00make for a good friend too.
00:01:02And men and women select friends who have the same qualities that they want in a mate.
00:01:07So protection, physical attractiveness, resources.
00:01:10So it's a good pathway.
00:01:12But the secondary route is it broadens your networks.
00:01:15And it also helps you learn about cross-sex mind reading.
00:01:18So it's very hard to actually, you know,
00:01:20come to the boneheaded beliefs of some of the red pill, black pill world online,
00:01:25if you actually have in real life female friends that you know kind of disprove a lot of what you hear.
00:01:32I'm going to quote you back to you here.
00:01:33William Costello polled 527 heterosexual and bisexual people.
00:01:38Are opposite sex friendships ever truly platonic?
00:01:4281% of women said yes.
00:01:44Only 58% of men said yes.
00:01:46Women were three times more likely than men to say their friendship was purely platonic.
00:01:51So I think it's a little like women hear that and they sometimes get very upset
00:01:55that to learn that their male friends see them as...
00:01:58Maybe half of your guy friends are trying to sleep with you.
00:02:00Well, not necessarily.
00:02:02It's just that they kind of would.
00:02:03So and this is the kind of the misconception that women maybe hear that and they think,
00:02:08oh, so he only wants to sleep with me.
00:02:10And it's not quite the case.
00:02:11It's just that he probably would.
00:02:12Yeah.
00:02:12When people hear about this for the first time and they doubt it,
00:02:16I always say just try it.
00:02:19Try when you're out for a few drinks the next time.
00:02:21Do you remember that one in The Economist?
00:02:23A study of Americans finds that in platonic couples,
00:02:26men are far more likely than the woman to find their friends sexy
00:02:28and far more likely to think that she finds them attractive too.
00:02:31Indeed, a man's assessment of how much his female friend fancies him
00:02:35matches how much he fancies her and is entirely unrelated to how she really feels.
00:02:41Clearly, men are prone to wishful thinking.
00:02:42Yeah.
00:02:43Yeah.
00:02:43Well, men need to kind of pluck up the courage some way.
00:02:45And if they have to be asked out more, it's your thing.
00:02:48That's true also.
00:02:49So, you know, on the one hand, women want to be approached more,
00:02:53but then are kind of unhappy to learn that their opposite sex friends are interested in them.
00:02:57But I do think women keep some opposite sex friends as backup mates too.
00:03:02You've got loads of data around backup mates.
00:03:05Come on.
00:03:05But yeah, I just think ultimately we should celebrate and try and cultivate more opposite
00:03:10sex friendships because it could be a pathway to proper relationship.
00:03:14I wonder if on social media that disincentivizes opposite sex friendships
00:03:19because you live in different worlds completely.
00:03:21So we were talking earlier and you hadn't heard of
00:03:24influences that like shaped my childhood.
00:03:26How did I not know Moella?
00:03:28Zoella.
00:03:28Whatever.
00:03:29Do you know Zoella?
00:03:31I've heard of her.
00:03:32There we go.
00:03:32Sorry.
00:03:33You're an avid subscriber of Zoella.
00:03:35Get with the program.
00:03:36You get ready.
00:03:36Did you get ready for today with Zoella?
00:03:38No, I didn't.
00:03:39And you try on hold from Jim Shawn?
00:03:40I know that things get ready for the day.
00:03:42But it's like Zoella, but also Facetune.
00:03:44Facetune is a huge app among young women where they can edit themselves.
00:03:48I hadn't heard of it I guess.
00:03:49So I think one of the statistics in my book is like 70 or 80% of young women
00:03:54wouldn't post on Instagram without Facetuning themselves first.
00:03:57Makes me so relieved to hear this.
00:04:00Every photo should have that attached to it.
00:04:04But it's been downloaded like hundreds of millions of times.
00:04:06It's a core memory from my childhood.
00:04:09But then, so I write this whole book about social media and the experience for young women.
00:04:14But then for young men, they have a completely different childhood.
00:04:17So it can be a young man that grew up near me.
00:04:19RuneScape.
00:04:20Playing RuneScape.
00:04:21I did play RuneScape.
00:04:22You played RuneScape?
00:04:23I'm a bit more masculine.
00:04:26They will not even recognize things that were huge influences on young women.
00:04:32And so I wonder if we try and be friends with the opposite sex,
00:04:35it's like a whole different world because algorithms are suggested.
00:04:38You already didn't have that much in common and now you've got even less.
00:04:41Interesting.
00:04:41Yeah, that's a good idea.
00:04:43What else?
00:04:43You're brandishing some graph I can see that you've got on there.
00:04:47Did you find that sex style yet?
00:04:48I have a question about the opposite sex friends.
00:04:54Is there a sex difference in the degree to which our opposite sex friends match our mate preferences?
00:04:59Because if there's not, if both men and women are like designing their opposite
00:05:05or selecting opposite sex friends based on their mate preferences,
00:05:08then when women say, "Oh, I'm not attracted to my opposite sex friends."
00:05:12Is that true?
00:05:13I've seen data around this.
00:05:14I've seen data that shows that the same traits that you look for in a partner
00:05:20are the ones that you look for in your opposite sex friends.
00:05:23I've seen this.
00:05:24So if men and women do that to the same degree,
00:05:27then is that really the case when women are saying-
00:05:29They can't be so shocked.
00:05:31Yeah, like what are the odds that like all my male friends-
00:05:34That looks exactly the same as my actual boyfriend.
00:05:37Oops.
00:05:39But it's kind of like from a jealousy perspective,
00:05:41you can see why it would be really jealousy inducing for a man,
00:05:46for his mate to have opposite sex friends or work colleagues who are sharing a mission together.
00:05:52Like you hear of these things of women calling someone their work husband.
00:05:56I'm like, "Disaster tactic. Don't never say this. This is a bad idea."
00:06:01So I do think that men are inclined to kind of pump the brakes on women's careers
00:06:06for a mate guarding perspective and an opposite sex friendship perspective as well.
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00:07:23Congratulations, you made it to the end of a clip.
00:07:25And the full length episode is available right here.
00:07:28Go on.