Could Harry and Sally ever just be friends? Part 1

By Catherine Portland.

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According to the wisdom of When Harry met Sally, men and women can never just be friends, the sex part always gets in the way. According to Harry Burns, one of cinema's more cynical comic heroes, a man can never be friends with a woman he finds attractive because he will want to sleep with her. And even if she is not attractive "you pretty much want to nail 'em too."

When Harry met Sally may be one of the best romantic comedies but I'm less convinced that its central premise still stands. Just as Billy Crystal's reign as unofficial Oscar host has finished, the film hails from a bygone era where the sexual apartheid between men and women was starker and the opportunities for platonic friendship scarcer. Men and women no longer interact solely as potential romantic partners, but instead as colleagues, classmates, drinking buddies and so forth, building friendships in an asexual environment.

Harry Burns would claim that I only think this because I'm a woman; Sally after all responds with indignant disbelief to the suggestion that her male friends want to sleep with her. But I would maintain the idea that the "sex part always gets in the way", went out with the joke about men thinking foreplay is turning off the lights. It references the cliched idea that men do all their thinking with their trousers not their head and can't get past the idea of wanting to sleep with every woman they meet, even if they do not find her attractive.

Dr Linda Sapadin, a psychology from New York, backs up my view. She writes in Psychology Today: "The belief that men and women can't be friends comes from another era in which women were at home and men were in the workplace, and the only way they could get together was for romance. Now they work together and have sports interests together and socialise together."

A quick straw poll confirmed that most people do think platonic friendship is possible, but at the same time many also have their own words of warning about friendly hugs extending into something sweatier – and the inevitable fissure it creates in the friendship.

Don O'Meara, a sociology professor at the University of Cincinnati, argues that it is possible to have platonic inter-sex friendships, but you have to work at them and overcome four main areas.