Hello and welcome back to The Overthinker’s Guide To Sex, a sex and relationships newsletter by journalist Franki Cookney.
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Welcome to November’s Big Think, a long-form piece, in which I examine an aspect of sexual activity, culture, or behaviour in more depth. Got a suggestion for something you think I should cover? Let me know!
Why can’t we fuck our friends?
“Why can’t we fuck our friends?” he asks. There’s amusement in his expression; he’s challenging me. But there’s also something else. Something imploring, like I’m the one that can offer permission, freedom, salvation.
He’s not the first person to approach me with a question like this. It happens a lot at parties, in pubs and bars, in furtive moments among friends, and online in my Instagram DMs. People will corner me and ask: Why can’t we do this? Why is no one talking about that?
Most of the time I think they know. They know it has to do with norms and expectations; the messages we get from society about how sex is supposed to work, what is okay, what’s not okay, what is taboo, what is acceptable, what is off-limits. They know we are all a product of this society, that these messages get internalised and mixed in with everything else; the values we were taught as kids, the experiences we’ve had, our own unique psychological makeup. But I think they still somehow want the answer to be simple. I changed my entire cultural upbringing with this one hack!
Society’s influence is not impassable. Our internalised beliefs about sex and relationships and how they make us behave, can be overcome, but it takes emotional intelligence, it takes work. We are definitely capable of thinking critically about the things that are holding us back from having the sex we want, but our capacity and willingness to do so varies.
And so.
“You can fuck your friends,” I tell him. “Who’s stopping you? Not me.” And society’s not going to stop you either. At least, not literally. Most of the time the obstacle lies within either you or your partners. And that brings me to an important point, I say. “Maybe your friends don’t want to fuck you?”
He looks sceptical. I laugh but, actually, I recognise this attitude. More than once have I encountered someone I felt sure did want to have sex with me but was not doing so for what, in the absence of any other information, I can only describe as ᵣₑaₛₒNₛ. Now, it could be that their reasons were based on a faulty premise. It might well be because of their internalised stuff around sex, and what it’s supposed to mean, and the conditions it’s supposed to exist in. But as with all sexual partners, you have to work with what’s on offer. You can encourage people to interrogate their stuff, but you cannot fight someone over whether or not they “should” feel chill about the idea of fucking their friends.
(I mean, I do think we have to countenance the very real possibility that they just don’t fancy us. In which case, end of. But that scenario doesn’t make for a very interesting newsletter.)
This conversation is always a weird one for me because, for the most part, I don’t want to fuck my friends. That’s… kind of why they’re my friends? If I’d fancied them I would have pursued that but I didn’t so here we are. Now, obviously I’ve fancied people that have ended up becoming friends. Sometimes because the moment passed and that’s what it naturally evolved into, sometimes because friendship was all that was on offer. The latter occurred more at school and university when it was harder to opt out of friendships and so I would grit my teeth and deal with my frustration the only way I knew how: by getting drunk and blasting Mr. Brightside in the kitchen at 2am while eating consolation toast with my mates in our student accommodation. These days, if that happened, I think I’d probably just duck out and move on. Not interested? Fine. Enjoy not fucking me. I hope it makes you happy. Dear lord, what a sad little life, Jane.
But if we’re talking about wanting to fuck existing friends then honestly? Nope. No thank you.
One of the messages we get from society is that we shouldn’t fuck our friends because sex is “special.” Even if we don’t take that to mean sacred, there’s still a sense that sex is what we do with people we feel something extra for, people with whom we have a connection “above and beyond” friendship. I see it as being the other way round. We can feel mad lust for somebody we barely know. We can have sexual chemistry with somebody after spending an hour in their company. Friendship is something we cultivate over time. Friendship, when it’s nurtured, can become something far more intimate, far more authentic, far more enriching, far more “special” than a simple shag. So, while I don’t consider sex to be sacred, or even, necessarily “special,” I do view it as distinct. Not without reason did the Ancient Greeks have separate words for them. Sexual attraction (eros) feels wildly different to me, than platonic affection (philia). And while I absolutely think you can have both, indeed all my best romantic relationships have, I also think there’s great value in keeping them separate.
Sex is not sacred but I think it exists within its own realm. I don’t want to get naked with someone just because we can. I want more than that from sex. I want it to feel different. I want to feel the tension between us. I want there to be an edge to our exchanges. I want anticipation, I want sensuality, I want connection. I want it to be transcendental, even if it’s only in that moment, in that space; even if it’s “only” my brain chemistry making me feel that way. And I want to experience the joy, the fullness, the comfort of friendship without sex.
Some of the best descriptions of this I have read, have been in Andrew Sullivan’s 1998 book Love, Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival. I want to tell you now that Sullivan is a problematic figure who has defended bio-essentialist views on race so it’s not without reservation that I quote him. Like this New York Times writer, I don’t seek to defend him, but I cannot let go of the simple beauty of these insights on friendship, despite everything I’ve since learned about their author.
Sullivan contends that the way sex and romance are put on a pedestal in our society is largely to the detriment of friendship. I see hints of this in the way that, over the years, various people have tried to extoll the virtues of “fucking our friends” to me. There’s a sense that friendship is great and all but what if it could be made even better by adding sex? And I just… don’t think friendship IS made better by adding sex.
“In almost every regard, friendship delivers what love promises but fails to provide,” Sullivan writes. “Where love is swift, for example, friendship is slow. Love comes quickly, as the song has it, but friendship ripens with time.”
The pull of sexual attraction can be exhilarating, obliterating even, but it can have little or nothing to do with how well I know or even like the person. Friendship feels both more and less expansive. It feels richer, but also softer, warmer. It lacks the piquancy, perhaps, of sexual attraction but has a greater depth to it. I feel held in a friendship in a way I don’t always feel in an erotic connection (which, of course, is often part of what makes it erotic).
Sullivan continues: “If love is sudden, friendship is steady. At the moment of meeting a friend for the first time, we might be aware of an immediate ‘click’ or a sudden mutual interest. But we don’t ‘fall in friendship.’ And where love is often at its most intense in the period before the lover is possessed, in the exquisite suspense of the chase, and the stomach-fluttering nervousness of the capture, friendship can only really be experienced when both friends are fully used to each other. For friendship is based on knowledge, and love can be based on mere hope [...] You can love someone more than you know him, and he can be perfectly loved without being perfectly known. But the more you know a friend, the more a friend he is.”
As I write, one particular question has been ringing in my ears, why can’t we have both? My most significant relationships have been based on a combination of eros and philia and probably a few of the others mixed in too (ludus, the playful love, probably a bit of pragma or companionate love, and, in some cases, agape, or what I like to think of as the “moon and stars” kind of love—I’ve always found it telling that the modern Greek way to say I love you to a romantic partner derives from this, S’agapó). But I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here. The question isn’t why can’t we turn friendships into romantic relationships? And the question isn’t why can’t we have fuck buddies? either. How to find and be a great fuck buddy is a topic I am certainly interested in but it isn’t quite what we’re talking about here, I don’t think (although there is certainly overlap and I think you could apply a lot of what I’m about to share to a fuck buddy situation). To me, this is about how to take an existing friendship and add sex. The question is how to combine philia with eros without it morphing into something else. Or, rather, it’s how to not fuck up what you already have. And that’s the key thing, isn’t it? Everything I’ve talked about so far, about what friendship means to me, about what it offers, versus what I think sex offers, comes with the implicit suggestion that bringing sex into the mix has the potential to destroy it. This is not some imagined fear, as I’ll get to in a moment. But first, let’s assume that, unlike me, you do want to fuck your friends. What’s standing in the way?
I said this at the beginning but it bears repeating: For whatever reason, your friends simply might not want to fuck you. Which is fair enough. You can’t control their feelings about it, all you can do is work on your own so that if and when you do encounter a friend who’s DTF, you know what you’re getting into.
I also said society teaches us that sex should happen within relationships that are somehow “more than” friendship. But at the same time, it allows for the possibility of casual sex. In the era of dating apps, the sex we have is often within relationships that are actually “less than” friendship. Can we really say, then, that society is stopping us from fucking our friends? If casual hookups are socially permissible, it doesn’t really follow that having sex with a mate would be off-limits. It isn’t the context that’s taboo here, so much as the refusal to conform to cultural expectations, and the cultural expectations here are that friendship plus sex must necessarily equal a committed romantic relationship.
Intellectually, I think most of us would reject that idea. But the thing about cultural expectations is that they don’t just exist outside of us, they get under our skin.
I spoke to Leanne Yau, polyamory educator and influencer. One of the main pitfalls when it comes to fucking our friends, she says, is “confusing the blend of friendship and sex as romantic attraction.” It’s tempting to dismiss this as monogamy culture bullshit, but it’s not. For a start, there’s the hormones. Finding yourself in a muddle over the combination of intoxicating sex hormones and feel-good friendship hormones isn’t a character failing. That shit is hard! Navigating between friendship and sex and back again takes emotional intelligence and intentional effort. When we don't have any models of how to have loving affectionate, friendly feelings towards someone and bring sex into the mix without it being a romantic relationship, it’s very difficult to carve out a version of it for ourselves.
It’s also worth asking ourselves… what’s the big problem with it being romantic? Does that actually change anything? I think a lot of us (even those of us doing ethical non-monogamy and relationship anarchy) feel the tug of romantic feelings and suddenly find ourselves with a whole bunch of different expectations about the relationship. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There is also a world in which we can ride those feelings—enjoy them!—without feeling compelled to reevaluate, rename, redefine the relationship.
It actually doesn’t really matter what the relationship is, or what label we give it, if we are being open and communicating about what we want from it. Romance, in and of itself, does not necessitate any particular kind of behaviour or relationship dynamic (as an aside, I quite like a bit of platonic romance in my friendships. I love being able to take my friends out for cocktails and spoil them, and I feel really great when they do things like that for me too). Problems arise because of what society tells us romance “should” mean. When we add sex to friendship, particularly if it starts to produce romantic feelings, we can be seen to be stepping onto the relationship escalator. It might even feel that way to us, such is the power of this social norm. It is absolutely possible to avoid the relationship escalator but it’s not easy, especially if we’re likely to face questions, assumptions, and judgements from people around us about the nature of our relationship.
Of course, sex doesn’t always lead to us liking each other more. In fact, having sex can also change the way we view each other for the worse. I know this doesn’t sound very progressive. It sounds a bit conservative, a bit basic, for me to sit here and say “if you have sex, they won’t respect you” but this remains a real thing that people experience. It might not even happen consciously, but, Leanne points out, far too many people still interpret “casual” as “disposable”. No wonder people are wary about going down that road.
“A lot of really poor behaviour comes out of ostensibly casual dynamics,” she says. “A lot of people perceive it like ‘well, it's a casual thing’ so they think it's okay to ghost, because it's not a legit thing. Or they think that it's okay to cancel at the last minute or whatever. And it sucks.”
Far from making it better, sex, for some people, can actually make the relationship seem "lesser.” The person they’re fucking becomes a sexual object, and they can actually end up treating them worse. Leanne refers here to the Madonna/whore complex, something I think most people wouldn’t like to admit they buy into, but which rears its head more often than you might think.
“Unfortunately I do see this particularly with men and masculine people,” she says. “Once you develop a sexual relationship with someone, you see them as impure and less worthy of respect, and your behaviour might change accordingly. If you haven't unpacked your ideas around sex then there is the potential for people to treat each other poorly.”
The concern that we will "lose the friendship" if we bring sex into it is very real. If we want to fuck our friends, one of the most important things to remember it that we are still friends and we need to continue to behave that way. “You should still be prioritising your friendship, and making sure that you each feel respected and taken care of, and that your needs are considered, and that your relationship isn't cheapened by the sex,” Leanne says.
Ask yourself: If you have sex with this person, are you going to view them differently? And don’t ask yourself this question while you’re horned up and gagging to make it happen. Don’t ask it based on what you think you’ll do or how you reckon you’ll feel. Ask it based on your experiences in the past. What have your hookups looked like? What have been the differences between your romantic sexual relationships and your casual ones? Was your behaviour different? Why?
Once we have decided we are going to fuck our friends, that we have the emotional bandwidth and communication tools to do it, there are of course some logistics we might want to consider. There are some conversations we need to have.
“Lay your expectations out,” Leanne suggests. “Ask yourselves, do we want to keep our friend hangouts and sex hangouts separate? Or are we happy to hang out and see where it goes every time we meet up? Are we expecting there to be any kind of regularity to this? Do we identify as monogamous or not, and if we identify as monogamous, what happens if one of us wants to get into a monogamous relationship with someone else? What is that going to look like? And how would our dynamic change? And what happens if this hypothetical new partner feels uncomfortable about our dynamic? Is our friendship something we would be prepared to give up? Or would we want to preserve the friendship, even if it makes a future partner feel insecure or jealous?”
She recalls a time when someone she was in a friends-with-benefits situation got into a monogamous relationship, and suddenly just blocked her on all platforms, without even having a conversation about it. “That was definitely very hurtful and not okay,” she says. “I definitely think you need to be negotiating upfront how the dynamic would end if it needed to end or how it would change if it needed to change?”
I think an awful lot of people want sex to be this easy "natural" thing that you can just do and not have to think too much about, But even if the sex itself feels easy and fluid and intuitive, there are always going to be feelings around it. If we don't take any time to consider and navigate them, we are going to end up hurting each other. Ultimately, it’s not sex that risks ruining the friendship, it’s our behaviour.
Like all ethical sex, fucking our friends takes thought and emotional maturity. “It involves a lot of personal work on how you perceive sex and your relationship to sex, and what you've been taught about sex and its place in your connections,” says Leanne.
We can absolutely fuck our friends. We just need to be sure we have what it takes to do it well.
A couple more friendship-related things to (over)think about…
This Slate piece on the history of the term “platonic” is really good.
Friendship is so good for you, that people with plenty of mates live longer, even though, as a rule, hanging out with friends leads to more alcohol and tobacco consumption.
ITV recently updated its workplace policy so that employees are now asked to declare friendships as well as romantic and familial relationships.
I’ve seen some stuff doing the rounds lately on how we’re supposedly in a “friendship recession”. I definitely have some feelings about this.
Have you, do you, would you like to fuck your friends? Have you got positive examples or cautionary tales to share? Is there a difference between fucking a friend and having a fuck buddy?