But some people will say that the establishment of pure friendship between men and women is a small probability event, and individual cases cannot be used to convince us that making friends with the opposite sex should be accepted by most people.
OK, in fact, accepting or not is a personal matter, and this article is not intended to convince you to do something. But what I can share with you is why we can try to build friendships with people other than the same sex, instead of being limited by the “partner is a passerby” mentality.
There was a saying that was widely circulated on the Internet before: “If it is not for sexual desire, boys are more willing to play with boys.”
Later, some women felt dissatisfied, and added a sentence of their own: “The same is true for girls.”
In fact, I think this sentence may have its applicable scenarios, such as in “social” software such as Tinder and Tantan. There’s no real social interaction there, and most people come for a mate—whether short-term or long-term.
But if you get out of sex-oriented gadgets, devote yourself to activities that interest you, and go to places where the same kind of people gather, you will find out: how can there be no common topics between boys and girls? There’s just so much in common!
So for “why should I establish friendship with the opposite sex”, my consideration is——
It’s not because the other person is the opposite sex that you form a friendship; it’s because you can talk to someone who happens to be of the opposite sex biologically, and then realize, “Oh, I’ve formed a friendship with a person, This person happens to be of the opposite sex.”
The significance of making friends with the opposite sex is that your horizons are opened up.
You become friends with someone no longer because your physiology is similar and you can go to the bathroom together, but because of shared cognitions, interests, and possibilities for communication.
There are also women who say that dating men is to better understand “male psychology”, which I think falls into another trap –
I always want to come up with some universal frameworks, so that I can put them on all the opposite sex, but ignore the uniqueness of the other person as an individual. However, just like I can’t speak for all women, the other side’s point of view doesn’t speak for all men.
We can make friends with the opposite sex, but it does not mean that the words of the opposite sex are more important than the same sex.