Why does it still seem unusual to many for a man and a woman to just be close friends?
Romance often feels like the endgame for emotional closeness between men and women. Law undergrad Saw Yone Yone wonders: What if that assumption is holding us back from opportunities for valuable connections and growth?
by Saw Yone Yone · CNA · JoinRead a summary of this article on FAST.
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Every few months, I catch up with my old junior college friends.
Back in school, we were from an arts stream class, where literature, history and languages would be more popular with the girls than the boys. Because of that gender imbalance, I'm the only guy in the group, and this dynamic has followed us well into adulthood.
At a recent meet-up, one of them said, almost offhandedly, that I was her only close, platonic male friend. The others quickly agreed.
That surprised me.
Curious if there was a broader pattern across my heterosexual friendship circle, I asked around. Some women pointed to the awkwardness of cross-gender friendships, where romance always seems to hover in the background, ready to complicate things.
A male friend said friendships with the opposite gender felt easier when both people were attached or otherwise unavailable, since intentions were clearer. One colleague said that when he was younger, it was easy to conflate emotional closeness with romantic interest.
It got me thinking: Why is it still rare, in most conventional settings, for men and women to be close friends without people reading romance into it?
When one party says "we're just friends", it often sounds like a defence rather than a description. It's as if friendship isn’t enough of a reason to care about someone from the other gender.
THE ROMANTIC "DEFAULT"
It's not surprising, considering we grew up with this narrative everywhere. From the teasing of primary schoolmates to adults asking: "Is he your boyfriend?" to romantic comedies like When Harry Met Sally, we are surrounded, from an early age, by the idea that every close male-female friendship is just a romance waiting to happen.
Even in adulthood, cross-gender friendships can raise eyebrows.
I've had friends tell me their partners felt uneasy about the closeness they had with friends of the opposite gender, even though for them, the lines were not blurred at all.
A female friend once told me she didn't invite me to her birthday celebration because she worried her parents might read too much into it.
Layered on top of that is the way many boys are raised, where emotional intimacy can feel unfamiliar even with other boys. In recent years, people have started calling this a "male friendship recession" – the idea that many men have fewer close friends than before and often struggle with emotional vulnerability in friendships.
Without strong norms around vulnerability, it can be easy to lean on romantic relationships for emotional support.
And when emotional intimacy is something we practise only inside romance, it becomes harder to form close friendships, especially when attraction to the other gender is involved.
WE MIX, BUT RARELY BEFRIEND
While this may be a quirk of my social circles, some research suggests that cross-gender friendships are not particularly common in Singapore.
A 2025 study by Meta and New York University that analysed global Facebook networks introduced a cross-gender friending ratio (CGFR) to measure the degree of gender segregation in social circles.
Singapore's results looked a lot like the rest of Southeast Asia's. Even today, men and women tend to cluster within their own gender outside of immediate family. For instance, Singapore's cross-gender friending ratio for the top 200 friends is 0.4892, indicating that among their top 200 friends, men in Singapore have only about half as many female friends as women do.
In other words, our networks are more divided than we might assume in a society where classrooms, offices and social spaces are thoroughly mixed.
Of course, Facebook isn't a perfect mirror of real life, but studies show online connections often reflect offline networks – the people we message, hang out with, eat with and confide in.
And what the CGFR suggests is that despite living, studying and working alongside one another, many of us still drift into gendered bubbles.
That divide doesn't just affect who we spend time with. It also limits our emotional imagination.
When we rarely see close, platonic cross-gender friendships modelled around us, we struggle to picture them as normal.
A HISTORY OF DISTANCE
These attitudes didn't come out of nowhere. For much of Singapore's past, men and women simply didn't spend meaningful time together outside family.
In her 1975 book Women in Modern Singapore, Professor Aline Wong, who would later become one of Singapore’s first female political officeholders, wrote that "whether born as a Chinese, an Indian or a Malay, a woman is subjected to socio-cultural and religious pressures to conform to the roles of wife and mother and to lead a secluded life".
That segregation shaped how genders interacted. Single-sex schools were the norm until mass education expanded in the 1960s.
In the workforce, women accounted for just one-third or 33.85 per cent of the labour force in 1973 – often in manufacturing or service roles – while men held professional and technical posts.
Friendships are often formed from shared experiences and proximity. When daily life kept men and women apart at school, at work and in social spaces, there were fewer chances for those relationships to even begin.
And even though our lives look nothing like they did then, some of those tendencies still linger in the way we relate today.
WHY THESE FRIENDSHIPS MATTER MORE THAN WE THINK
But after some research, I also found that more cross-gender friendships can benefit society as a whole.
When more men and women form meaningful friendships, it becomes harder to reduce one another to roles or stereotypes. We become less likely to see women as emotional caregivers by default, or men as emotionally unavailable by nature.
In my experience, that holds because having close friendships with women has changed how I see things. I spent most of my school years in all-boys environments, and without realising it, I absorbed a way of seeing women as either fantasy objects or off-limits – not individuals I could relate to in a genuine, human way.
My friendships with women helped me unlearn a lot. Hearing their experiences made me more empathetic – for example, more aware of when I was talking over others.
Being around women – who are often socialised to talk more openly about their emotions – made it easier for me to talk about my own feelings and anxieties, and the messier parts of life.
That openness didn't come naturally to me. I was eased into it by being around people who were more emotionally attuned and articulate.
When we treat romance as the only valid form of emotional closeness, we limit ourselves. We start to see meaningful friendships as either threats or just waiting rooms for something more.
And in doing so, we overlook the many ways real, intimate friendships can enlarge us.
MAKING SPACE FOR THESE FRIENDSHIPS
Part of the challenge, I've realised, is that romance is the only relationship structure we've been taught to take seriously nowadays outside of family.
It comes with a set of rituals and milestones, with labels and rules. We know how to talk about romance – cheating, situationships, crossing lines – because these conversations tend to dominate social life.
Friendship, meanwhile, doesn't come with the same structure. Rarely are there anniversaries, expectations about how often you should talk, or agreed-upon boundaries.
So when a cross-gender friendship becomes emotionally significant, it's easier for people to misread it – and sometimes, for us to misread ourselves, too.
Instead of pulling away the moment things get complicated, I'm learning that it helps to talk about it more, not less. This could look like being clearer about intentions, checking in when things feel complicated, and setting clear boundaries before someone gets hurt.
What I'm also trying to unlearn is the instinct to conflate emotional intimacy with romance.
The time we spend on each other – checking in, showing up, understanding someone deeply – shouldn't belong only to one type of relationship.
If anything, the more we let those gestures exist outside of romance, the more room we'll have in our lives for meaningful connection.
Being able to form meaningful friendships with people of any gender – to be close without subtext – shouldn't feel unusual.
And I wonder how many more people we might actually grow close to if we treated friendship with the same seriousness and tenderness we automatically reserve for romance.
Saw Yone Yone is a law undergraduate with a keen interest in policy and sociocultural issues.
If you have an experience to share or know someone who wishes to contribute to this series, write to voices [at] mediacorp.com.sg (voices[at]mediacorp[dot]com[dot]sg) with your full name, address and phone number.
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