Can a married person strike up a close friendship with someone of the opposite sex? Spouses have reasons to be wary, say behaviour and psychology experts
It's a risky world out there - for married folk with a close friendship with a person of the opposite sex.
It is not that partnered men and women can't be friends with people of the opposite sex. It's just that with divorce rampant, marriage can seem pretty fragile.
'People notice when a married person develops a close friendship with a person of the opposite sex,' says Mr Thomas Bradbury, psychologist and principle investigator of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Marriage and Family Development Study.
'The problem is that these perceptions are not always misplaced. People do have affairs, and they can begin in exactly this way.'
Married men and women in opposite-gender friendships must tread carefully, behaviour and psychology experts say.
Overlapping criteria In part, friendship leading to romance happens because what people are looking for in a mate overlaps with what people look for in a friendship. That's companionship, intimacy and, often, validation that they're attractive to the opposite sex, says psychology professor April Bleske-Rechek at the University of Wisconsin.
We look for partners who are faithful. We look for friends who are loyal. 'People can be friends,' she says. 'But are they just friends? It's a loaded question because friendships and mateships coincide.'
When men and women look for a mate, they look for someone who is similar to them in intelligence, attractiveness, worldview, values, height and weight. The trouble is, friends look for people who are similar in those ways as well.
Friendships between the genders often lead to marriage, but once it does, outside friendships between men and women - when there is sexual attraction - can complicate people's lives.
Regardless of who is attracted to whom in the friendship, neither gender considers romantic interest a good thing among friends.
Women are twice as likely as men to report such attraction as a complication. About 15 per cent of men say that if a close female friend is attractive to them, it makes their lives more difficult. But 33 per cent of women say finding a male friend attractive complicates their lives.
The difficulty they cite most often is their spouse's jealousy.
The spouse may be onto something. There are indeed people who may profess friendship but will steal another's mate. About half of 236 college-age men and women surveyed in a June 2001 study in the Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology said they had tried to attract another's partner at least once.
And 85 per cent of them said someone had tried to attract them away from a mate at least once. In his book, The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies Of Human Mating,psychology professor David Buss at the University of Texas in Austin calls this 'mate poaching'.
That same study found deliberate mate stealers have characteristics distinctly different from those who pursue romance from available mates.
On personality scales, those who set out to attract married persons are disagreeable, unconscientious and unfaithful people who find it easy to talk about sex and see themselves as sexually attractive.
Those successfully targeted by poachers see themselves as extroverted, open to experience, attractive and unfaithful. Poachers and poachees, it seems, lack empathy and morality, and are neurotic.
That disagreeable profile held up in international research involving nearly 17,000 people in 53 countries. Research published in the April 2004 Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology by an international team found that the personality traits of people who try to steal the mates of others, as well as those who succumb, are universal.
No wonder tongues wag. Wary husbands and wives have an uneasy sense of the temptations out there, even if they trust their spouses.
Deflect temptation But the danger that lurks in a world, and a workplace, full of opposite-sex people who have a lot in common does not mean they can never be friends once one of them has committed to another.
They just have to be careful and use their common sense.
Anthropologist Helen Fisher at Rutgers University and author of Why We Love, says opposite-sex friends can expect a friendship, at some point, to cross the flirtation line. They need to deflect temptation. 'Start by putting a picture of your wife or husband on your desk,' she says. 'And talk about them a lot.'
Women should make a point of meeting their male friend's wife, men of meeting a woman friend's husband.
'Meet the wife and fawn on her,' Ms Fisher says of her own technique as a single woman. 'Choose her side of the table to sit on. Make eye contact with her. If you can tell her you've got a boyfriend you love, that'll help."
Make the spouse a friend too, with the goal of defusing jealousy, of making the spouse feel that the friendship is no threat.
To silence wagging tongues, opposite-sex 'just friends' shouldn't touch, or share food over lunch, or stand too close to each other. Crossing those lines fuels gossip.
Worse, it can lead down the slippery slope to greater intimacy. But if people talk, and there's nothing to talk about, 'you've got to just flat-out deny it,' Ms Fisher says.
'Is there such a thing as a non-sexual affair? What if you go for coffee at 10 o'clock every day with someone from work, and talk intimately with them,' says therapist and psychology professor Stanley Charnofsky at Cal State Northridge. 'Then you go home, and you don't talk to your spouse.' The platonic friend is getting some of the spouse's major perks, even if it isn't sex.
Keep your spouse informed, he says. Tell your partner about your friend and what you've talked about. Respect a spouse's feelings.
'Opposite-sex friendships... have to be secondary,' Mr Charnofsky says.
Yes, it is difficult, relationship researchers say, but opposite-sex friendships are worth the effort. 'The world would be a pretty boring place if you could associate with only half the population,' Mr Buss says.
