Managing Platonic Expectations
A friend of mine sent me an email with the following questions, regarding my previous post:
“what’s wrong with a strictly platonic relationship? and so what if it leads to something more, if that’s what both parties want??”
There’s nothing wrong. And indeed if something more happens, it is a legitimate outcome of an initially platonic relationship. The tricky part, of course, is figuring out the “what both parties want” clause. This is basically managing each others’ expectations.
I came across yet another excellent article, this time from Psychology Today. The article talks about the challenges of having such a friendship; the first item on their list is “Defining the Relationship.” When a single guy indicates that he wishes to be “friends” with a single attractive female, there is a non-zero probability of the guy actually wanting something more than a platonic relationship. Ask any guy. Only when the friends get to know one another for a while and have an invested interest in maintaining the status-quo, then we will really be in an honestly legitimate platonic relationship.
My friend’s other question:
“do you sit down with every female friend you have and discuss your expectations/intentions?”
I think that myself personally, it has taken me a while to develop the emotional maturity to manage my own expectations as well as being able to more openly discuss these issues. But in a lot of cases, we typically don’t do a sit-down; we just go with an interpretation of the interactions. For example: are the interactions becoming more frequent and go more in-depth than usual; are there deliberate efforts to get together; are there flirtatious innuendos? These are all hints and desires of the friends wanting to take it to the next level. I think that people’s interpretation of “friendlier than average” vary quite a lot especially in our multicultural society. It is important to normalize interactions in light of a person’s background and operational parameters.
But back to the question – in all the times that a sit-down or the equivalent happens, I am grateful for the clarity and the honesty. (This typically is initiated by the female friend who notices that my expectations are starting to get out of wack.) It is one thing to rationally try to manage one’s own feelings and try to keep things under control; however, we are only human, aren’t we?
