Romantic Friends

Your friends are your dating life, whether you date them or not.

This month’s chapter is about the tension between the public and the private in dating. We obsess over the dating conundrums of online strangers and hypothetical beings, looking for stage directions for a role that’s ultimately our own to improvise. I want to conclude it with a quick exploration of the space in between the public and the private: your friends.

For this purpose, “friends” are everyone you know personally and have an ongoing relationship with. Anyone you see regularly, whose opinion of you matters, who you have shared context with. Friends aren’t merely bus-mates — you were selected to be in the same room for some reason.

So, should you date them?

Nice try, thought experimenter. The answer, of course, is: it depends on who your friends are. And so does everything else. Your social sphere determines a lot about your dating life, even if you never actually date any of them.

Who should pay on the first date? Is it more important that the guy is tall or that he is sensitive? Is exclusivity presumed, and if so, at what point? Can you forgive cheating? Physical abuse? Emotional abuse? When should a guy text? Is it acceptable for girls to complain about men in general? Can guys tell sexist jokes? Can you be friends with your ex?

You might think the answers to some of these are obvious and universally agreed upon. If so, I invite you to post a direct assertion of any of them on Twitter.

While there’s endless disagreement about all of these topics in the world at large, there’s almost certainly a lot of agreement among people you know. People care a lot about norms relating to sex, dating, and the relationship between men and women in general. They care a lot about having these norms in common with their friends. If someone doesn’t conform, they feel significant pressure to change or to find a different friend group.

Your dates want to see your social proof and find out which 5 people you’re the average of. Your friends want to gossip about your relationships, especially if it means new people entering the group. It’s impossible to keep your dating life entirely separate from people you know unless that itself is the norm among your friends.

Tell me who your friends are, I’ll tell you how you date.

Can men and women be friends?

Again, you likely think there’s a clear and correct answer here, but not because your answer is universal. The reason is that different answers to this question are foundational to different social groups. People who disagree on this issue rarely mix, so most people you know agree with you.

I think there are three broad answers to this seemingly-binary question, neither of which is a straightforward “yes” or “no”.

The first is: “huh, why would they?“

I often walk through Crown Heights in Brooklyn, a neighborhood that is a curious mix of Hasidic Jews and first-gen immigrants from the Caribbean. I see groups hanging out, walking somewhere, or sitting down for a meal. These groups are almost universally of a single gender.

In many cultures, though not in the American educated urban class, there is a general assumption that men and women just don’t have enough in common to be friends. Men hang out with other men, playing cards or video games and talking about sports. Women hang out in female groups, discussing secret female topics¹. Men and women operate in parallel spheres with their own hierarchies, responsibilities, and forms of status, often codified by religion or tradition.

This influences how people in these communities date. Courtship is separate from one’s social life, often involving matchmaking that helps bridge the gap between the male and female spheres. Married couples then have their own social circles with other couples that exclude most single people, especially single women.

The selection bias among my followers is almost certainly toward the second option because it’s the one I would pick , I would bet that in general opinion on this is more evenly split.

The second answer is: “men and women can’t be friends because the men want to bang them.” You hear this version mostly from women. If it’s a guy, he’ll often add “…and so the guys get taken advantage of.”

This is the longhouse answer. Namely: this is the attitude of those who defend the longhouse and those who attack it head-on, both ends of the horseshoe working to keep longhouse norms in place. The women inside the longhouse say: no amount of male sexual attention is tolerable, we can’t be friends with men who want to fuck us. The men say: no amount of suppressing male sexuality is tolerable, we can’t be friends with women we don’t get to fuck.

These women and men have another thing in common: they are dating each other. They both agree that if a man approaches a woman it is for one purpose only, and the woman accepts or rejects the approach accordingly. These relationships are, at least initially, based primarily on mutual physical attraction. People who share this norm exhibit overt jealousy and explicit mate guarding, which they consider a good and sensible thing to do.

In every case, the norms around how friends are also the norms of how people date. They’re two sides of the same coin. And this brings us to the third option, that one native to the culture I’m in, but one that still confused me for many years.

Polyamory is the friends we made along the way

In 2013, I discovered open relationships and also online rationality entirely independently of each other. It took a while before I realized that so many rationalists also identified as polyamorous, and I was shocked when I did!

I ran a study looking for shared causes, things like decoupling or consequentialism or progressive politics. I surveyed almost 700 people on their attitudes, relationship styles, and familiarity with LessWrong. The one big reason I found why so many rationalists were poly is that other rationalists influenced them.

Among people who regularly engaged both with rationalist friends and rationalist media, the *majority* identified as non-monogamous.

When people hear “poly rationalists” they imagine a few hot girls with harems of horny nerds who organize orgies in group houses full of soft cuddly furniture. I know one group like that: Aella’s slutcloud. However this lifestyle is rare even among rationalists in Berkeley, and barely existent on the East Coast.

When I joined the rationalist community in New York a lot of people called themselves polyamorous, but almost no one was slutting it up. Most people were looking for a single partner to focus on, and only a minority of those in a relationship were looking for someone else to date. In contrast, my “monogamous” non-rationalist friends would say things like “I met this girl I might be serious with, but I could probably squeeze in 3 more weeks of Tinder hookups before she asks if we’re going to be exclusive.”

It took me a while to realize that “polyamory” had more to do with how rationalists treated friendships than with how they thought about romance. Specifically: a shared agreement to welcome romantic feelings among friends, and to not let romantic drama ruin the communal spirit as much as possible. What it looked like in practice wasn’t wild orgies, but instead:

• People who have known each other for a while becoming romantic and then transitioning back to the Platonic realm² once that ran its course without declaring any official status changes.

• People who are looking for marriage having overlapping relationships to get to know potential long-term partners.

• No one freaking out about showing up to a party and seeing their ex with his new lover who is also your own metamour through your shared friend that recently broke up with…

• People enjoying things like cuddling, going out dancing, or watching a movie with someone of the opposite sex without raising eyebrows, even if they weren’t actually “dating”.

These norms are not the result of rationalists being unusually promiscuous or sociosexual, but of rationalists being a standalone tight-knit community that they want to be both their friend group and their main dating pool. Rationalists tend to focus less on looks or “SMV” in partners and more on the same intellectual and spiritual traits they also value in friends. If you’re looking for things that require observing someone for many months to uncover, you have no option except to date people in your friend group.

The goal was to maximize social harmony, not casual sex. My rationalist friends mostly cycled through each other in a slow Swiss format looking for someone to commit to.

The main difference with mainstream culture is that in the latter you’d hear “I broke up with this guy because it turns out he went on a few Hinge dates with my coworker and that would be weird.” A rationalist would be happy they have a coworker to ask what it was like to date someone (and maybe also oblivious to the fact that said coworker might not be happy to talk about it, if they aren’t a rationalist).

Throughout most of my life, and long before I had the notion of an open relationship, I resented the artificial-seeming barrier between friends and lovers. Going back to high school, I was too nervous to flirt with strangers and only dated girls I befriended first class. On the other side, I remained good friends with almost all of my exes and got invited to their weddings. Polyamory mostly affects how I relate to my female friends, not in how I relate to my marriage.

Actually dating your friends

Is it actually true that guys will bang almost all their female friends if given the chance? It turns out men are very split on this:

Note that the sample size for all three screenshots in this post is vastly larger than almost any you’d find in a published academic paper on dating and attraction.

For a lot of women and men, the question of dating any of your friends is moot because they find none of their friends attractive. For the rest, dating friends can stil feel too risky and problematic. A lot of the objections that seem to be about the potential relationship have to do more with the dynamics of the friend group and your place in it:

• Worry that a breakup will fracture the friend group, with people being forced to take sides (and perhaps defaulting to ejecting the less popular/extroverted member of the couple).

• One’s power and status in the friend group affecting how they look as a romantic prospect.

• Friends knowing too much about you and your past mistakes, leaving little room for mystery or the more idealized you may present to a stranger.

• The end of that particular friendship once it becomes romantic, as some things (e.g., talking about relationship issues or insecurities) are for Platonic friends only.

I have been in situations where I felt very insecure about my friend situation. My first job in a remote town in Israel, or when I arrived in business school as an immigrant, the third-youngest student out of 300, and only one who knew math. I acutely felt the precarity of my position on the bottom rungs of popularity. And despite my natural flirtiness and the fact that I’m in the lucky third of men who find almost all their female friends attractive, I was absolutely too terrified to flirt with anyone there.

People talk about the importance of an abundance mindset for dating, but there’s also an abundance mindset for friendship. When you feel secure in your friend group, when making and keeping friends feels well within your power, dating friends is easy. When friendship feels scarce, bringing romance into the equation feels impossible.

So, at last, should you date your friends?

You already know the answer to that. If it feels like the obvious thing to do, you wouldn’t be asking. If it feels too risky, you’re probably right.

But — consider that there are many people out there to befriend. Some of them have wildly different norms, ones that might be a better fit for your own approach to life. Some of them might make you feel more welcome and secure, like I felt in the warm bosom of NYC rationalists after my two years of b-school.

Friends exert massive influence on your dating life one way or another. If you’re struggling with dating, ask yourself if you’re in the right friendzone.

1. A friend recently came across a rather heated online discussion about breastfeeding, whether it’s necessary for children and the acceptability of doing it in public. A few women complained about “the patriarchy” invading women’s bodily yet again. My friend pointed out that the entire discussion included only women, and that he doesn’t know a single guy who has strong opinions one way or another on breastfeeding.

2. “Platonic realm” is just a fancy way of saying “friend zone”.