Can Men and Women Be Friends?
By Floyd Dell
Floyd Dell
was born at Barry, Illinois, June 28th, 1887. Is the author of several novels and collections of essays including “Janet March,” a story of a young woman and her adjustment to modern standards. His latest book is “Looking at Life.” Other books are “Women as World Builders,” 1913; “Were You Ever a Child?” 1919; “Moon Calf,” 1920; “The Briary Bush,” 1921.
CAN MEN AND WOMEN BE FRIENDS?
BY FLOYD DELL
Friendship between men and women is rather a new thing in the history of the world. Friendship depends upon equality and choice, and there has been very little of either in the relations of the sexes, up to the present. A woman does not choose her male relatives, nor is she according to archaic family laws their equal; motives other than personal choice might lead her to become a man’s wife; wholly impersonal reasons might place her in the relationship of kept mistress. Only in her rôle of paramour was there any implication of free choice; and even here there was no full equality, not even of danger. None of these customary relationships of the past can be said to have fostered friendship between men and women. Doubtless it did exist, but under difficulties.
Family bonds, however, are being more and more relaxed, women are no longer the wards of their male relatives, and friendship with a father or brother is more than ever possible. Further, the free personal choice which marked only the romantic amours of the age of chivalry is now popularly regarded in America as essential to any decent marriage, while the possibility of divorce tends to make free choice something besides a mere youthful illusion. More than ever before, husbands and wives are friends.
At the same time the intensity of friendships between people of the same sex appears to be diminishing. This intensity, in its classic instances, as in Greece, we now regard as an artificial product, the result of the segregation of the sexes and the low social position of women. As women become free and equal with men such romantic intensity of emotion finds a more biologically appropriate expression. Friendships between people of the same sex must to-day compete on the one hand with romantic love and on the other with the more fascinating though often less enduring friendships which can now be enjoyed between men and women. Neglect of these latter opportunities is coming to be regarded as a kind of spiritual cowardice, or at least as a failure in enterprise.
The influences of the machine age, so destructive to fixed authoritarian relationships, appear to foster the growth of friendship between the sexes; so much so that we may expect it to become, in its further developments, a characteristic social feature of the age that lies immediately before us.