Just Friends?

Can a Platonic Relationship Turn Passionate? And if It Could, Would You Want It To?

My best guy friend is sitting across from me as I type this, playing footsie with me under the table. We've been friends for 10 years, since college, and we've grown closer with age. We can talk for hours about things big and small; we can also sit comfortably in silence. He makes me laugh, always, but has sincere words when I need a lift.

It's the perfect relationship. Except, of course, for when we split ways and I go home, try to mentally decode the meaning of footsie and then turn to my roommate or my sister or anyone who'll listen and say, "UGH! WE'RE SO PERFECT TOGETHER, WHY AREN'T WE DATING?!" And other sane things like that.

Pop culture abounds with examples of friends who've navigated (or attempted to navigate) the path to romance. Think "Friends," in which Monica and Chandler get together. And "Little Women," when Laurie longs for childhood pal Jo March. Or, most famously, "When Harry Met Sally . . .," which explores the muddy waters of sexual tension to determine if, in fact, men and women can be friends.

So let's start with that controversial question: Can men and women be friends? I mean, can they really be just friends? Okay, yeah. Yes. And yet:

"All friendships, even same-sex ones, have ambiguous and changing boundaries," says Linda Sapadin, a clinical psychologist and author of "Now I Get It! Totally Sensational Advice for Living and Loving" (Outskirts Press, 2006). "You may think somebody's a best friend, and they just consider you a casual friend. How it's perceived is not always the same."

In other words: Your perspective can shift. Suddenly you see a friend as desirable, but he or she still sees you as only a friend. Which leaves you with two choices, Sapadin says: You can try to change it to a romantic relationship. Or you can learn to live with it so that there's flirtatious banter -- footsie, anyone? -- but nothing else.

It's sexual attraction without acting on it. And the primary reason many of us don't act is fear: the worry that if our friend rebuffs us or the move from platonic to romantic fails, the friendship is irrecoverable.

Such was the outcome for Amy Ewen. She and her co-worker Peter were close friends -- the kind who prompt others to say, "Oh, you guys should be dating." But they never did until just before Peter left to spend a year traveling in Asia, when they enjoyed a whirlwind romance. The day after Peter departed, he sent Ewen a dozen roses.

"I was so happy, but it was really bittersweet because he was leaving," Ewen says. Her expectations were realistic, she says (she wasn't expecting them to stay together long distance), but they split with the assumption that there would be something on the other side: a continuation of their friendship.

Ewen, inspired by Peter, left her job to travel, too. When she returned after five months in New Zealand, where she'd met someone else, Peter was back as well, and she wanted to reconnect with him as a friend. He never returned her phone calls.

When she finally ran into him one evening in Adams Morgan, he was standoffish. He shook her hand as though they were business acquaintances and then blurted out that he wasn't in love with her.

"I was remembering how things were when we were good friends," Ewen says. "He thought I was thinking about being his girlfriend. It's sort of a shame, because we got along so well."