Just Friends?

Kwame didn't skip a beat. "Love you, too. Bye."

Neither acted on those words until a happy hour three months later when, fueled by booze and perhaps pent-up emotion, Lynne kissed him. That act wasn't so much a matter of crossing the boundary between friendship and romance; it was more a matter of erasing it.

"Everything that had happened before that was us dating," Kwame says. "We'd basically been dating for six months and didn't know it."

* * *

Alcohol, of course, can be a powerful agent when it comes to guiding friendships into sexual encounters. But unless both parties are ready to make the mental switch, the romance ends with the hangover.

Falls Church residents Melissa and Rob Floyd were friends for three years in the most platonic sense. She used his washer and dryer; he cooked for her; she cut his hair. He had a girlfriend, and she thought of him as nothing more than a good friend.

By 1998, both were single. Melissa was living abroad but returned home to celebrate New Year's Eve, and arranged for herself and Rob to stay overnight at the party house. Cut to the scene with Melissa standing at the top of the stairs, open bottle of champagne in hand, saying, "Well, we can't let this go to waste," before turning to head toward the bedroom, with Rob following. (Such is his memory of the event, at least.)

This is the Hollywood part where we edit in fireworks and mood music. And yet, nothing.

Turns out, when it comes to friendship-turned-romance, timing and context are key.

"Generally, sparks happen when they're supposed to," Behrendt says. "Can you come back and meet somebody and they're in a different place? Sure. But now you've met a different person."

For Melissa and Rob, the timing wasn't right until a few months later. She was still living abroad and he often traveled overseas for work, so they decided to meet in Turkey for a vacation.

There, driving down hairpin roads rimmed with goats and donkeys, "we were essentially completely alone, completely relaxed," Rob says. "It environmentally allowed us to realize and think about what we meant to each other and what a life together could be."

"I like to think I grew up in that heartbeat," Melissa says of that trip. "He was a really good friend and someone who probably knew me better than almost anyone at that time. I think I just realized that's what I wanted: I wanted that person who knew me so well and loved me because of that."

"Plus," she says, "he's cute."

* * *

The right timing often is paired with the maturity to understand the difference between what makes friends compatible and what makes romantic partners compatible. When Melissa and Rob reconvened after Turkey, each came armed with a list of things to discuss, both small (her cat, his goatee) and big (did they want kids, and where would they live?).

These kinds of talks, so pragmatic and seemingly unromantic, are imperative to saving a relationship.

"The friend definition is very different from how we define our romantic relationships," Werking says. "We have different expectations. Flaws that are okay in a friendship may not be okay in a romantic relationship."

But if the flaws are benign and the spark is there, well, that's a great place to be. After all, Stern says, "the healthiest relationships are those that are maximum safety and maximum passion." Friendship: safety. Romance: passion.

Which brings me back to my footsie friend. Passion -- as much as I like to think it's there, hidden in his subconscious -- is missing.

There was a short period after a drunken confession of my feelings when it seemed as though he was thinking about it, this notion of us. He was flirtier, looking at me differently. I looked at him differently, too -- in a way that made me freak out. Was this seriously someone I could see myself being intimate with?

And then things snapped back to normal, back to being really good friends, with me thinking, still, that we'd make the perfect couple. Perhaps that's just the nature of our friendship, the unalterable dynamic between us.

Anyway, he's dating someone now and seems happy, so as his friend, I'm okay with that. Besides, I've got someone new to like. He's a great guy -- and I know that because, alas, we're friends.