Why Falling in Love with a Friend Is So Common

Source: Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

In the movie When Harry Met Sally, there’s a scene in which Harry claims that “Men and women can't be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.”

The implication is that sexual attraction is inevitable in mixed-sex friendships between heterosexual persons, and that they’re eventually going to hookup or become romantic partners.

Of course, sexual attraction doesn’t always emerge in these cases and not every friendship is going to follow the same exact path. But it is indeed the case that the friendship often turns into love, just like it did for Harry and Sally.

A recent set of studies sought to explore just how often people follow the friends-to-lovers pathway to romance because it’s something that has received surprisingly little attention in relationship science.

As part of this study, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, the authors reviewed 143 articles on relationship initiation and found that only 18% looked at relationships in which the partners started out as friends.

Given that the bulk of the research on relationship initiation is focused on relationships that develop between strangers, this might lend itself to the impression that friends-first initiation doesn’t happen very much in the real-world.

But that wouldn’t be true.

How Common Is Friends-First Initiation?

To explore the prevalence of friends-first relationship initiation, the authors conducted a meta-analysis of seven studies involving approximately 1,900 adults from the US and Canada. The results showed that, on average, 68% of participants indicated they had been in a relationship that involved being friends prior to becoming romantic partners.

When looking at diverse sexualities, the rate was even higher (85%) for people who were in same-gender and/or queer relationships (i.e., relationships that included two women, two men, or one or more trans/nonbinary people) compared to people in heterosexual relationships.

Thus, friends-first initiation appears to be very common in general, and it seems to be especially common for same-gender and queer couples.

This path to starting a relationship seems to be quite a desirable one, too. The researchers also conducted an online survey of 298 young adults in which they were asked what they thought was the best way to start a relationship. Nearly half (47%) said it was to be friends first. By contrast, participants were much less likely to say that meeting through an online dating service or out at a bar was desirable.

This research is not without limitations. For one thing, the results are based heavily on college-aged, Western, educated participants, who are not necessarily representative of the broader population. Relationship research should further investigate friends-first initiated relationships in diverse cultural and age groups. The way people develop relationships may vary considerably depending upon cultural norms, as well as what stage of life they’re in.

Takeaways

These findings are important because they tell us that those who are studying relationship initiation would do well to expand their approach. Most research on relationship formation looks at meetings between strangers. When you consider that friends-first initiation is actually the single-most common and desirable way to start a relationship, we’re missing an important piece of the action by focusing so much on strangers.

This research also raises some provocative questions, such as whether relationships that grow out of friendships tend to fare better over time. To the extent that they have better communication and more intimacy, they just might.

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