The Harrys and the Sallys

It's the age-old question: Can men and women just be friends?

I have a new question: Why are we still asking that?

Maybe it's because I went to a high school that had only recently gone co-ed, so most of my friends were guys. Maybe it's because my only sibling is a brother. Or maybe I just think it's ridiculous to assume that men and women are just inherently unable to separate sex from a relationship.

Unlike Harry from When Harry Met Sally, Rabbi Schmuley (from the above article) doesn't think men and women can't be friends. He just has rules. Some of them make some amount of sense--Don't share secrets that you wouldn't share with your spouse--but others seem kind of silly: "You can't go out to late night dinners together. You can have lunch together in a public place, but you should not order alcoholic beverages. "The embers of attraction really can grow in situations like that, and suddenly it's not so innocent, it's not just friendship anymore," Rabbi Shmuley says." Am I going to suddenly fall for a guy just because we're having a drink? Maybe it's not appropriate to have a dinner with drinks--which feels intimate--with a friend of the opposite sex, but why are these 'embers of attraction' necessarily even there? Just because a guy's a guy doesn't mean I'm attracted to him.

I think, as younger generations get older, this won't be a question we have to ask as much, since we've grown up having guy/girl friends who are just that--friends. But whenever I see it, I still see it as an anachronistic issue.