I’ll be glad when this shoddy article quits being cited, about how men and women just can’t be friends.

Fucking Christ, only cloistered academic geeks can credibly produce and cite bullshit like this as they spend so little time in the real world.

Every other normal person in the world ever has had a female or male friend to which they aren’t attracted – and so what if you are attracted? Does that make the person any less of a friend somehow?

Attraction doesn’t mean action, and it doesn’t even mean the desire for action.

At least one commenter utterly destroys the article.

The SciAm summary hugely misrepresents the published data.

For instance: "The results suggest large gender differences in how men and women experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa."

Um, no. On a nine point self-reported scale men and women on average rated their attraction between 3.9 and 4.9. Though men were very slightly more attracted. Similarly:

"[M]ales on the younger end of the spectrum were four times more likely than females to report romantic attraction as a benefit of opposite-sex friendships, whereas those on the older end of the spectrum were ten times more likely to do the same."

Uh, yes. Because merely 10 percent of middle-aged men and 1 percent of middle-aged women listed "the possibility of romance" as a benefit of same sex friendship, the men were technically 10 times more likely. But the real headline (which I find much more surprising) is that 90 percent of middle aged men and 99 percent of middle aged women did NOT find "possibility of romance" to be a benefit of friendship. So treat this article with some caution.

It’s amazing how results can be twisted to fit the societal narrative, even when it makes no sense at all or flatly contradicts them.

A more valid interpretation of the results would be, “Most normal men and women can be just friends, and do so all the time.”