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Cross Sex Friendship Essay

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Relationships with others in our lives and it is very important to many people. An awful relationship understood is a cross-sex friendship a conflict, intimacy, self-disclosure, and communication style within them. In our everyday lives, friendships with others serve a purpose, standards, expectations, differences, challenging situations and validate one’s sense of affections towards one another. Is it possible to have long-lasting friends of the opposite sex without becoming “friends with benefits”? I have always been a “guy’s girl” and I could probably say the majority of my best friends are males. To sit here and say with what the majority of our society tells us, that it is not possible to have close platonic cross-sex friendships, …show more content…

Telling these individuals that they are placed in a certain category because of their gender is immoral. For example, I definitely think that I manage conflict more so like a male than a female, therefore when I am going through a difficult time I would much rather confide in my male friends than my female friends. I don’t like spending long periods of time talking about a problem, and my male friends understand that (Thill M. R., 2012).
As far as communication goes, many may think that topic avoidance will arise the most in males, especially when it comes to males and female relationships. There are many who think there is a lack of communication and topic avoidance in cross-sex friendship. However, research has found that cross-sex friendships and same-sex friendships have more in common than one would think. A study was conducted with undergraduate business and communication students (101 females and 76 males) where they were asked to complete a questionnaire about topics (negative life experiences, dating experiences, relationship issues, friends, and sexual issues) they avoided within six different relationships consisting of same-sex friendships and cross-sex friendships. Results found that individuals were only more likely to avoid topics consisting of romantic undertones when with the opposite-sex, compared to same-sex friendships. Yet, individuals avoided disclosure to males more than females on only two

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