The erotic life of friendship

A feminist look at men, love, and the erotic power of friendship

This essay first appeared in Italian in Il Foglio Review (June 2025, print edition).

My favorite friends are the chronically single, the emotionally damaged, the single women who have no patience for men. These people are intense, brilliant, razor-sharp about the world and about life. They spot trends before anyone else, know how to connect the dots, always have an interesting project going on—like that friend of mine who told me he stopped masturbating years ago thanks to the No Fap movement. Apparently, there’s an entire section of the manosphere dedicated to detoxing from porn addiction and the dopamine spikes linked to masturbation. It probably ties in, somewhere along the manosphere circuit, with the neo-tantric practice of not ejaculating in order to preserve one’s life force. Spin the wheel a little more and you end up in the forest screaming about being a man and “feeling the weight of your balls.” But that’s a digression—what I mean is, there are plenty of weirdly fascinating projects I wouldn’t even hear about if I only hung out with women.

When a friend gets married, starts a relationship, moves in with someone or couples up, a light goes out behind his eyes. It’s true for all of us, to some extent. The energy we pour into one single person drains us a bit, takes away that free time we’d otherwise spend on completely useless and therefore exquisitely artistic pursuits, like wandering around Rome’s cruising spots: true art, unbent by publishing capitalism or Substack subscriptions.

It’s especially straight men who vanish, who melt away once they find a girlfriend. First they disappear, then the belly appears. Not literally—it's not like they ghost you, or refuse to meet up. It’s that when you do see them, they’re no longer there: emotionally checked out, zombie-like; boring, not making an effort, not telling you anything, just sitting there in passive mode. They go back to not asking you anything about yourself, just like they do on dates, but also to not telling you anything about themselves—nothing real, anyway. Couples therapist Esther Perel calls this “ambiguous loss.” She’s actually repurposing a term originally coined by psychologist Pauline Boss to describe—more serious, heart-wrenching contexts—the non-loss-loss of a partner due to neurodegenerative illness like dementia, or because they’re stationed far away for work or military missions. Perel says we’re all living through ambiguous loss now, because the people around us are both here and not here; we’re suffering from relational atrophy—we’re forgetting how to be with others, how to connect with another human being. One reason is that we’re always in front of a screen, even at home. Another, linked to this, is that we’ve become relationally lazy. We send messages like “how’s it going?” instead of asking real questions. We don’t offer our energy. We’ve been infected by the individualism of self-care, self-love, personal boundaries, the cult of being fine on your own, and we forget that wellbeing starts with relationships. People who live the longest, Perel says, aren’t the ones who go to the gym or eat vegetables—they’re the ones with a network of meaningful relationships.

Even the so-called “gender divide”—the phenomenon where women seem to hold more progressive views and are more emancipated, while men often bask in a kind of nostalgia for the good old days when they could say whatever they wanted and the world was built to suit them—according to Perel, it’s also largely due to the fact that men and women are no longer friends. She also talks about the “male loneliness epidemic,” a wave of isolation that affects young men especially, who no longer have real-world friends. This loneliness is partly tied to the world of incels, the “involuntary celibates” who are angry because no girls want to have sex with them. But have you tried, says Esther Perel, having female friends before trying to sleep with women? Talking to people of the opposite sex without wanting to date them? Everything is so functional, so goal-oriented. As if sex were supposed to just show up one day like magic, without building any relationships. And as if it were supposed to stick around by magic, when we no longer maintain relationships outside of the couple. Wrong. We have to cultivate vitality, joy, eroticism, fun, laughter, depth—even outside of our couple.

The embarrassing thing is that I know I’ve been that person too: ambiguously lost, absent with my friends, obsessed with whatever boyfriend I had at the time—especially in the relationships where I lost myself (which is to say, most of them). I reread messages with my friends and think, who is this asshole? And it’s me. It was me. I didn’t listen, I’d always steer the conversation back to my own misery, I’d ask favors for men we wouldn’t even see or hear from again a few months later. I was blind and deaf to the world around me and repeated that week’s boyfriend’s name more often than a Soka Gakkai mantra. My friends humored me, hoping it would pass. We’re used to thinking of these as normal symptoms of being in love—but that’s just infatuation within the obsessive-pathological frame we’ve absorbed growing up over the past fifty years. Maybe five hundred.

As women, we grew up thinking our survival depended on the kind of man we chose as a life partner—because it did. The wrong man can kill you, and we’ve always known that. At best, the wrong man within the structure of patriarchal marriage could doom you to a life of misery and struggle, for economic reasons (which play out in the massive amount of unpaid labor we’ve had to do) and for emotional ones (living with a dead weight, a ghost, a belittler, a cheater). It’s no surprise that historically, when we thought we’d found a good one, we shifted the entire axis of our life toward him. There was something desperate and unhealthy in how we latched onto them, but it made sense within the patriarchal trap. It makes sense that even among ourselves, all we talked about was boys—because it’s an ancestral form of information-sharing to improve our decision-making and avoid dumb traps.

I obsessed too. Every time, it was like my center of gravity tipped over, my focus shifted. But in the healthier cases, I came back to myself—or at least I hope I did. Maybe not completely, but say 70%. Which is probably the highest percentage of selfhood one can hope to retain while in a relationship. But there are women who never come back. Husband and kids become a foreign land to others, a place they vanish into forever.

For men, it’s a different story. In their case, once they’re in a couple, they no longer need that (tiny) slice of emotional life that patriarchal society has allowed them to develop. Not because they’re inherently insensitive or less emotionally complex—on the contrary. It’s that their emotional life is so heavily repressed it becomes chaotic, stunted, or unreachable. When they’re single, their feelings aren’t exactly front and center, but they’re forced to engage more, to be more in the world. They’re less sure of themselves, less rigid, more vulnerable—and vulnerability is interesting, it’s a question, a leaning toward the other. Etymologically, vulnus is a wound, so an opening. The couple protects men. Maybe it was even invented to suit them: to ensure the sexual availability of at least one woman at all times. So once they’re tucked into the cocoon of a relationship, they don’t need to make outside plans anymore, don’t need to experiment. Many of them, despite the stereotype, stop even looking around; they become sexless—or rather, in Perel’s terms, disconnected from eros understood as lust for life. They stop talking to their male friends, they vanish from their female ones.

A gay friend told me that straight men behave this way because their girlfriends are jealous—but come on. That’s just your usual internalized misogyny, I told him. Women are more than happy to share the emotional labor. It’s exhausting being the only woman in a man’s emotional life. Encouraging him, inspiring him, reassuring him, comforting him, explaining his own emotions to him. Having female friends is very healthy for a man. It gives him reference points for what’s acceptable to say and do. It gives him someone safe to explore complex feelings with. Having male friends, for a woman, is a lot of work—for the exact same reasons. Given the stage society is in, given the gender divide, having male friends means doing a lot of explaining. You only bother if there’s even a shred of potential for equal exchange.

But no woman can settle for just one man—because society is made of men. Public life still runs through men; they’re everywhere, and we come into contact with them all the time. But it’s also because women place greater value on relationships, and often establish an erotic connection even when it’s not sexual. Eroticism as in fully living, being excited about things and sharing them with different people—not for any particular gain, but to nourish a vital energy. Women know relationships matter. They feel it instinctively. They’re willing to share energy because they want to receive it too, to have their own vitality fed by others. That’s the concept of eros that Esther Perel has been tirelessly reminding us of—it’s been twenty years since her bestseller Mating in Captivity. It’s simply about being human. Feeling truly fulfilled only in a network of others, feeling constrained in nuclear relationships that can’t meet all our needs.

Instead, quite often, contrary to popular belief, for a man one woman is more than enough. That’s partly because work or career takes up so much emotional space for men, and partly because men often don’t truly respect women. They look to other men for validation, recognition, exchange. Ask yourselves: why don’t your husbands bounce ideas off women? It’s weird. That too is a kind of withdrawal, a retreat from life—and therefore from eros—while still expecting sexuality, disconnected from everything else.

Withholding their energy from us is itself a patriarchal abuse, a form of selfishness that dims our eroticism—our life force. If anyone still needs proof that equality is sexy, that we need each other to live more fully, more joyfully, more deeply, it’s this. The fact that men have opted out of being present doesn’t mean it’s good for them (they’re not exactly thriving, what with the loneliness epidemic and the perpetual male crisis), but it also hurts us. And I’d like to say to men: do better, show up, give us more—even in friendships. Especially in friendships. Because it’s all one spectrum. Relationships are relationships, and they only work when people are actually there.

The Apple TV show Platonic is about the friendship between a recently divorced man (case in point) and a married woman with three kids. Like many Apple shows (Shrinking, Ted Lasso, Still Up), Platonic is funny without being stupid, suffused with a certain optimism and the relaxed light of Pasadena. The show’s comic rhythm is carried bare-handed by the delightful Rose Byrne and her equally delightful Australian accent. In Platonic, Sylvia and Will reconnect after five years of no contact. She’s left her job as a lawyer to raise the kids, but she’s neither sad nor sacrificial, as American films usually like to portray. She spends her mornings making off-color jokes with another mom and has a good relationship with her husband. In fact, it’s the husband who encourages her to reconnect with Will, now that he’s divorced from a woman Sylvia never liked anyway. Will has lots of interesting projects—mainly inventing new craft beers for his bar in the Arts District—and lots of free time. When they meet again, Sylvia and Will fall back into their old obsessive rhythm—mornings on scooters turn into afternoons at his bar, into visiting homes for sale under fake names, and platinum highlights in his hair. It’s a “dysfunctional” relationship, but by whose standards, by what rules? No jealous husband, no risk of ever becoming anything but platonic. That’s the show’s real strength: exploring male–female friendship without falling back on clichés that no longer reflect reality. Platonic asks why friendships between men and women end when they don’t end because of jealousy or sex. And the answer season one gives is more realistic—and more subtly bitter—than the ones we’re used to from the When Harry Met Sally genre. It’s also very contemporary, because today, I think, there are more husbands who genuinely want what’s best for their wives than wildly jealous ones (I’ve absorbed Pasadena’s optimism). Season two drops August 6, so we can watch it on our phones at the beach, or on sticky summer nights. Until then, here’s hoping there’s still a future for Sylvia, for Will, for male–female friendship, for life beyond the couple and off the screen.