They Are Just Good Friends!

Are they?

- I. M. Soni

A film heroine, once a beauty queen, was linked to a man years younger to her. It was gossiped that she was marrying him. When asked, she replied: “There is nothing in it. We are just good friends. Kareena Kapur said as much while in relationship with Saif Ali.”

This phrase has become an euphemism for what is popularly known as friendship – a concept conceived and propagated from Plato’s Utopia. Platonic friendship is supposed to be between two persons of opposite sexes, independent of sex.

Such a claim can be true with the tongue slightly out of mouth. Many women shun marriage and are content to take the half-loaf which is better than no bread! They are ‘friendly’ with males. Whatever it means.

The flip side is that there cannot be ‘friendship’ between men and women without sex. The two are mates in the mind before they become friends.

Friendship may exist between the very old and the very young male and female but is the sex element missing here? No one knows. Sex may show up in their relationships either in a delightful or a disturbing, disastrous way the qualities in both which respond to each other are physical. He admires her femininity and frailties of the flesh.

Plato did not use the word ‘friendship’ he used ‘love’. The Phrase was platonic love. This is not friendship because the qualities men and women fall for in each other are based on sex. It shows the balance of the Eros from which modern erotica stems. Symposium means a drink and dinner party he referred to love born out of divine beauty. The beautiful lovers fell for the divine beauty of each other where physical intimacy was not a dominant factor. Later, thinkers contended that the divine beauty appreciation cannot but lead to physical relationship.