By Carol Church, Writer, Family Album

Reviewed by Suzanna Smith, PhD, Department of Family, Youth, and Community Sciences, University of Florida

In the 2011 movie “Friends with Benefits,” two friends try out a sexual relationship without any “strings.” The female character soon calls the experiment off, but by the end of the movie, the two end up in a real romance.

This typical Hollywood ending doesn’t come as much of a surprise. But how do real-life “friends with benefits” relationships tend to operate? And do men and women want different things from them? A recent study of about 300 women and 100 men who were in so-called “FWB” relationships at the time of the study examined this question.

Men and women were asked about their reasons for getting involved in this type of relationship, and how committed they were to both its sexual side and its friendship aspect. They also indicated whether they wanted the relationship to stay the same, or to turn into a romance.

More men than women listed sex as a reason to enter the relationship. However, the majority of men and women named both sex and emotional connection as motivators for getting involved. While women tended to be more interested than men in having their “FWB” relationship turn romantic, quite a few men wanted this, too. But perhaps most importantly, both men and women said the friendship side of the relationship mattered more to them than the sex.

These findings suggest that although men and women may approach “friends with benefits” arrangements differently in some ways, they also share some similarities in how they think about a situation like this. And in the end, it seems that emotional connection may trump sex—an interesting fact about this unusual type of relationship.

(Photo credit: Kiss by David Martyn Hunt. CC BY 2.0.)

References:

Lehmiller, J. J., VanderDrift, L. E., & Kelly, J. R. (2011). Sex differences in approaching friends with benefits relationships. Journal of Sex Research, 48, (2-3), 275-284.

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