My new role as cult leader and my en¬suing (or should that be ongoing…) sex drought has got me thinking seriously about relationships. Having spent the best part of the past decade in one, and most of the last two years dragging myself out of another, I have become all the more aware of the im-portance of platonic friendship. As with most long-term love, it’s all too easy to drop your mates like a sack of shit when the trouser time is upon you, but it’s the good friends who are usually still there for you should your romance hit the skids. So, since going solo, I have purposefully spent lots of time investing in burgeoning friendships and promising not to drop kick them should love come around again.

Since deciding to invest extra time and energy in my friends, I have been paying particular attention to my male mates. Be¬ing a bit of a tomboy at heart, I love hanging out with the lads. It’s always nice to have a bloke buddy to drink with, plus they can offer titbits on the intricate workings of the male psyche, should the urge to plunder that un¬discovered terrain grab you. Alas, your male mates are usually the first people you sacri¬fice in favour of a new romance. So I’ve been taking advantage of the fact I haven’t got a jealous man to pester me, and made sure I cultivate my boy friendships. But friendships of the opposite sex do tend to stir up a bit of muddy water. Unless all parties involved have a significant other (and sometimes even when they do), I’m not sure any of us is im¬mune to the inevitable tensions between two people of the opposite sex.

All this has got me thinking about the re¬lationship between men and women, and pondering that fateful question, posed most aptly in the classic Eighties romcom When Harry Met Sally…, ‘Can men and women ever just be friends?’ As I tiptoe through the relative minefield that represents the battle between the sexes, I’m starting to suspect the fundamental differences between men and women means that platonic friendship is a virtual impossibility. But it’s the thing we hold in common that really causes the problems.

Billy Crystal was a wise man when he said the pesky sex part always gets in the way. However platonic one’s friendship may appear, it’s usually all a pretence, as if you like each other enough to be mates, invari¬ably you end up either wanting to get it on, actually getting it on or wishing you hadn’t zaccidentally got it on the night before after polishing off four bottles of Merlot.

The reason I’ve been focusing on this particular subject is, after spending an in¬ordinate amount of time hanging out with my male friends, I’ve been teetering on the sexual tightrope myself, and starting to wob¬ble. I’d love to think that men and women can function in a straightforward friendship and sail calmly and platonically through the stormy seas of sexual relations, but now I’m not so sure.

If you are in a relationship and your male friend is in one as well, then it’s usually all well and fine. You have your partner and they have theirs and everyone is happy to pursue a platonic friendship, provided the other partner’s are friends, too, and not psy-chotically jealous agraphobes. But if you are both single, a certain amount of sexual frisson invariably enters the equation. You see, you normally form friendships with people who you are at least on some level attracted to. Combine this with a couple of bottles of wine, a Sex Cult Guru and a neglected li¬bido, and is it any wonder we don’t all end up in the sack?

But if you manage to avoid shagging your mates, when you do finally meet a bloke who does tick all the boyfriend boxes, this often leaves your male friends out in the cold. I am trying very hard to keep my boys at arm’s length in favour of modern compan¬ionship, whilst maintaining they are genuine friendships that will stand the test of time, but it’s turning out to be a bit tricky.

This does beg the question, if I like one of them, already have a great friendship with him and the possibility of shagging the arse off him is starting to linger in the air, why don’t I just shut up and fall in love? (Assuming he feels the same way, which I suspect he might) but I’m not so sure my nether regions aren’t just trying to lull me into a false sense of security, just for the sake of some horizontal action. So I’m trying to stick to my platonic guns, to stop myself from getting into another relationship for all the wrong reasons and also to save myself from cocking up what is essentially a rather great friendship.

But this brings up the most interesting as¬pect of my recent explorations, which is that the more I resist the inimitable charms of one of my lovely boy friends in favour of friend¬ship, the keener my male comrade seems to become, indicating that the good old hard-to-get game really does work. If you contin¬ue to resist them, boys do inevitably fall for you. Everyone always wants what they can’t have, and unrequited passion is enough to get anyone’s loins in a spin. If nothing else, hanging on to your single male friends teaches you all sorts of lessons, which pre¬sumably you can then apply to your love life once the next relationship comes along.

So, aside from it being a temporary re¬prieve if you’re struggling with singledom, or when you’re merely in that ambiguous time before you both give in and get together, can men and women ever really just be friends? In an ideal world we’d all be shacked up with Mr or Mrs Right, maintain firm lifelong friend¬ships with other couples, have a safe but es¬sentially harmless sexual frisson with a col-league at work to alleviate boredom and have no need to ponder on the incessant battle between the sexes. But, God, wouldn’t life be boring? I’m afraid at this stage I can only really speculate on the answer to this conun¬drum. I will either have to find a nice stable man and settle down so we can have other couple friends to hang out with, or continue dangling my male friends over the deep precipice of sexual tension just for kicks. I think I know which option I prefer…