Why Friends With Benefits Never Works, According to Science
How to stop getting caught in dreaded non-relationships
If I were to ask you whether you’d agree to a friend with benefits type of arrangement, what would you say? The Hollywood box office hit Friends with Benefits starring Mila Kunis, and Justin Timberlake has touched on the subject. However, I am not convinced that these arrangements work long-term in reality.
It didn’t really in the movie either. However, while swiping left and right on my dating apps, I matched with many people looking for a friendship with benefits. It does sound quite beneficial on the surface: It’s a setup mimicking something like a romantic relationship without putting in the work of a relationship. And it’s a way to avoid getting hurt.
The problem: Uncertainty is inherently unsustainable.
What it is, what it is not, and everything in between
In this day and age of gray areas, who can still surf waves of non-commitment without capturing feelings? That’s what I’ve been asking myself over and over again. Because my experience shows that while the idea of friendship plus is not bad per se, it never works out over a long time.
In the beginning, it may all be great: Both know what’s up and can deal well with the fact that they are only an interim solution, rebound, or distraction for each other. Maybe both are convinced that this gray area is the right way for both at the moment. As long as both know clearly and present it that way and communicate it, again and again, it can work out quite well and also in the long term.
However, this is not entirely true from a scientific point of view. Friends with benefits never work in the long term. The reason for this is our brain and psychology. The reason scientific reason for this is the familiarity principle. It dictates that we are attracted to what is familiar to us. According to several studies, facial attractiveness positively correlated with both familiarity and typicality. Meaning that we react positively to the known. Therefore, this will inevitably lead to stronger feelings for someone we repeatedly share intimate moments with.
Or, put differently, just like in the movie Friends with Benefits, feelings will get involved. Meaning: Eventually, someone involved in a prolonged FWB situation will catch feelings, wanting to move the relationship to the next level. This inevitably causes the hypothetical win-win of friends with benefits to fall apart.
Prolonged FWB situations never work
Like the overwhelming majority of romantic comedies, the Hollywood box office hit Friends with Benefits ends with a happy end. My life experience points in the other direction: Either my lover completely vanished out of my life or first fell in love with me before disappearing from it. In the end, though, in all cases, these types of arrangements never had many advantages in the long run but rather entailed more problems.
It starts with secrecy: At first, I liked the idea of having a secret lover with no strings attached. But that thrill very soon dwindled. Why? Because it hinders good advice: Not being able to talk to your support system about your arrangement is never a good option. Furthermore, while the lack of commitment, in the beginning, is the biggest plus of being friends with benefits turns into its largest pitfall.
And then there are the logistics: Where and when do we meet? How can we keep this arrangement a secret? Are there any other aspects we have to cover before starting to have an intimate relationship? And, are there occasions we will run into each other in public?
Lastly, investing time and sharing intimacy with a person affected the way I approached other people. I was less interested in genuine single male friends and had a strange focus on this secret lover/friend. In other words, I can’t date and have a friend with benefits at the same time. I believe muddling waters is a direct path to muddling boundaries, values, and personal convictions.
I don’t need to see my friend naked from time to time. The upkeep for something that can’t work out, like a prolonged FWB situation, doesn’t make any sense to me — not at all.
What having a friend with benefits taught me about my boundaries
I find the thing with friendship plus, above all, an additional temporal expenditure, which I do not see: Basically, the same issues have to be resolved as in a real relationship. Moreover, these arrangements have the same pitfalls as a romantic relationship. So I kept asking myself why I shouldn’t just get involved in a real relationship again.
Because one thing was always clearer to me: I couldn’t maintain a more or less time-intensive endeavor and at the same time date other people as well. That was always too exhausting for me. And you get hurt in life anyway; you can only choose who you want to be hurt by.
And that’s the big difference for me: I don’t maintain such friendships anymore for some time because I don’t have time for the long-term consequences of such arrangements. If I dare to let, someone gets close to me, even physically, then someone from whom I can expect more than a lazy excuse and a reference to weird in-between arrangements.
There is a big difference between building something together and maintaining something together artificially. If we are honest, the difference between a real romantic relationship and a friendship-plus-scenario is that the former two people commit themselves to build something unique.
I refuse to be anyone’s friend with benefits. I am not your rebound.
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