Revisit but not Revise: Friendship and the Romantic Imperative

Popular culture apparently feels the need to return, yet again, to Harry’s and Sally’s statement that “men and women can’t be friends” (When Harry met Sally) in another of Hollywood’s romantic comedies. Friends with Benefits, as a close relative of the iconic When Harry met Sally... in terms of theme and plot, is not only revealing with regard to concepts of friendship and/as opposed to romance. The romantic imperative it constructs and represents is certainly a gendered imperative, as well: The crucial issue is the avoidance of romance in a specific constellation, namely cross-sex friendship between two heterosexual individuals – attempts at which, the films suggest, are doomed to failure. In this sense the narratives are driven by (the question of) a “romantic imperative”, that is by debating and depicting the unavoidability of falling in love. When Harry met Sally and Friends with Benefits both participate in the “contemporary phrasings” which, as Victor Luftig puts it, “define male/female friendship according to what it is not”. Concepts such as “‘just friends,’ ‘only friends,’ ‘not lovers’” all “in effect describe friendship negatively” (1) and testify to our lack of conceptions of male-female relations outside heteronormative frameworks. The films’ plots confirm those frameworks in denying alternatives to heterosexual romance. I would like to suggest that at the core of the “friends turned lovers” theme is a particular dynamic of likeness and difference, and that the narration of a process of transition from friendship to romance allows a production of difference that serves certain purposes.