I’ve seen a number of comments and posts recently linking friendship (and yes, I mean friendship and nothing more) with sex and even polyamory. For example:

We’ve been trained to believe that desire and care cannot coexist […] But that belief isn’t natural; it’s cultural. We inherited it from centuries of monogamy presented as moral law, not personal choice. It was built to protect order, not intimacy.

I’ve never been fully convinced by the myth of exclusivity. Not because I reject love, but because I believe it can take many shapes. Polyamory, to me, isn’t about sleeping with everyone – it’s about radical honesty. It’s saying, “I feel something for you, and it doesn’t have to threaten anything else in my life”. It’s acknowledging that attraction can exist without ownership …

[Kamila Murko; on Substack]

This young lady is curious in more ways than one, and I can’t work out whether she’s real or AI. But whichever, she comes up with some interesting takes on life and relationships.

Then I came across this comment:

Polyamory might actually be friendship operating within a patriarchal framework that continues to essentialize sex and romantic relationships.

[Nicolle Double L; on Substack]

I think that maybe does the sincerity and depth of polyamory an injustice. However it drew this interesting response …

As someone who uses sex to deepen my friendships, there’s some truth to this. I wish it were different, but in my experience sex is the best way to ensure a deep lifelong friendship with a man (even decades after the sex stops).

[Vortex Goddess; also on Substack]

Now all this started ringing bells with me. Why?

When I was a first year undergraduate (1969-70) my friend Geoff Allcock (yes, really) averred as his belief that there is no reason why one shouldn’t have sex purely as a token of friendship and outside a relationship (ie. attraction without ownership). This was not mere male student bravado, because Geoff was the kind of guy who even at 19 or so would have thought deeply about things and formed his own genuine beliefs.

This made an impression on me at the time (hence I’ve remembered it) and I’ve come to agree with Geoff.

I’ve tried to capture the overlap, as I see it, of various levels of sexual relationship in the following diagram.

Why should Geoff not be right? I have no experience of polyamory (and anyway every set of relationships will work in their own unique way) but could it be that polyamory sits sexually somewhere “beyond” the apparently more common fuck buddy relationship – which is also distinct from sexual friendship – something deeply and sincerely rooted in the same way monogamy is.

As you might expect from my generally open and liberal views I have no problem with this – although I concede that I might find the actuality difficult, which is doubtless says more about me and social conditioning.

It seems to me that in a world where everyone is really treated equally, regardless of sex (ie. we’ve managed to evict the patriarchy and male chauvinism) we would see an increase in genuine M-F friendships and then we could see a rise in sex (hetero and same sex) as a token of nothing more than friendship. And why shouldn’t we? Indeed it could even be a driving force for the change – a circular feedback loop.

Bring on that change, I say!