The Friendship Challenge

Aditha DISSANAYAKE

If men are from Mars and women are from Venus; if this means they will always be romantically entwined, can they never be just friends?

D.H Lawrence who revolutionized the love life of fictional characters in novels like “The Rainbow”, “Women in Love” and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” was adamant a man and a woman can never be friends. In a 1925 letter he wrote, “Friendship between a man and a woman, as a thing of first importance to either, is impossible: and I know it.” In other words what he surely means is that in order for men and women to come to each other as authentic men and women, they must stop trying to be “pals” with each other.

Confusing friendships

He could be right. After all, men and women who have love as the last thing on their minds often end up realizing it is impossible to do anything else but love their companions. Mr. Rochester eventually discovers the love of his life in the plain, outspoken, righteous Jane Eyre. Captain von Trapp admits he falls in love with Maria on the first night she spends at his house as the children’s governess. Even Prof. Higgins, who insists his interest in Eliza Doolittle is purely scientific realises he cannot live without her, so accustomed had he got to her face. Undoubtedly what starts as neutral relationships on the pages of most novels gradually turn to love and end up in marriage. Things are worse in the movies. The classic film “When Harry Met Sally” starring Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal drew the point home stronger than never before; true friendship between men and women is impossible, because as Harry says sensual attraction gets in the way. According to Michael Monsour, author of the book “Women and Men as Friends”, “The movie “When Harry Met Sally” set the potential for male-female friendship back about 25 years.” Television has not helped either. “Almost every time you see a male-female friendship, it winds up turning into romance,” Monsour notes.

So, can men and women ever be just friends? Not in fiction. Not in the movies. And it appears not in the past, either. History hardly ever records purely chaste relationships between men and women. Prince Vijaya never saw Kuweni as a mere friend nor she, him. A quick look into the days of yore reveals friendship between the sexes was more or less unknown due to the simple reason men and women occupied different spheres; men went out to earn a living, women remained at home. The only way they could get together was through romance. If so, when did the tables turn? According to sociologists the concept of pure friendships between the two sexes came into being only after the advent of the feminist movement. It was Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of feminism, in the late 18th century who emphasized that the most important element in marriage should be friendship. Calling it “the most sublime of all affections,” she said friendship between husband and wife should be the mainspring of marriage.

Thus in Wollstonecraft’s wake came the “New Woman,” - intelligent, well read, strong-willed, idealistic, unconventional and outspoken. For her, relationships with men, whether or not they involved physical attraction, had also to involve mental companionship, freedom of choice, equality and mutual respect. In other words, relationships with men had to be friendships. Easier said than done, of course. Why else would C.S. Lewis, in his book “Four Loves”, argue that friendship is the “least natural” of loves.

Lewis believed that friendships of the opposite gender very easily turn into romantic love. “Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other,” he wrote, “or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, friendship is almost certain to turn into romantic love sooner or later.”

What are the guidelines of platonic love?

Yet, unlike in Lewis’ day, in the modern world men and women mix on equal and familiar terms at institutes of higher learning, at work and in day to day activities. Today it is normal and at times even boring to see a member of the opposite sex at the next desk so much so that stripped of the mysteriously romantic aura that engulfed them in the past, friendships between the two sexes have become not only possible but an ordinary part of life as well.

To quote psychologist Linda Sapadin, “Now men and women work together and share sports interests and socialize together.” This cultural shift has encouraged psychologists, sociologists and communications experts to put forth a new message: Though it may be tricky, men and women can successfully become close friends.

Why should it be tricky? Mainly because even though there are rules for how to act in romantic relationships (flirt, date, get married, have kids) there are no guidelines when it comes to platonic relationships. The main reason for this is that platonic relationships are rarely seen in the media. “Friendship isn’t courtship. It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end.” writes William Deresiewicz in an essay in the New York Times;. “Stories about friendships of any kind are relatively rare, especially given what a huge place the relationships have in our lives. And of course, they’re not sensual. Put a man and a woman together in a movie or a novel, and we expect the sparks to fly.” Deresiewicz goes on to add even though platonic love is possible in today’s society it does not receive the prominence it deserves because society still does not understand “love” that has nothing to do with physical attraction or blood. “We understand romantic relationships, and we understand family, and that’s about all we seem to understand.”

Time is surely ripe for changes. In today’s milieu men and women can be friends. If there is someone willing to walk beside you in good times and bad times, that’s all that counts. Whether they come from Mars or Venus is surely irrelevant.

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Computer science: still a male domain?

“Where are all the women?” is a common cry at technology conferences. The appointment of Marissa Mayer – Google’s 20th ever employee and its first female engineer – as the new Yahoo! chief executive does little to answer that question.

For as long as I can remember, there has always been a handful of women at or near the top of Silicon Valley companies. In the US, Carol Bartz, the last Yahoo! CEO but one (it’s been a tumultuous time for a pioneering internet company that everyone fears is fading), led the computer-aided design company Autodesk from 1992 to 2006; and Carly Fiorina rose to prominence at Lucent before leading Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005. Other notable company leaders include Kim Polese (Marimba, SpikeSource), Donna Dubinsky (Palm, Handspring, Numenta), current HP chief executive Meg Whitman (eBay), and June Rokoff, who in the early 1990s was Lotus’s vice-president of software development. In Europe, the first female tech business leader that springs to mind is Martha Lane Fox (Lastminute.com), probably the best known, but before her was Rikke Helms (Borland, Dexterra) and Dame Steve Shirley (FI Group); the most prominent female academic computer scientist is Dame Wendy Hall, busy founding web science in Southampton.

New Yahoo! Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer. Picture by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Around 2000, both the Association for Computing Machinery (in the US) and the British Computer Society BCS (here) became concerned about what they saw as an alarming trend: the number of women entering computer science was shrinking. There was no obvious reason why this should be the case.

The number of women entering other sciences, particularly medicine and biology, was on the up. Computer science does not require great physical strength or size. And there are role models, from Marissa Mayer and the others listed above to early heroines Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, current engineers Susan Landau and Rebecca Mercuri, and community builders Anita Borg, and Emma Mulqueeny (Rewired State). Yet at the coding fest for teens Mulqueeny ran last summer, Young Rewired State, the percentage of girl coders was still depressingly small.

At last weekend’s HOPE 9 (Hackers on Planet Earth) in New York there were the usual minimalist queues for the women’s lavatories – and a panel to discuss how to get more women to participate in the hackspaces. During the debate, a German woman recounted her experiences visiting hackspaces wherever she travelled. Sometimes, she said, she could sit for half an hour and no one would speak to her. The best advice from the panel organisers, Johannes Grenzfurthner and Sean Bonner was: stop complaining that there are no women around and just invite all your friends to participate. This might work for Young Rewired State, too: allow kids, male and female, to sign up in groups as well as individually so that shy kids would be sure to turn up on the day. And probably parents would be reassured if all the sponsoring locations made sure there were women as well as men acting as leaders.

For the broader problem, it’s clear that a more profound change needs to take place, both in how we view mathematics, science and computers: not as boys’ subjects or toys but as valuable subjects in which everyone should be literate. We have not come far enough since 1970, when my New York private school got its first computer – and only the boys had access to it. It matters: for modern computer systems to be usable by all and sundry, the make-up of the population that designs and implements them needs to reflect that of the population at large.

As for Mayer, she had probably gone about as far as she could at Google, where the two founders are likely to continue to rule. Yahoo! still has a large, persistent audience, substantial revenues, and a well-known brand name. There are enough previous CEOs who have failed to restore the company’s former status as an Internet leader, that if Mayer fails she’s lost nothing – and if she succeeds she’ll be seen as having achieved a miracle. Good luck to her.

-Guardian.co.uk