Can Men and Women Be Friends?
In my novel Hartfords, I intended to flip a patriarchal society on its head. One way I sought to do that is something I’ve rarely seen done, by creating a lot of plutonic relationships between men and women.
Hartfords centers a family in the 1840s New England whom wider society thinks is a little strange. The five daughters have been raised by their parents to be educated and independent and to not orient their lives around a man.
As a result, no one seems to want to marry them, until the oldest sister defies the odds and marries someone who isn’t afraid of her wit or her gumption. But that still leaves behind four unmarried sisters, and the town gossips continue to cackle.
Pretty quickly, Samantha accepts a bet from a townsperson, committing to find husbands for all of her younger sisters by the end of the year.
In this society, gender roles are clearly divided. There’s men’s work and there’s women’s work, and matchmaking is definitely women’s work. As the plot to find husbands grows, expanding outward to encompass more people, I very intentionally involved both men and women in the scheming and dreaming. They worked together toward a common goal. I also created very deliberate male-female friendships.
I am always delighted when readers pick up on this and say they appreciated it. Even in twenty-first century United States, there are few avenues for men and women to develop intimate relationships outside of a dating relationship or intimate partnership. This is a place where I think lies about sex and sexuality continue to impact us. Deeply embedded beliefs that men only want sex from women make men and women frightened of men’s sexual urges (which science will confirm are no more naturally rigorous than women’s desires). Add to this the impact of the Billy Graham rule that Vice President Mike Pence made headlines for in 2017. Often men in evangelicalism are held up as righteous for avoiding situations where they might be alone with a woman. This rule, meant to “protect from temptation” only compounds the belief in the dangers of a woman’s body, increasing the divide between men and women, and perpetuating a society that still blames the situation, rather than the perpetrator, in cases of sexual assault.
Still, even I didn’t know male-female relationships could have a middle ground between casual friendship and intimate partnership. Until I moved to Los Angeles, I never experienced even a taste of it. For the first time in my life, I became friends with men who weren’t afraid of me. It was normal to be friends with both married men and married women. It was normal to just be friends. I got a glimpse of something I’d always longed for. The dream left my imagination and began to sprout into reality.
It’s strange to think I could not have completed my novel without Los Angeles. My vision for a world of friendships between men and women was hazy until I got a real-life sample. Then I wrote a book about the past, dreaming of how things could be in the future.
Lean more about my novel HERE.