Men and Women Can't Be Friends - Who Said That?

My Childhood friends and I meeting up after thirty years. From Left Humphrey, Me, Kelvin and Henry

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I was idly watching Netflix one day when a childhood friend of mine Humphrey, from out of town called to say he'd be coming to see me - with some of our other childhood friends, Kelvin from London and Henry from Connecticut (we call him the Mayor of CT).

I was quite excited. It had been over thirty years we all saw each other last, but somehow it didn’t feel like it.

While we were catching up, I had an Instagram video playing in the background. Someone was confidently saying that men and women can never be friends.

I paused.

It sounded strange. Not new - frankly, I'd heard it before. Even my dad used to say the same thing while we were growing up. But it still didn’t sit right with me.

Because my reality looked nothing like that.

Most of my friendships growing up were with boys. We went to primary school together, moved on to secondary school, and even when university took us in different directions, we always found our way back to each other during the holidays.

We all probably never gave it a thought.

So I got curious.

I asked my husband what he thought, if it bothered him that I had so many male friends.

He said no. And his reason was simple: we all grew up together. Somewhere along the line, we had stopped seeing each other as “men” and “women” and started seeing each other as something closer to siblings.

That answer stayed with me.

Because maybe the question isn’t whether men and women can be friends.

Maybe the real question is: what kind of foundation was that friendship built on?

Growing up the way we did, our friendships often transcended sex, tribe, and all the categories that usually define people. The lines were there, but they didn’t matter.

And I wonder now… at what point do they start to matter? To me, probably never.

Yaay! My Brothers from another Mother

We grew up in Satellite Town together. Proper middle-class kids. We rode bikes, licked Samco and Parmalat yoghurt, went to White Sand to do backflips and front somersaults.

The boys pulled our hair the same way brothers do at home. We wrestled, raced through the closes, fought, laughed, everything. And if any strange boys from Festac or the estates came looking for trouble, our "brothers" gave them a good licking.

There was no “boy” and “girl” dynamic.

We moved on to secondary school, and still, nothing changed. We didn’t look at each other with any sexual undertones. It was always the boys who didn’t grow up with us who showed interest.

And our boys? They shut it down immediately.

“No - you can’t date them. What do you even see in them?”

The same protective, slightly insulting energy only siblings can give.

By university, it got even worse in the most hilarious way.

If a girl liked one of them, we were the first to ruin it:

“Yuck. He used to wet his pants in primary school." “He cried over everything.”

And they did the same to us.

'The Mayor of Connecticut' and I

So when people say men and women can’t be friends, I understand why it sounds true to them. Because not everyone grew up like us.

Humprey, Me, Kelvin

Most other people were aware of gender differences from the very beginning.

But for us, once you’ve known people as just people, before anything else… it’s hard to suddenly start seeing them differently.

As much as I agree that people see the world differently, I also know that how they grow up shape them in ways that are hard to undo.

When you’ve known boys as just people - before the world starts assigning meaning to gender, it becomes difficult to suddenly see them through suspicion, tension, or hostility.

It doesn’t make us better than anyone else. But it does mean we learned to understand each other in a way that was unforced.

There’s a kind of ease that comes from growing up side by side, seeing the awkward phases, the vulnerability, the ridiculousness. It strips away a lot of the mystery and, with it, a lot of the fear or resentment that sometimes defines male- female interactions later in life.

And maybe that’s the real difference.

Not whether men and women can be friends—but whether they were ever allowed to be just children together first.

Humphrey and I