ChickSpeak

Overheard between friends:

Girl #1 observes, “So what’s the deal with you a Bob? You two look totally cute together. Are you guys hooking up, dating… what’s the deal?”

Girl #2 replies, “Nope, we’re just friends with benefits. It’s so not a big deal at all…”

Questions and conversations like this are common among students and recent grads alike. Found somewhere between a real dating relationship and the complete autonomy of random hook-ups comes the FWB- Friends with Benefits. Many of us are at least familiar with this status, but until recently not too much research has been done on this. Is FWB harmless and easier than dealing with a romantic relationship? Does this situation create more stress because one or both people are secretly worried about falling for the other person and getting hurt?

Questions like these and many others were delved into by researchers at Michigan State University. The results might surprise you. Writer Benedict Carey for the New York Times weighs in.

“To some, it may seem like an ideal relationship, less stressful than an affair, longer lived than a fling or that elusive one-night stand. You can even sit around in your sweats and watch “Friends” reruns together, feeling vaguely reassured.

Yet relationships in which close friends begin having sex come with their own brand of awkwardness, according to the first study to explore the dynamics of such pairs, often called friends with benefits, or F.W.B..

The relationships tend to have little romantic passion, but stir the same fears that stalk lovers: namely, that one person will fall harder than the other.

Paradoxically, and perhaps predictably, the study suggests, these physical friendships often occlude one of the emotional arteries of real friendship, openness. Friends who could once talk about anything now have an unstated taboo topic - the relationship itself. In every conversation, there is innuendo; in every room, an elephant.

The research, conducted among Michigan State Universitystudents, confirmed previous findings that most college students report having had at least one such relationship. Although that is undoubtedly true of many couples throughout history, “friends with benefits” have become a cultural signature of today’s college and postcollege experience.

“The study really adds to the little we know about these relationships,” said Paul Mongeau, a professor of communications at Arizona State Universitywho was not involved in the research. “One of the most interesting things I get from it,” he said, “is this sense that people in these relationships are afraid to develop feelings for the other person, because those feelings might be unreciprocated.”

In the study, appearing in the current issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, Melissa Bisson, a former graduate student at Michigan State, and Timothy Levine, a professor in the communications department, surveyed 125 young men and women and found that 60 percent reported having had at least one friend with benefits.

One-tenth of these relationships went on to become full-scale romances, the study found. About a third stopped the sex and remained friends, and one in four eventually broke it off - the sex and the friendship. The rest continued as friends-with-benefits relationships.

In a follow-up study, the researchers gave 90 students who reported having at least one such relationship a battery of questionnaires asking about passion, commitment and communication.

“We found,” Dr. Levine said, “that people got into these relationships because they didn’t want commitment. It was perceived as a safe relationship, at least at first. But also that there was this growing fear that the one person would become more attracted than the other.”

Yet, he added, the overall qualities of the relationships appeared to be true to the name. On standard psychological measures, they appeared more like friendships than romances.

For the full article in today’s New York Times can be found HERE.