The opposite of sex on February 23, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

Do you think it’s possible for someone in a serious/committed relationship to be close friends with someone of the opposite sex? Based on my own personal feelings and experience, I don’t think so. I argued a lot with my girlfriend of almost three years about this, yet she always assured me that the guys she hung out with were “just friends.” Well, I put up with it, until she finally cheated on me with one of them. Do you think it’s too much to ask of a girlfriend to not have guy friends? Personally, I don’t think it’s possible for a guy and a girl to be “just friends.” I mean, all of my relationships have started out as a friendship first…

— The Man

Dear Man,

1. Yes, opposite-sex friendships are possible, even when one or both parties are otherwise attached. One of a jillion cases in point: Breakup Girl and her trusty webmaster, Chris (why do you think we call our enterprise Just Friends Productions?) Our friend-/partnership has weathered, outlasted, and never come into any sort of conflict with our “other” relationships, except for the one time Chris “had to” watch the “lost pilot” of Brisco County, Jr. on the BG TV right when a beau and I had just come in with Eat Drink Man Woman.

2. Don’t you dare ask any girlfriend to not have guy friends. I understand that you’re smarting from past cheatage — but if someone’s going to cheat, they’re going to cheat, whether it’s with a “friend” or someone else. Come on, Man, if a girlfriend asked you not to have any friend-girls, you’d think she was a psycho jealous freak. And you know what? The best relationships, platonic and romantic, are those in which partners want and trust each other to have “other” friends, lives, and TV shows.

Love,
Breakup Girl