The Impact Of Cross-Gender Friendship

In a conversation with a leader of my church years ago, I was asked something about my best friend in a way that assumed my best friend is a man.  I casually answered by using female pronouns to indicate that my best friend Gabi is actually a woman.  While I despise assumptions, I relish opportunities to correct people who presuppose that my friends are all or mostly male, when the opposite is the case: most of my friends are women, and they have been for approximately the past four years of my life.

Gabi and I around a month ago!

During the last few years, I would have had almost no friends at all if I was not welcoming towards friendships with women.  One of these friends provided the emotional support I needed to endure the two most grueling and exhausting trials of my entire life.  These friendships broadcast several key facts about my worldview and personality to those who only casually observe my life, since, through them, my egalitarianism and anti-legalism are on blatant display.

Friendship between men and women is just now reaching a status in American culture where it is not thoroughly considered impossible, but it is still regarded by many as unnatural.  There is nothing unnatural about men and women treating each other as the metaphysical equals that they are, with Scripture explicitly teaching that both genders were intended to corule creation as equals (Genesis 1:26-28)--and the ultimate affirmation of gender equality is the formation of deep friendships with the opposite gender.  Instead, it is unnatural and and unbiblical to segregate men and women in friendships simply because they represent different genders.

The impact of opposite gender friendships in my life has been extraordinarily liberating.  Indeed, the impact of friendship between men and women can be lasting, deep, and positive in the lives of others as well.  The evangelicals that discourage, oppose, or attempt to dissolve cross-gender friendships have the capacity to truly damage the social life of someone who believes in their contra-Biblical nonsense.  When someone automatically discards an entire gender from their possible friend pool, they can shoot themselves in the leg socially, as well as fail to treat that gender as equals that they are.  It isn't difficult to grasp why.