In the past three years, I have noticed more people around me become more accepting of my friendships with women, which comprise all of my deepest relationships [1]. At the same time, I have noticed that similar friendships are, at last, becoming more entrenched in Western culture in general. It is becoming increasingly common for men and women to interact without the anxieties instilled by complementarian ideas of either secular or perverted religious origin. My generation might be the one to, as a whole, totally discard the social factors that have suffocated and discouraged male-female friendships in America for so long. Despite this progress, there are enough complementarian ideas still ingrained in American society to condition some to perceive friendships between men and women as unnatural, dangerous, or impossible to preserve.
These friendships, if they exist against the backdrop of sexist social expectations, possess a beauty that same gender friendships cannot. Every man and woman who commit to a non-romantic relationship with each other (in such a societal context) must defy ignorant traditions, and this allows them the opportunity to blatantly live out the most foundational elements of egalitarianism. Men and women who share intimate friendships acknowledge the other as an equal worthy of a significant emotional connection. For Christians, these relationships provide the supreme affirmation of the fact that God intentionally made both men and women in his image.
Thus, each friendship between men and women openly spits on the face of harmful and fallacious ideas that have segregated the two genders for centuries--if not physically, then emotionally and relationally. Each one of them is ultimately an expression of the truths of egalitarianism, even if the friends involved in them do not recognize this aspect. This is why cross-gender friendships have a special significance in certain cultural contexts. There is nothing counter-cultural about someone having a friendship with another person of the same gender; however, friendships with the opposite gender communicate a great deal about one's worldview from a distance. Their very existence threatens ideological structures that stand upon sexism, and this is no small power.
Social norms that discourage friendship between men and women are utterly antithetical to everything about rationality and Christianity. Logic obliterates the arguments for these norms, exposing them as the destructive forces that they are. They have perverted numerous relationships and thwarted many others. Conservative Christians who enforce them have exchanged reason for error and Biblical morality (Deuteronomy 4:2, Romans 7:7) for the human constructs so viciously condemned by Jesus, placing them among the Pharisees [2] of the modern church landscape (Matthew 15:3-9).
Humans are social beings (Genesis 2:18), and even evangelical legalists will admit this. Avoiding friendships with the opposite gender has the devastating effect of restricting one's pool of possible friends to a far smaller number on the basis of nothing but that one has a different bodily structure and different physiological functions! If one argued against friendships between people of different ethnicities, the evangelical world would revolt in outrage; substitute gender for race, and their cognitive dissonance is set on full display. They are just as inconsistent and incompetent in this area of their worldview as they so often are in others.
May my generation be the one that not only fully sheds this sexist, unbiblical nonsense, but one that also embraces the "normalization" of these friendships! Already I see signs suggesting that this will be true of my generation, and, in light of this, egalitarians should do their best to contribute towards the reshaping of the social world so that this comes about.
[1]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-impact-of-cross-gender-friendship.html
[2]. Here I use the word "Pharisee" in the more colloquial Christian sense, referring to someone who ignores the actual commands of the Bible in favor of clinging to extra-Biblical preferences.
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