In early December, two young independent filmmakers posted a YouTube video of Utah State University students answering the question: "Can men and women be just friends?" The video went viral.

The responses of the approximately dozen students were universal: The women said, "Of course!" and the men a simple, "No." The men's reasoning for such a response, in short, was that attraction will always be there. It's the age-old argument made in the 1989 Meg Ryan, Billy Crystal film, When Harry Met Sally.

Of course, you can't believe everything that comes out of Hollywood, and even a supposedly honest independent filmmaker has enough editing skills to tailor a three-minute clip to his hypothesis. Still, a fascination with this question remains. Could Harry have been right all this time? Men and woman really can't be just friends?

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C.S. Lewis, in his book Four Loves, argued that friendship is the "least natural" of loves. "Without Eros [romantic love] none of us would be begotten," he wrote, "and without Affection, none of us would have been reared; but we can live and breed without friendship."  But life is so much fuller with friends; with those we share interests and hobbies. And that is precisely what friendship is, Lewis argued, the shared interests and passions.

So then can men and women not have the same interests or goals? Of course they can. And many contend that men and women have a lot to learn from one another about the pursuit of interests, passions, and even careers. A female friend of mine put it aptly: "To not have friends of the opposite gender means missing out on half of life-how sad, unbalanced and unnecessary."

The other half of the question still remains to be addressed: Will sexual attraction always lurk below the surface of friendship?

Lewis said that friendships of the opposite gender very easily pass into Erotic (romantic) love. "Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other," he wrote, "or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later."

This is quite good, as we need romantic love to breed, and friendship often provides a great foundation to strong romantic love.

College, which used to be the place many young people met their spouses, no longer boasts the healthy dating culture the 1940s and 50s provided, according to many college students involved in the movement to restore a marriage culture.  Dating, they say, has been replaced by the two extremes of hooking up or just hanging out.

For many youth today, hooking up is not a romantic quest so much as it is a pleasure-seeking quest. Merely hanging out is fine, they say, but how does one discern mutual attraction and the potential for friendships to become romantic? With dating scripts not as simple as in generations past, perhaps the answer lies in the fact that men and women will naturally desire friendship with those to whom they are attracted.

This, obviously, does not mean that every friendship between opposite genders will end in romance. And it also shouldn't mean that every friendship between opposite genders should be pursued for the sake of romance. Rather, friendship, whether it be between a man and a woman, or two parties of the same gender, should be pursued for the good it is, which is the chance to care for another.

But if a man and woman who are friends find that their friendship turns into romantic love, how all the better it will be for them, to know they are both friends and lovers.

Meg McDonnell is a Phillips Foundation Robert Novak Journalism Fellow working on a project about young Americans and marriage trends. 

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