The question is as old as the tavern: can a man and a woman be just friends? The Spanish psychologist and couples therapist Antonio Bolinches gives the answer nobody wants to hear - they can, but on a condition that sounds almost insulting.

„As long as there is physical antipathy. As long as neither of them fancies the other enough,\" he says on the podcast „Lives Recounted\". In other words: the friendship stays clean right up until attraction walks into the room. The moment one of the two feels something stronger, the relationship gets complicated - and usually the one who felt it hides it best.

Bolinches introduces a term worth remembering: sublimated friendship. That is what forms when somebody has fallen in love, received a clear „I love you as a friend\", and instead of walking away - stays. Only they stay in a different role.

His description is uncomfortably precise: „I like a girl, but she tells me she only loves me as a friend. I have an internal dialogue and either give up seeing her so as not to get frustrated, or I keep spending time with her. I turn being in love into friendship and stay in reserve, because sometimes in moments of weakness a man gets access to that woman who feels rejected by another man.\"

That is a sentence that explains half of all the long-running „best friendships\" everyone around already knows everything about. It is not spite - Bolinches is not judging, he is describing a mechanism. But he is also describing a cost: the person waiting is not free, and the person being waited for usually does not know they are.

The psychologist adds another layer, and here it gets most interesting. Whether somebody accepts a sublimated friendship depends on how many options they feel they have. „If you have possibilities with many partners, you do not accept sublimated friendship,\" he says. The more doors you see open, the less time you will spend in front of one that is closed. When the options narrow, waiting starts to look reasonable.

But there is another side Bolinches does not deny: the fact that a relationship began with attraction does not mean nothing is left of it but calculation. There can be real care, trust and closeness that are worth something in themselves. The difference is not in how it started, but in what is expected now.

And there is the only question worth asking yourself if you are in that position. If you can accept that this person will not be your partner, be glad for their relationships and build your own life - the friendship can find its place. If you read every conversation, every break-up and every evening when she is vulnerable as a possible door - then it is not a friendship, it is a queue in which only one person knows they are standing.