Lifestyle
Can straight married men and women be friends? I went on a quest to find out
Last fall I met a guy.
He had a thick mustache and was, by my estimate, at least 10 years my junior. We happened to sit next to each other at a dinner event at my social club. I’d recently watched “Wild Wild Country,” a documentary series on a religious cult, and it was all I wanted to talk about. It turned out that he loved documentaries on religious cults too. Soon he was listing others I needed to see. We ended up discussing movies, Buddhism and his home state of Vermont for most of the night. He was funny, enthusiastic, friendly and smart. I felt lucky to have met him.
When the event wrapped up I thought about asking for his number — maybe we could get a drink sometime? But I decided against it. If he’d been a woman or gay I wouldn’t have hesitated, but we are both in committed heterosexual relationships. I in a fulfilling marriage with my awesome husband, he in what seemed like a happy relationship with his girlfriend. I didn’t want to date him, I just wanted to hang out again. But for two people in our situation, is pursuing an independent friendship even allowed?
I’ve always thought of myself as someone who seeks out male and female friends equally, but now that I’m a married mother in my 40s it seems this is no longer the case. In the last decade I’ve befriended hetero and queer women, gay men and non-binary folks. But with a few caveats, I haven’t developed new friendships with straight guys. Had I unconsciously accepted the old adage from “When Harry Met Sally” that men and women can’t be friends because “the sex part always gets in the way”?
After my encounter with the fellow religious cult documentary fan, I began to wonder how I got here and if I was the only married woman who felt this way. Was this evidence of my age, or an instinct that spanned generations? Surely our understanding of relationships has evolved since Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in Katz’s Deli.
After talking with friends and strangers, therapists and a few professors, I’ve found that the answers to my questions vary wildly, depending on who you ask. And also: there is far more at play within platonic relationships than I’d ever thought.
“It’s different for everyone,” said Gaea Woods, a marriage and family therapist who practices in Los Feliz. “It’s up to you to decide based on the relationship if it’s appropriate or not.”
Despite the impact that social connection has on our well-being, research on adult friendships is scant, and even harder to come by when considering friendships between men and women.
“We focused so long on romantic relationships to the exclusion of other relationships that we simply don’t have basic data,” said Jaimie Krems, a social psychologist at UCLA and director of the university’s new Center for Friendship Research.
The few studies that do exist tend to look at male and female friends in their late teens and early 20s when researchers say opposite sex friendships are more common. But in my quest for answers, I did manage to find a study from 2012 published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationship that included a survey of older adults in their 30s and 40s who were asked to list the benefits and challenges of having a friend of the opposite sex.
Overall, people in the study reported more pros than cons. They valued the conversation, emotional support, advice and especially the insights into how members of another gender think, but they also acknowledged significant challenges. Chief among them were navigating the jealousy of a romantic partner and the possibility that the friendship could lead to romantic feelings.
I know from my own life experience that these hurdles can be overcome. I’ve had several platonic male friendships over the years and they’ve never veered into dicey territory. My husband is also remarkably OK with these relationships and has female friends of his own. (Though, speaking with friends and acquaintances, I know this isn’t true for everyone). Even so, my current straight male pals are either friends from my youth or people I’ve met through work. Forging new platonic relationships with straight men outside of these categories feels more fraught.
When I told Krems about my discomfort, she suggested it may be because I’m uncertain about how my overtures of friendship will be received by straight men who I’ve just met. It’s less complicated with old friends, she explained, because those friendships are clearly defined as platonic.
“That relationship has a script already,” she said. “You know what it is and you aren’t negotiating what it could be.”
The same is often true for work friends.
“You have this very tight, well worn schema that we are adult colleagues who are going out to talk,” she said.
But with a new friend of a different sex, the parameters of the relationship have not yet been established. If I suggest going out for a drink, a guy who doesn’t know much about me yet might assume my intentions are romantic. Or even worse, his wife or girlfriend might.
“You don’t know what the great benefits are going to be of the friendship — maybe you guys have chemistry and can be best friends, but immediately the road blocks are apparent,” Krems said.
When I held an informal poll of women in my community, some said they have deliberately eliminated friendships with straight men from their lives.
Anja Ahkile, a doula and mother of three young girls who lives in Beverlywood said most of her romantic relationships started as friendships — including her relationship with her husband. (They were in the friend zone for a year before they got together.) Because of that she’s developed strict boundaries around her interactions with men. When she and her husband go out with another hetero couple she’ll shake the male partner’s hand rather than offering a hug, and she’s always careful to greet the woman first. She’s also told her husband she’s not comfortable with him developing close friendships with women.
“I could be friends with someone of the opposite sex, but what happens when me and my husband are in a rough patch and there’s this other dude who is easy going and we have a bond?” she said. “There is too much potential and fertile soil for the lines to get blurred.”
Akhile says she loves her husband, but she also acknowledges that there are other men in the world who she could have fun with. Falling for one of them is a risk she doesn’t want to take.
“I don’t want to ruin my marriage, especially when overall I’m happy in my marriage,” she said.
Like Akhile, I’m in a fulfilling marriage and certainly don’t want to risk messing it up. But is total abstinence from male friendship really necessary? The friendship researchers I spoke to say they don’t yet have enough data to draw conclusions.
“We know that most friendships across cultures and across eras have really been within sex, making mixed sex friendships a little less normative,” Krems said.
There is also some evidence that opposite sex relationships become more challenging as we age. April Bleske-Rechek, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and lead author of the 2012 study that looked at the pros and cons of opposite sex friendships said there is a difference between the dynamics of having a friend of another sex in early adulthood, when we are more likely to be seeking a romantic partner, and later in life when we are more likely to be in partnerships we don’t want to jeopardize.
“As people get older they are more likely to settle down with somebody and more likely to have kids, so the nature of their friendships changes,” Bleske-Rechek said. “Women in particular tend to make mom friends, and it’s just safer to go out with other couples.”
But then there’s Kendra Schussel, an environmental consultant in Burbank, and one of the few women I talked to who had developed an independent friendship with a straight married guy while in her 40s.
They started chatting while picking their kids up from an after school theater program and hit it off. The kids liked each other and the guy wasn’t working at the time, so he was able to do all the extra-curricular activities that his partner couldn’t. Over time they discovered that they both liked raunchy fart jokes and whiskey. Soon they were texting regularly. When Schussel started dating again after her divorce she talked to him about the men she was going out with. Eventually, Schussel became good friends with his wife, too.
“She never indicated to me directly or indirectly that it was a problem for her and she’s a therapist so I think she would have said something,” Schussel said. “I realize this is wildly unusual and I’m so grateful for this friendship.”
Schussel is proof that hetero opposite sex relationships are possible, but she has boundaries too. She’s touchy-feely with her female friends — linking arms, sitting close — but she doesn’t do that with her married male friends. She’s also promised herself that if she thinks she might want more from a friendship with a married man she has to end it.
“I trust myself,” she said. “I would never want to be the person who broke up a marriage or got in the way of someone else’s relationship.”
As for me, I’ve decided that while I really liked my dinner companion from the other night, I’m not going to pursue an independent friendship with him. Like Schussel, I’m confident I can keep the friendship platonic, but I don’t want to make him feel awkward by asking for his number, and I certainly don’t want to make his girlfriend suspicious that I have ulterior motives, especially when I liked her so much too.
Maybe if he and I had met in college or at a work event we would be great friends. But for now, I’ll just enjoy seeing him — and his girlfriend — together at my local social club.
She likes religious documentaries too.
Rose Byrne poses at a 2025 press conference in Berlin for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
Andreas Rentz/Getty Images Europe
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Andreas Rentz/Getty Images Europe
Rose Byrne is one of the few actors to receive both an Oscar and a Tony nomination in the same year — the former for the film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and the latter for Fallen Angels on Broadway.
If I Had Legs was an intense indie film about a mother falling apart as she struggles to keep up with ever-increasing caregiving demands for her ill daughter. Byrne, who previously starred in blockbuster comedies like Neighbors and Bridesmaids, was praised for showing her range. Now, she’s returning to comedy in the revival of Noël Coward’s 1925 play about two wealthy women who find out a man they were each previously involved with is coming to town.
Kelli O’Hara, Mark Consuelos and Rose Byrne star in the Broadway revival of Fallen Angels.
Joan Marcus/Polk & Co.
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Joan Marcus/Polk & Co.
“I had long wanted to do a true comedic piece onstage, like it’s one of my dreams,” Byrne says of Fallen Angels. “We are trying to reach the back row, so physically, … I felt like I was screaming when I first got up [there], because we’re not wearing mics either.”
Byrne’s Fallen Angels character gets progressively drunk — and increasingly loud — throughout the play. She credits Coward’s “brilliant” writing and stage directions with guiding her performance.
“The language he used, the sort of linguistic gymnastics and the extraordinary vocabulary of Noël Coward is a delight,” she says. “I never tire of sitting backstage and I’m constantly rediscovering the words that he peppers throughout.”
Interview highlights
On her role in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Mary Bronstein wrote this incendiary screenplay and I just did not want to mess it up. It was such a creative opportunity. … We hit it off and had a real experience, one of those experiences in life that, creatively, has kind of changed me.
[The film] defies generalization or description, because it’s sort of like a fever dream, in a way. It has gallows humor in there. There’s horror tropes in the film, too. I think Mary Bronstein [who also directed the film] really broke the mold with the tone of the film, in many ways. She … tapped into the monster within and the fear of being a parent and the horror of being a parent, and some of the joy too, but obviously she’s in a really extraordinarily difficult situation, this woman. I still can’t believe the film got as far as it did, just because it was a small independent film.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You was a small independent movie, says Byrne, “I still can’t believe the film got as far as it did.”
A24
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A24
On the constant beeping of medical equipment in the background of If I Had Legs
These noises get magnified and actually Mary Bronstein made those louder, just a bit, like the clock on the wall, the beeping of the machine, all those things were louder because they are in [the main character’s] point of view. And it is as a parent, those things become overstimulating. It’s relentless and, [Bronstein] wanted to capture that claustrophobia.
On why viewers don’t get to see the daughter or know what her illness is
The conceit of not seeing the daughter, and Mary has spoken to this many times, but [it’s] sort of a two-prong thing in that I don’t think Linda, my character, can see her daughter at this point. She’s so drowning and beginning this real descent into her mental health crisis. … Also for the audience to have that choice taken away to not see the daughter, you’re forced to reckon with the mother. Because as soon as you put a child on screen, your empathy, as it should, goes to the child. They’re so vulnerable, and immediately your concern will go to them, and so she takes that choice away from the viewer. So you are forced to be in the perspective of the mother.
On parenting after spending the day on set
Kids are so in-the-moment and grounding and — in the best way — they’re not particularly interested if you’ve had a hard day. But it’s so wonderful because you immediately snap into your role as mom, the greatest role, the most challenging, the most fun. And so for me, it’s church and state … leave it at work. I mean, obviously there were days when I was more exhausted or tired or [it’s] harder to let things go. But children are the great equalizer, as a parent.
On the thrill of filming the 2011 film Bridesmaids
We had such a fun time. It was a great group of actresses. I couldn’t believe I was there. … It’s already extraordinary to have that many scenes with just women. I’ve had that once since then when I did Mrs. America , [a] show for FX about the second wave of feminism. … But this was really, really special. And we had no idea that it would go on to become such a beloved movie and all of that. But the shooting of it was wonderful. It was an education in the brilliance of these comedic actresses and the performances. … It changed my life in so many ways. It really did. … The improv stuff, it’s just like a skillset that is still I marvel … they make it look effortless.
Therese Madden and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Anna Katherine Scanlon was having sushi in Marina Del Rey when she received an urgent text from her best friend.
“Just saw another place that was awful.”
Scanlon’s best friend, who was moving back to L.A. from Texas, had been apartment hunting for over a month and her moving deadline was creeping up.
In between bites of salmon nigiri, Scanlon began scrolling through apartment listings on her phone and came across a 1920s studio apartment in Los Feliz that she knew her best friend would swoon over.
“I sent it to her and was like ‘This is fabulous,’” she says. “I’m going to tour it immediately.”
Scanlon, an L.A.-based filmmaker who also works at a nonprofit, hopped into her car to see the rental, which had Art Deco tile, beautiful natural light, lots of storage and a stunning view of Griffith Observatory — a “rare find” for $1,900 in the sought-after neighborhood, Scanlon says. She sent a detailed video tour to her best friend, who applied instantly and signed the lease a few days later.
On the drive home, Scanlon, 33, had a light bulb moment: “What I love doing is something most people find totally overwhelming and exhausting,” she says. She could turn her knack for apartment hunting into something more.
So after finding apartments for several other friends (not to mention a dreamy 1927 storybook apartment in Echo Park for herself) and building a following on TikTok by posting apartment tours, Scanlon launched an apartment scouting business, LA Apartment Scout. She helps her busy clients find historic, characterful homes in L.A. within their budget.
She’s part of a rising group of apartment scouts — not licensed real estate agents, but savvy entrepreneurs who tour apartments, share videos on social media and, in some cases, work one-on-one with clients to find a place that fits their specific aesthetic and budget.
Unlike brokers — licensed professionals who act as intermediaries between landlords and tenants, commonly used in the apartment-hunting process in places like New York City, Boston and Austin, Texas, scouts operate outside the formal housing system. They aren’t connected to property owners and they don’t handle applications or negotiations. Instead, they act as digital lookouts who hunt for coveted vintage apartments that are otherwise hard to find without expertise.
The demand for apartment scouts highlights the pressures of L.A.’s competitive rental market, where vacancy is scarce and rental rates are among the highest in the country. According to Apartments.com, average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in L.A. was $2,182 as of May, which is 33% higher than the national average rent price of $1,642.
“To some extent, it reflects a dysfunctional housing market,” said Richard Kent Green, director of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate. “It’s very hard for people to search and find what they’re looking for at the price they’re looking for, unlike many markets where it’s pretty straightforward.”
Apartment-scouting services tend to be especially appealing to younger Angelenos who feel priced out of homeownership, but still want spaces that reflect their personalities and tastes, rather than the increasingly common standard modern unit.
“There are tons of people who want to live in a home that reflects the character of the city, the beauty, glamour and drama, that is creatively inspiring or just cozy, unique, has character— not gray laminate floors,” Scanlon says.
Those seeking a scout might also be living out of town or simply too busy to endlessly search rental listing sites, Craigslist, Reddit and Facebook Marketplace, and then tour properties. One of Scanlon’s clients turned to her for help because they were finishing their PhD while getting ready for a new job at NASA.
Scanlon’s personalized services begin with a consultation call to understand the client’s needs, then she curates a list of apartments, tours the ones they love and provides videos of the space and the surrounding area. Scanlon says she works similarly to a local expert guide and relocation assistant. Since the apartment scout market is newer in Los Angeles, finding rates up front can be difficult (Scanlon did not wish to disclose her fees).
Indya Stewart, an interior designer and apartment scout, inside of a home.
(Gus Acord)
Indya Stewart, 24, of Hollywood is another L.A. apartment scout. In late April, the interior designer shared an eight-second TikTok with the words “hidden talent: finding chateau style apartments in L.A. for prices that feel illegal” and told people to contact her if they need help finding a place of their own.
“Omg pls put me on,” one person commented with an emoji crying face.
“Moving in the fall and I neeeeeed u,” another person said.
“Hmmm yes moving to LA in a month and can only live in a fairy castle sos,” commented another.
After receiving a flood of messages from people, she decided that instead of responding to each person individually, she would share her apartment picks on her interior design website. The list is free and is separated by region.
Unlike Scanlon, Stewart doesn’t tour apartments for people, rather she provides a curated list of vintage apartments for people to browse on their own.
“I spend so much of my free time looking for these places because I genuinely love the process,” says Stewart, who lives in a 1920s-style townhouse in Hollywood. “Sharing them just feels natural.”
Miesha Gantz of East Hollywood pivoted from dance to real esate.
(From Miesha Gantz)
While many apartment scouts do the work as an independent side gig, some like Miesha Gantz of East Hollywood are beginning to cross over into the formal real estate industry.
After stepping away from her professional dance career due to a massive pay cut, Gantz set out to find a more affordable apartment. Her criteria was specific: A 1920s or 1930s Spanish-style studio with oversize windows, lots of natural light, a fireplace, hardwood floors and character-rich tile work.
She began posting videos of her apartment-hunting journey on TikTok and before long people were asking her for help. Soon after, Gantz, who has a background in real estate, launched a membership-based website called the Hollywood Waitlist, where she posts listings of charming, vintage studios and one-bedroom apartments primarily based in Hollywood. She updates the website weekly with homes that are mostly under $2,500 per month. People can access the website for $6 for one week and $12 for one month.
As her social media and website gained traction, Gantz got connected with the Rental Girl, a boutique real estate brokerage based in L.A. and decided to reinstate her real estate license. She recently started working for the company’s concierge team, helping clients in a way that’s similar to her previous work as an apartment scout. However, the main difference is that she can now work directly with clients throughout the entire application process and help them secure the home.
Although finding the rental market is extremely competitive in L.A., these apartment scouts often foster a sense of community online. In TikTok comments, it’s common for people to offer tips from their own apartment-hunting experiences, sharing whether street parking is actually feasible in a particular neighborhood, if a building has a pest issue or if a listing agent was rude to them.
“When people know better, they do better,” says Gantz, who is also a filmmaker.
It’s worth noting that scams do exist in the world of rentals, so exercise caution when using social media. As demand for apartment scouts grows, Scanlon says she hopes others get involved, tackling different niches and neighborhoods.
“I don’t feel protective of it at all,” she says. “I’d love to see more people doing this.”
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Monday May 18, 2026.
Scott Kowalchyk/CBS Broadcasting Inc.
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Scott Kowalchyk/CBS Broadcasting Inc.
The Late Show With Stephen Colbert comes to an end this week amid a lot of changes in the business and the country. Some of the sources of tension include the economics of late night, the approaching merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers, and President Donald Trump’s constant criticism of late-night hosts. But for Colbert’s fans, it’s the end of a friendly, funny, candid show. So we’re talking about the legacy of Stephen Colbert in late night.
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