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While generations of love stories have focused on romantic love between straight men and women, Apple TV+'s Platonic is a love story of another kind – the platonic kind. The show centres around Sylvia and Will, former besties who meet again in adulthood and strike up their platonic friendship again. Now in its second season, the show explores how something as rare as a platonic friendship between a man and a woman can send society spiralling.
In season 2, for instance, their friendship butts up against Will's romantic relationship with overbearing fiancée Jenna. Sylvia finds that Will is pulling back from their friendship. As she puts it, whenever Will is in a serious romantic relationship, “things get screwy” between them. Is Jenna jealous? Probably a little. Does Will feel awkward being so close to Sylvia while he's engaged to some else? Also possible. Whatever is going on here, it's an all-too common phenomenon – having a platonic friendship with a straight guy as a straight woman is hard – and it's even harder when that straight guy starts dating another woman. What do you do when your platonic guy friend enters his girlfriend era?
GLAMOUR sat down with Sarah Jessica, Nicole Ari Parker and Sarita Choudhury to talk season 3 of the Sex and the City reboot.
First, it's probably important to understand why we are, as a society, so uncomfortable with platonic friendships between straight men and women. For one thing, there's the fact that decades of films and TV shows have taught us that it's kind of impossible.
Platonic is not the only fictional work to explore platonic friendships between men and women, but it is one of the first to present it as a functional dynamic rather than a stepping stone on the route to a romantic happy ending. Just take When Harry Met Sally, which saw Billy Crystal's Harry trying to have a platonic friendship with Mg Ryan's Sally – except, of course, the pair were secretly in love the whole time, they just didn't know it. From the beginning of the film, Harry asserts that “men and women can't be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.” He adds, “no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.”
Countless friends-to-lovers arcs over the years back him up – Friends, 13 Going on 30, New Girl, Dawson's Creek, The Summer I Turned Pretty – each one features a platonic friendship that turns romantic.
It's no wonder we all feel a little iffy when a man and woman insist they're just friends — and it's no wonder Jenna feels a tad uncomfortable about Will's close friendship with Sylvia.
Platonic serves as a welcome reminder that it's high time we expanded our understanding of the scope of human relationships. Because Sylvia and Will have no sexual chemistry – and it's so refreshing to see. No, Billy Crystal, men don't simply walk around thinking about sleeping with their female friends. In fact, let's give them a little credit, men are very capable of having platonic female friends. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that a man who has platonic female friendships should be considered something of a green flag by potential partners.
The exciting new instalment will premiere in September.
In recent years, we've seen a surge of shows and discourse celebrating the power and importance of platonic female friendships. We have all suddenly realised the power of having a good friend group and, often, we refer to our female friendships as platonic love stories. Just take Sex and the City or Dolly Alderton's Everything I Know About Love. We can accept that it's possible to have a non-sexual love story with our female friends… so what's stopping us from having a love story with straight male friends?
Platonic is a great reminder that we should give time and space to all of our friendships – male or female – regardless of whether or not we're in a romantic relationship. And we should remind our guy friends to remind their girlfriends that something, things really are just platonic.
