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?

Paul Sarkis

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.”