I’m sure we’ve all been there. Your boyfriend casually drops the name of his “work wife” into conversation. There’s the girl he’s been friends with since pre-school. The girls he still follows from dating apps because they “stayed in touch”. The girl he met online who he now Snapchats every day, apparently to “check in”.
And apparently, we’re all supposed to be completely normal about this.
Now, I will admit that sometimes these dynamics are genuinely, completely platonic. I know. I’ve heard the stories. Men and women can be friends. But if we cut the shit for a second, if my man is suddenly maintaining a thriving female friendship outside of the childhood/school-friend category, I’m immediately suspicious.
And, annoyingly, the research doesn’t make the answer any cleaner. A 2024 study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found that mate preferences can intersect with friendship attraction. In other words, friendship and attraction aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive; they can coexist.
That doesn’t mean every man secretly wants to sleep with his female friends. Obviously. But it does make the idea that friendship and attraction exist in completely separate psychological boxes feel a little optimistic.
Because what exactly are we doing here?
She’s either:
1.) A girl he tried to pursue and failed.
2.) A girl he did pursue, but has strategically kept in reserve should he ever fancy rekindling things.
3.) Or, and this is my personal favourite, the girl he swears is “just a friend”, despite knowing she’s secretly in love with him, because apparently having a woman orbiting around him and laughing at jokes that frankly didn’t warrant it is essential to his emotional well-being.
Maybe I’m cynical. Maybe I’m jealous. Maybe I have trust issues.
All of these conclusions are possible.
Or maybe I’ve just spent enough time listening to men describe women they have history with as “basically like a sister” to know that sentence should be treated as a small but extremely important red flag.
Once upon a time, being friends meant actually being friends.
Knocking on each other’s doors asking if your friend can come out to play. Putting on elaborate, West End-level performances of Let It Go to secure a sleepover.
Now it can mean daily Snapchat selfies, 2am Instagram DMs, private stories, “accidental” likes from three years ago and sending each other TikToks all day.
And this isn’t just a generational shift in how we communicate. Social media has fundamentally changed how easily intimacy can be maintained outside of a relationship. A 2025 study published in The Family Journal, examining 765 people in relationships, found associations between problematic social-media use, infidelity-related behaviours and relationship dissatisfaction. Researchers also highlighted how social platforms can facilitate both existing relationships and new virtual connections.
Because social media didn’t invent cheating. It just removed a lot of the logistical inconvenience.
You don’t need to meet someone at the work Christmas party anymore. You can send them a suggestive Snapchat from the comfort of your own bed.
So where exactly does friendship end and emotional cheating begin?
And, more importantly, why does the algorithm always seem to know before the girlfriend does?
But social media isn’t necessarily the villain here. A 2024 study by Murikkattu et al. explored how individuals use social media to maintain long-distance relationships and found that digital communication could support communication and relationship satisfaction. Similarly, Devasia, Rodriguez, Tuttle, and Kientz (2025) found that long-distance couples used digital games to create shared experiences, express affection, and build intimacy despite geographical distance.
Perhaps technological developments didn’t cause the extinction event of romance. Maybe it’s how we use them.
Social media is essentially a surveillance system anyone can access: a kind of transparent shield where, safely behind a screen, we feel removed from the messiness of real-life relationships. Except the barrier doesn’t really conceal anything. If anything, it gives our insecurities more room to run wild. A partner’s new follower becomes a potential threat; a new notification becomes evidence. Suddenly, the very platform designed to keep us connected becomes a breeding ground for jealousy, mistrust and miscommunication.
And research is beginning to reflect that.
A 2025 longitudinal study by Sarafina Métellus, Marie-Pier Vaillancourt-Morel, Audrey Brassard and Marie-Ève Daspe, published in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, followed 322 young adults in relationships over two years and found that social-media jealousy was associated with increased electronic partner surveillance and lower relationship satisfaction one year later.
Perhaps, then, social media isn’t inherently toxic to romance. It’s simply a very powerful tool, and as Stan Lee famously put it, “with great power comes great responsibility”.
Maybe the question isn’t whether they have friends of the opposite sex in the first place; maybe it’s what kind of friend they are.
Is there sexual history?
Do they delete their messages?
Does the “friendship” require secrecy?
As a woman, I’ve experienced firsthand the accusations of being “psychotic” for simply asking for a little context around a boyfriend’s female friends. I can’t speak for every woman, but I do think men can be quick to interpret these questions as an attack, becoming defensive and blaming them on female insecurity.
And yet, I can’t count the number of times it has eventually emerged that he has been intimate with her in the past, their conversations are considerably flirtier than he initially let on, or they’ve “given things a go, but it didn’t work out”, which, occasionally, seems to mean she rejected him and he’s been patiently waiting for round two.
Your boyfriend could have a female friend he genuinely has no sexual attraction to. But if she has made her intentions clear and he still maintains the friendship partly to feed his own appetite for validation, I would argue this, too, can become a form of emotional cheating.
If you trust your boyfriend, it might be worth asking why every female friend he has seems to become the problem. Sometimes the issue isn’t the friendship itself, but the behaviour and secrecy around it. Women have been socialised to recognise certain behaviours that men might dismiss as harmless, and the “insecure girlfriend” archetype has been used for years to make women fearful of being labelled “crazy” for questioning them.
This is where my foolproof test comes in. I call this the “Would he be okay if I did it?” test.
The premise is simple: the easiest way to test whether something is genuinely innocent is to imagine doing exactly the same thing to him.
Now, I’m not encouraging anyone to play mind games in a relationship. It’s not a scoreboard. It’s simply a way of seeing how he would feel if you behaved exactly how he did.
If you had a male friend you used to sleep with and messaged daily, would he call it harmless?
If your male friends commented fire emojis under your latest Instagram selfie, would that be acceptable?
If you liked a shirtless gym selfie of his friend, would he find that disrespectful?
The issue isn’t necessarily having opposite-sex friends, but whether the same boundaries apply both ways.
Maybe when he experiences what it feels like on the other end, he’ll stop labelling you “insecure” and realise he’s actually just being a shitty boyfriend who can’t enforce healthy and respectful boundaries.
Shocker.
But women aren’t always as insecure as we’re made to believe. A 2024 meta-analysis of 716 studies by Vera Hampel, Mary Hausfeld and Jochen I. Menges found that women tended to perform better than men in other-focused emotional abilities. Therefore, what gets dismissed as female “irrationality” can sometimes be heightened sensitivity to the emotional dynamics happening around us.
Maybe “female intuition” isn’t so mystical after all. Maybe it’s simply a woman noticing a shift in her relationship that her partner hasn’t been able, or willing, to communicate.
The problem with social media is that it has enabled everyone to take on the role of a detective. We don’t necessarily trust our instincts anymore; we investigate them.
Privacy vs Secrecy
I believe everyone is entitled to privacy within a relationship. You don’t have to share every passing thought with your partner, have a tracking app on your phone so they know exactly where you are at all times, or give them access to your bank account and spending habits.
Obviously, this is unhealthy. I also threw the last two in there because I don’t want my potential partner knowing how many times I visited the shop for sweet treats or how many autumnal-themed kitchen towels I bought.
That’s my business, and no one else accepts my overdraft.
You don’t need access to your partner’s phone to have trust.
However, deliberately hiding conversations, deleting messages, muting notifications or refusing to acknowledge a friendship can change the context.
There’s a difference between “I don’t want you reading my private messages” and “You can’t know who I’m talking to.”
And that brings us to an important point: trust doesn’t mean a lack of boundaries.
You can’t create trust by having access to every part of your partner’s life and convincing yourself that, because you can see everything, they therefore can’t hide anything. That’s not necessarily trust; that’s surveillance with a cute little relationship bow wrapped around it.
Trust requires some unknowns. But healthy boundaries can make those unknowns feel less vulnerable and daunting. You don’t need to know everything your partner does to trust that what they are doing respects the relationship.
Managing intimacy while juggling a global pool of potential connections feels overwhelming, but maybe the ultimate act of intimacy isn’t about having fewer connections. It’s about knowing which ones deserve boundaries.
Because maybe she really is “just a friend”. The question is whether he treats her like one.
Sources
Campbell, K., Meagher, B. R., Goetz, C. D. & Vaitayavijit, N. (2024). “Mate Preference Dissimilarity Predicts Friendship Attraction at Zero-Acquaintance for Men, Not Women.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 41(7), 2023–2031.
Abbasi, I. S. & Dibble, J. L. (2025). “Social Media Addiction, Infidelity-Related Behaviors, and Relationship Satisfaction: Statistical Moderation Requires Careful Interpretation.” The Family Journal.
Murikkattu, N. E., Shah, D., Singh, N., Bhatia, M. S. & Sinha, A. (2024). “The Experiences of Individuals in Maintaining a Long-Distance Relationship Through Social Media.” World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews, 23(2), 2736–2743.
Devasia, N., Rodriguez, A., Tuttle, L. & Kientz, J. (2025). “Partnership Through Play: Investigating How Long-Distance Couples Use Digital Games to Facilitate Intimacy.”
Métellus, S., Vaillancourt-Morel, M.-P., Brassard, A. & Daspe, M.-È. (2025). “Attachment Anxiety and Relationship Satisfaction in the Digital Era: The Contribution of Social Media Jealousy and Electronic Partner Surveillance.” Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 51(4).
Hampel, V., Hausfeld, M. & Menges, J. I. (2024). “Is Dealing with Emotions a Women’s Skill? A Meta-Analysis of Gender and Emotional Intelligence.” Academy of Management Proceedings.