FWB

A friend with benefits is something very commonly heard about today even though it has been around for a very long time. Maybe its from the recent big hit movies like Friends with Benefits or No Strings Attached but unarguably is very prevalent in todays society. I even once heard it being talking about over a decade ago on the hit TV show Seinfeld. But the real questions arouse if it is a good idea and if it really works and how many people take part in having a friend with benefits. 

In an article I read from psychology today that talked about friends with benefits started out with a statistic that about 60% of people have agreed that they had a friend with benefits at one point in their life. Some even more than just one single person. People have this idea that if you have friends with benefits you will automatically catch feelings for the person and a relationship will form, maybe for some people this is true and they catch feelings but only about 10-20% of FWB relationships will actually turn into long term committed relationships but even those 10-20% don’t last because the sex and physical aspects of the relationship will fizzle out. This happens because of how the relationship first started (unless it starts out as friends first) in most FWB relationships the friendship is based off sex and the physical things rather than a bond or an actual friendship. But what happens to the friendship once the sex is out and they are not compatible for each other anymore? Do they go back to being friends? Or does their friendship end with the FWB relationship? Well the article has a study on that to which shows that about only about 18% of FWB friendships actually end friendships along with it. More than half of them stay the same after and about 13% of them are even closer than they were before the FWB relationship.

From a college student point of view, I don’t see the big deal of having a FWB relationship with some guidelines so neither person gets hurt and also respecting the other persons health and safety and not taking advantage of one another. Especially in college where typically relationships don’t always last as long and most end after graduating. Even though I know some can start from high school and last forever, typically they don’t and there are many obstacles that stand in the way of that idea of forever. College is about having the time of your life before you get into the real world…