Is it normal to experiment with your best friend

Or could be explained away by the fact that romantic cues are less subjective, or tend only to be picked up after you have a pretty good idea the other person is sexually interested in you. We subconsciously seek attractive friends in the first place, meaning romantic feelings are likely to develop Credit: Getty Images.

We subconsciously seek attractive friends in the first place, meaning romantic feelings are likely to develop because there is already something about our friend that we find enticing. How heterosexual men make friends with women, she says, looks very similar to how men date — they tend to gravitate towards people that they are physically and emotionally attracted to regardless of whether they act on it.

This mum is a friend who is attractive, tall and lean. She is married to someone small and my husband is tall, so naturally it plays on my mind. In the dream he is making her laugh.

She is everything that annoys me in terms of female rivalry. I wake up and hit him to tell him about the dream. Yet it comes at a price. The idea of rejection is not the reason that we rarely act on that attraction. People feel more regret for missed romantic opportunities than unsuccessful and embarrassing attempts to ask someone out. In one study, people were presented with various profiles of other daters and given feedback on their likelihood of success if they were to ask them out.

As a species, we are romantic risk-takers. Women tend to overpercieve the attractiveness of their close female friends, compared to strangers Credit: Getty Images. The effect is also seen in less secure individuals, like people with anxiety or low self-esteem, for whom rejection might be more painful than other people. The threat of having no one was even stronger. Their fear of rejection was stronger than most people, but so was the incentive to take the risk. Abbey emphasises that our attitudes to our friends can easily change.

The evolutionary theory for the origins of these behaviours offers a neat explanation, but as Abbey points out, if we want to challenge the traditional gender roles in dating we are better off looking at our actions and not our history. But it will certainly change our behaviour. William Park is williamhpark on Twitter. Join one million Future fans by liking us on Facebook , or follow us on Twitter or Instagram.

See what I mean? Mind, none of us has to have sex with a person of this gender or that to start to sort out our sexual orientation , because that's about more than just sex: it's also about who we are physically and emotionally attracted to, who we love, and where we feel most at home when it comes to our intimate relationships. I can know I like the smell of tomatoes, the look of tomatoes, the things tomatoes tend to go with before I actually eat one.

So, while sexual exploration isn't anything close to required for us to figure out sexual orientation and our whole sexuality, sexual exploration with partners is usually part of sussing out that puzzle in time. We live in a really homophobic and heterosexist culture, where it's considered pretty normal that heterosexual people will have varied opposite-sex experiences before they find particular partners and sexual activities that they like best.

Because we live in that culture, it's also often assumed that heterosexuality is a sort of default setting: that everyone really IS heterosexual, save a bunch of us who deviate from that norm. However, based on everything we know from the study of sexuality and sociology, that's a false assumption. Most folks will be somewhere in the middle, even if they have stronger attractions -- be they emotional or sexual -- to any one gender or biological sex, or even if they only choose to have partnerships with people of a different gender.

Figuring out how any one of us feels in terms of orientation often is something that takes a good deal of time and life experience, and to boot, who we like to be with, who we enjoy sex with, usually is about way more than just which set of gonads a person has.

If it was only about that, then heterosexual people, for instance, would be equally attracted to every single member of the opposite sex, and we all know that's just not the case. Who we want to be with, who we love, who we want to be sexual with is about a lot more factors than gender: it usually has to do with that person's personality, how they look, how they communicate, what about them is common with us and what is different, what they do, the dynamics we have between them and us, what we want at a given time, where we're at in our lives, the whole enchilada.

She was exotic to me. Nothing about her sharp blonde bob and stylish Scandi uniform felt familiar. Even her social life was unbelievably cool and unreachable, like something out of Gossip Girl. She approached me, which at the time seemed unbelievable, but after a few drinks we were whipping out our best stories trying to impress each other, laughing loudly at anything the other one said.

I questioned her motives that night but fast forward six years and countless straight relationships on both sides, we were firm friends. Best friends. My crush had never developed.

It was more that I wanted to be her, or at least be like her. Our friendship faltered after a drunken night out in which we spent most of the time flirting outrageously with other people. The conversation switched to experimentation. Had she ever slept with a women? Had I ever been tempted? Our answers both led us to the same resolve; we should have sex. In hindsight we probably should have laid down some rules, or at least spoken about what this meant for our friendship, but in that moment we were two grown women making a joint, consensual decision to challenge our sexuality.

A choice.