The online survey “Friendship Between Men and Women” (April 2015, N=133) shows that for most participants, friendship is first and foremost a moral category—and only then a relationship. When they say “friend,” respondents most often mean trust, sincerity, loyalty, support, and a willingness to be there “in good times and bad.” Across dozens of answers, the same idea repeats: a friend is someone you can confide a secret in, someone you can count on without reservation, and someone who remains available “at any time of the day or night.” In short, friendship is defined through a sense of security, not through entertainment.
But how many such people do we have? Asked how many people they can say are their friends, the median is 3, and the most common answer is 2. The average is 6.89, but it is pushed upward by extremes (some individuals report 50 or 100 friends), suggesting that most actually rely on a small circle—while a segment of respondents understands friendship more broadly, almost as a social network.
The key finding of the survey is clear: 83.46% of respondents say they have a friend of the opposite sex, and 80.45% believe in friendship between men and women. A total of 13.53% do not believe in it, while 6.02% have no opinion. In other words, the idea of male–female friendship in this online population is not an “exception,” but the dominant norm.
How do these friendships form? The most common answers are: “by chance,” “spontaneously,” “at school,” “from childhood,” “at work,” “at university.” In other words, most often through everyday contact and shared growing up or working together—not through a “plan” or special circumstances. Friendship, it seems, emerges where people have long seen each other as persons, not as roles.
Still, open-ended answers reveal the main dilemma: sexual attraction and the possibility that “someone might misunderstand” the relationship. Even among those who believe in friendship, a condition often appears: it is possible “if there is no attraction,” “if clear boundaries are set,” “rare, but it exists.” Interestingly, explanations also include the claim that male friendships are “more loyal” or “simpler,” while female friendships are sometimes described as burdened by rivalry—pointing to gender stereotypes that still shape experiences of closeness.
The sample is predominantly female (65.41%), with a median age of 34 and an average of around 36. Regionally, most respondents are from Belgrade (23.31%) and Bačka (21.05%). Two comments beneath the survey further reinforce the “pro” narrative: a friend of the opposite sex can also be a married best man, a pillar of support, and “unconditional backing.”
Survey conclusion: most believe friendship has no gender—but it does have rules. And the most important rule, it seems, is not romance, but trust.
Methodological note: the results were obtained through an online survey conducted on 8 April 2015 on the Onlineistrazivanja platform (tvojstav.com), on a sample of N=133 participants who chose to take part (self-selection). For that reason, the sample is not representative of Serbia’s population and the findings cannot be generalised to all citizens; they describe the views of active internet users who at that moment were motivated to respond. Some questions were open-ended, so the cited formulations are indicative (qualitative insight), while the percentages reflect the distribution of responses within this sample.