Depending on your generation, “Friends With Benefits” is not such an outrageous concept.
The depth of each friendship is completely up to the individuals involved.
In her book called “Are You the One for Me?”, Barbara De Angelis (Ph.D) reasons that love and compatibility are separate entities. She suggests that without at least 60-80% compatibility a [monogamous] relationship is not a good one – even if there is truck loads of love. She guides her readers through developing their own compatibility checklists – the boxes to be ticked based on a completely not-shallow holistic view of our needs.
Many of us have developed checklists that are unlikely to be met … by any one person in the communities we find ourselves living in. And, as a result, we choose not to “take ourselves off the market” and try to be happy alone whilst we wait for Mr/Ms right.
This is generally a less than satisfactory situation, you don’t have to dig deep to find research about how much loneliness and feeling disconnected contributes to unhappiness. Maslow rates intimacy and sex as fundamental human needs to be met before we each have any hope of achieving self-actualisation (an enlightened state of being).
Imagine the spring in your step if all your boxes could be ticked – even if you needed to be close to more than one person to feel really special and connected in the world.