Amy Mantravadi and Rachel Miller have both written excellent, very detailed reviews of this book. I commend them both to you.
I was excited to be a part of the launch team for Aimee Byrd’s newest book. As I’ve written in the past, I have enjoyed the Mortification of Spin podcast for several years, and one of my summer books last year was Byrd’s No Little Women, which I highly recommend. I have been surprised at the backlash Aimee has received in the lead up to this book. The number of people accusing her of actively sabotaging marriages has been startling and unjust. Reading Why Can’t We Be Friends has confirmed to me that as a culture we don’t really know what friendship is.
My closest friends in the whole world, outside of family, are Jawan, Becky and Sarah. They are the people I would drive miles out of my way to see. I weep when they weep and rejoice when they rejoice. My heart is lifted when I see I have a message or email from them. They are my friends. I love them.
If I spent hours talking to, texting, or messaging, them while ignoring my family, that would not be friendship. It would be an unhealthy relationship. If I talked to them about my hopes and dreams and the deepest part of my soul and didn’t share any of that with my husband, both my friendships and my marriage would be in very unhealthy states. I love those women, but I have never had a candle light dinner with either of them, because that’s not what friends do. As Aimee points out in her book, friendship isn’t exclusive.
The thing is, healthy limits are a part of healthy friendships, regardless of the shared or differing sex of the participants. My friendships with Jawan, Becky and Sarah doesn’t threaten my marriage, not because they are women, but because they are my friends. The relationship I have with my husband is unique and exclusive. My friendships are not. In fact, as Aimee points out, my friendships with those women don’t threaten my friendships with other friends like Natalie and Jocelyn and Suzanne. Friendship doesn’t work that way. When Jawan introduced me to Becky, she didn’t lose part of her friendship with me. We both gained a shared friend, and the many benefits of that. If I ever behave to my friends in the way I behave to my husband, I would have crossed lines that friendship is not designed to cross. The objections to other sex friendships assume that friendships will always lead to crossing those lines, but true friendship doesn’t.
The problem with both the hook up culture and the purity/courtship culture is that every interaction with the other sex is as a potential sexual partner. This is unhelpful and unnecessary; it is also learned. Friendship in any context will fail if we expect all human interaction to result in a unique, exclusive relationship. We will be dissatisfied with every point of contact. Friendship should be our normative definition of intimacy, with sexual partnership properly identified as rare and exclusive. In this case, cross sex friendship should be the antidote to, not the casualty of, a hyper-sexualized culture. The more inclusive our friendships, the more personal, but less novel and exclusive, the individuals with whom we relate will seem.
All the redeemed, male and female, make up the bride of Christ and are sons in the Son (p 136)
Why Can’t We Be Friends is about friendships and faithfulness in the body of Christ. Aimee takes solid, and uncontested biblical truths, and makes the good and necessary application of them to our relationships with the other sex. She then roots those relationships in the outworking of the local church and the means of grace. Byrd’s words and application, from beginning to last, are about faithful friendship within the covenant community of God and it is this context I think her detractors are missing. Aimee isn’t calling us to seek out the other sex just to prove we can. Nor is she calling for a general “free for all” attitude to interpersonal relationships. She is calling Christians to be the covenant community we are called to be. Her words echo Paul’s admonition to Timothy, “Do not sharply rebuke an older man, but rather appeal to him as a father, to the younger men as brothers, the older women as mothers, and the younger women as sisters, in all purity.” 1 Timothy 5:1-2 (NASB)
I hope a lot of people actually read this book for its content, instead of disagreeing with it blindly, or hunting the perceived heresy. If that can happen, we can begin to have the real conversations about friendships and wisdom between the sexes.
Life More Abundant 
Wow – can’t wait to read the book!
I didn’t have this book on my list, but now I think it needs to be. 🙂
I have always found Aimee to be challenging to read, in the sense that I think my mind works pretty differently than hers does–even when I agree with her conclusions, I find I have to study her argument for awhile to understand how she arrived there. It sounds like it’s worth investing the time to grapple with this book. I do have a lot of questions about this subject which I imagine the book addresses more fully.
It does seem like past generations/eras have been able to think about friendship in a less fraught way. I’ve been thinking for years that this needs to be written about more, so I’m glad that she has. Reading a few of these reviews, I wonder if there are also other underlying theological issues that need to be talked about more in order to make a discussion of friendship productive. Some of the language surrounding sanctification and maturity is a bit of a stretch from the way I’ve been used to thinking about it, for instance, and I’m probably not alone in that.