When Harry met Sally, he said the sex part always gets in the way. “You realize of course that we could never be friends,” Harry says in the film to a confused Sally. “What I’m saying is—and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form—is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.”

My ex-husband said something similar to me, once upon a time. No man is friends with a woman he doesn’t want to fuck, he said.

At the time, I thought he was cynical. Damaged by his own failed attempts at controlling his dick around women he claimed to respect. I had male friends. Real ones. We talked about books and work and our relationships with other people. It felt platonic. It felt possible.

My thoughts changed, though, in part because of this: I know a woman who had a best friend for 15 years. Male, straight. Dinners, advice, real intimacy. She got divorced. He made a move within three months. She said no. He vanished. Fifteen years and he was just waiting.

Research has laid this out. According to a study from 2000, “analyses revealed that men evaluated the potential for having sex with their close opposite-sex friend as more beneficial than did women.” In other words, sex is rarely absent from men’s minds, even when they seem platonic.

The sex part doesn’t just get in the way of friendship between men and women. It gets in the way of something more valuable: men’s access to how women actually think.

According to that same study, both men and women agreed that access to information on dating the opposite sex from their friend is a key benefit of these relationships. Women have the emotional intelligence men desperately need. We see power dynamics they miss. We understand relationships they’re living in but can’t decode. But men can’t access it because they’re always carrying that hum of possibility. Even unconsciously. Even when the friendship feels genuine.

I saw this in action recently, while out to dinner with three girlfriends and a man. He listened to us talk frankly for three hours. About astrology, work politics, dating, clothing economics, time travel paradoxes. The guy who cried after coming. The choking request that ended in ghosting. He was taking notes in his head.

At some point, this man told us women that he’d pay to hear this whole conversation as a podcast. Not because we were performing for him. Because we forgot he was there. Women talk differently when men aren’t listening. We say the parts we usually edit out. The power moves. The sexual truths. The quiet calculations we make that men never see.

He was watching us decode things he didn’t know needed decoding. Office dynamics his male colleagues miss entirely. Relationship patterns invisible to the men living them. The gap between what women perform and what women want.

Women don’t perform when men aren’t listening, but he was only there because of his wife. She’s why four women felt safe talking like he wasn’t in the room. Remove her and the whole thing collapses.

But here’s the rub: That man at dinner absorbed three hours of intelligence he couldn’t get anywhere else. The whole time, some part of his brain was filing us under “potential.”

My ex-husband was right. Harry was right. Women experience these friendships as platonic. Men experience them as opportunities they’re not taking yet. The sex part gets in the way. Not because men are predators. Because their dicks are in the way of their own education.