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"  Ah, the joys of modern friendship: knowing that your loyal pal is always going to be there for you\u2014as a shoulder to cry on, a buddy to laugh with, or...a sexual partner whenever you&amp;#039;re in the mood. Recent studies have found that the practice of having sex with a good friend without any romantic strings attached\u2014a type of relationship often known as &amp;quot;friends with benefits&amp;quot;\u2014 is becoming increasingly common among young people. Hollywood is just now catching up with the real-life trend: In a slew of upcoming film and television offerings, &amp;quot;sex buddies&amp;quot; will take center stage.  No Strings Attached, a romantic comedy hitting theaters on Friday, stars Natalie Portman as a busy young doctor who enjoys having sex but doesn&amp;#039;t have the time or patience for traditional dating. As such, she establishes a purely physical relationship with her close guy friend (Ashton Kutcher), with the understanding that neither one of them will let any romantic feelings enter the picture. (Or so they think.) &amp;quot;I am a huge romantic-comedy fan,&amp;quot; says the film&amp;#039;s writer, 28-year-old Elizabeth Meriwether &amp;quot;and I hadn&amp;#039;t really seen a romantic comedy that felt like it was about my life or my friends&amp;#039; lives.&amp;quot; So she set out to write a rom-com &amp;quot;that felt real and that didn&amp;#039;t end with a kiss, but started with one.&amp;quot; Meriwether also &amp;quot;didn&amp;#039;t want to tell the story of some girl who has been planning her wedding since she was a little kid\u2014I wanted to tell a story about a girl who has other things going on and who doesn&amp;#039;t necessarily want the things we expect girls to want.&amp;quot; Indeed, Meriwether&amp;#039;s script takes many of the previously established norms of the romantic-comedy genre and turns them upside down. A &amp;quot;morning after&amp;quot; scene, for example, features Kutcher&amp;#039;s and Portman&amp;#039;s characters waking up together, mortified\u2014not because they&amp;#039;d had sex the night before but because they&amp;#039;d spent the night cuddling. &amp;quot;A lightbulb went off in my head,&amp;quot; says Meriwether about conceiving the on-screen moment. &amp;quot;It was like, this is the scene where they are totally embarrassed\u2014when they wake up fully clothed, spooning each other.&amp;quot; On the small screen, NBC will feature a Brian Grazer\u2013produced comedy this spring called Friends With Benefits, from the writers of (500) Days of Summer. The concept of friends enjoying a physical but nonromantic relationship is &amp;quot;essentially the jumping-off point for the show,&amp;quot; says cowriter Scott Neustadter, 33. Two of the show&amp;#039;s main characters are &amp;quot;a guy and a girl who are great friends\u2014they might even love each other,&amp;quot; says Neustadter, &amp;quot;but their priorities are different, the timing isn&amp;#039;t right, and for lots of reasons they simply wouldn&amp;#039;t make for a very good couple. Each one is searching for that perfect person, but in the meantime, it&amp;#039;s nice to know that there&amp;#039;s someone you can turn to in all matters, who is waiting on the other line\u2014or on the other side of the bed.&amp;quot; Thanks to the &amp;quot;relaxing of labels,&amp;quot; says Neustadter, these two characters &amp;quot;can absolutely have a physical relationship without having a romantic one.&amp;quot; Still hungering for more &amp;quot;friends with benefits&amp;quot;\u2013themed entertainment? You&amp;#039;re in luck. Portman&amp;#039;s Black Swan costar Mila Kunis teams up with Justin Timberlake, playing a pair of pals who use each other for sexual satisfaction in a romantic comedy directed by Will Gluck (Easy A) coming to theaters this summer. Its title? You guessed it: Friends With Benefits. (As if all this weren&amp;#039;t confusing enough, Friends With Benefits was also, at one point, the name of the Natalie Portman movie.)  Suggests Meriwether: &amp;quot;This kind of relationship and these kinds of discussions are really in the air right now. And I think that&amp;#039;s great. I hope that more people make romantic comedies that are asking some of these questions and feel modern and show different types of female characters.&amp;quot; Plus, the &amp;quot;FWB&amp;quot; dynamic is inherently complicated and can be a juicy topic for writers to tackle. &amp;quot;People change, situations change, new people enter the fray,&amp;quot; says Neustadter. &amp;quot;Lots of things can happen to upset what is initially a well-oiled machine. There&amp;#039;s inevitably a tension in this kind of dynamic.&amp;quot; Of course, there have been other examples in pop-culture history of people trying out this kind of relationship\u2014Jerry and Elaine on Seinfeld gave it a go (without much success), as did Elliot and JD on early episodes of Scrubs. And Alanis Morissette helped popularize the phrase &amp;quot;friend with benefits&amp;quot; in a lyric of her 1996 song &amp;quot;Head Over Feet.&amp;quot; But today&amp;#039;s young adults seem to embrace the &amp;quot;no strings attached&amp;quot; relationship like no generation before. (One recent study found that two-thirds of young people surveyed had been in such a relationship.) &amp;quot;I think with texting, e-mail, and Facebook, there&amp;#039;s just no expectation for anything now,&amp;quot; says Meriwether. &amp;quot;The normal rules for dating have changed, and no one has figured out exactly what the new rules are. When are we dating? When is it a relationship? When are we in love? The road to romance is now full of all these funny and complicated twists and turns.&amp;quot; This generation is also composed of men and women who, as kids, were shuttled endlessly from one after-school activity to another. So perhaps, as adults, scheduling sex with a friend into their iPhone calendar just feels natural. &amp;quot;They are overwrought and overprogrammed,&amp;quot; says Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a founding editor of Ms. magazine and the author of nine books. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re looking for ways to simplify their lives.&amp;quot; Friends having sex has become so commonplace, says Neustadter, that &amp;quot;in this day and age, the question isn&amp;#039;t is such a thing possible, but rather can such a thing last without serious complications?&amp;quot; But another question arises too: Is this kind of thing good for women?  &amp;quot;Most women want romance, I&amp;#039;ve noticed,&amp;quot; says Erica Jong, the poet, novelist, and essayist whose iconic 1973 book Fear of Flying changed the culture&amp;#039;s dialogue about women&amp;#039;s sexual choices. &amp;quot;I hate the term &amp;#039;friends with benefits,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Jong continues. &amp;quot;It sounds somehow like you are using another person for erotic satisfaction. There is nothing wrong with that morally, but do you like to be used by a guy? A woman using a guy is just the same as a guy using a woman.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;To be honest,&amp;quot; says Neustadter, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve never heard of a FWB situation that&amp;#039;s worked well. It always ends, one way or another. More often than not, someone winds up being hurt, even when so much time and energy was spent protecting themselves from such a thing.&amp;quot; Says Pogrebin: &amp;quot;Anything that increases women&amp;#039;s choices and freedom is a good thing, so I am not going to oppose a woman&amp;#039;s choice to have sex without strings. However, my gut instinct is that it doesn&amp;#039;t work.&amp;quot; She thinks that &amp;quot;it complicates things for women when you have made a policy decision that you are going to have sex just for sex, and then you fall in love, and it&amp;#039;s completely antithetical to your theory. What do you do?&amp;quot; It is, she says, &amp;quot;very hard to detach the body from the brain\u2014and the heart.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relationships/advice/a11515/no-strings-no-problem-521429/>