There are some very depressing rites of passage a famous young woman has to go through.
The first time you’re photographed without make-up and a tabloid makes comments about your appearance. The first time a “source” sells a story about you. And as Emma Raducanu is finding out, the first time that your lack of love life becomes so boring to the world media that they simply invent one for you.
The chosen fictional suitor? Fellow 22-year-old tennis player Carlos Alcaraz. And look, we’ve all seen the film Wimbledon. The idea of two tennis players falling in love during Wimbledon has all the makings of a charming British rom-com. But as we all have to occasionally remind ourselves when the parasocial relationship sets in, these are also real people, with real lives – and for all we know, actual romantic partners who are feeling pretty miffed about the headlines.
Raducanu and Alcaraz have been photographed together recently, it’s true. But for the incredibly saucy reason that they’re both ambassadors for Evian. It’s the most clean-cut thing two people in their early twenties could be doing.
And yet, despite literally no evidence that the pair are romantically involved, there’s now a slew of online articles seemingly linking the pair, with one paper reporting that they’ve been spotted “with their arms around each other” – which, if you look at the picture, transpires to be them standing together at a public photo call once again, as global ambassadors for a water brand.
Rumours are sufficiently rife that Raducanu felt it necessary to issue a correction, telling the reporters that the pair are “just good friends”. At which point I throw my hands to the sky and wonder who is in charge of her media training, because everyone – literally everyone – knows that the worst thing you can do if you’re trying to deny a bit of secret snogging is to use the expression “just good friends”. It’s probably completely true, but of course that doesn’t matter.
This strange behaviour about men and women who are friends was one I only discovered for myself relatively recently. For the majority of my life I only ever had female friends. All-girl schools and then an English degree will do that to you. But in my thirties, I ended up picking up a couple of very good male friends and one male best friend, and I was genuinely shocked at the reception these friendships get from otherwise fairly open-minded, modern people. These male friends are automatically assumed to be gay or half-heartedly trying to sleep with me, neither of which is true.
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Having close friends who are the opposite sex is a genuinely useful thing, especially if you’re dating or in a heterosexual relationship and occasionally require a translator who can explain why men behave in certain ways. Yet the worst prejudice about male/female friendships actually seems to come from my female friends.
When I mention that my male best friend has driven me somewhere, or come over for dinner, or consoled me through a tricky emotional situation, the response will always be to ask how my fiancé feels about that.
My fiancé feels fine about that. I assume that’s because he trusts me, or because he knows that I don’t want to shag anyone who isn’t him, or maybe because I made it clear from the outset that my friendships are sacrosanct and I’m not going to change them because of some outdated societal bias about who is allowed to be friends with whom. Male or female, if your romantic partner starts trying to control who you’re mates with, that’s the reddest of red flags.
That said, I do find myself editing my behaviour around male friends. I share them less on social media, I talk about them less in conversation, sometimes I’ll even steer away from inviting them to couple-y social events.
And that’s just on the strength of what people I know in real life are saying. If I were an international tennis star then I’d be inclined to give that friendship a very wide berth, just to avoid the endless questions.
And that’s very sad. Being a tennis champion has already taken out large chunks of Raducanu’s childhood, teens, education and life in general. It would be a real shame if the media attention, a by-product of her talent and her career in tennis, were to take yet another thing away from her: the genuine, and entirely innocent, joy of a male-female friendship.
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