I’ve long known the term “friends with benefits” — in the words of Wikipedia, “A friends with benefits relationship […] is a sexual arrangement between friends that involves recurrent physical intimacy and varies in its formation, outcomes, and attributes.” But it never occurred to me to wonder how it arose; now I’ve had this section of the Wikipedia article pointed out to me:
Terminology
Some researchers assign the origin of the term “friends with benefits” earliest known usage to Alanis Morissette’s 1995 song “Head over Feet” in the lyrics, “You’re my best friend, Best friend with benefits.”[1] However, others primarily believe it to have originated from the 2011 film known as Friends with Benefits.[1]
That footnote goes to “Have a Friend with Benefits, Whom off and on I See.” Friends with Benefits Relationships, but it’s behind a Springer paywall; in any case, I wouldn’t trust a chapter in the International Handbook of Love to do adequate philological investigation. A Google Books search has turned up a bunch of bad metadata. So I turn to the assembled Hattery: anybody know anything of the phrase’s history? Thanks and a tip of the Languagehat hat to James!
Far too late. The term was already well-established among my own cohort of randy, hormone-driven young Americans by the time that I left the country around the turn of the millennium.
Just as I suspected!
The phrase started popping up at Urban Dictionary in 2003. It starts showing up in printed sources at GBooks in 2000. The earliest I found it was in Diary of a Junior Year, published by Scholastic Press, ©1998. Hollywood, on the one hand, wouldn’t use a term like that in the title of a rom-com until it has been well-established and is certain to be just naughty enough and no more. Scholastic Press, however, aims for a young audience (the book was apparently published in collaboration with Teen magazine), and any slight inauthenticity or stuffiness in a book would condemn it. By 1998 the Morissette song had been out for 3 (≈ ∞) years.
(fixed)
A shout-out to the ingenious Hebrew יזיז yaziz ‘friend with benefits’, where the daleths of ידיד yadid ‘friend’ were changed to the similar-looking and charged-with-meaning zayins.
The earliest COCA hit for this three-word string is from 2002. I sort of feel like I knew the phrase earlier than the year given for the Morisette song (which I don’t actually know), but that’s a pretty vague memory. And it’s confused by the fact that I feel like I remember conversations about the “concept” as early as circa 1986 without any certainty that this particular label had already attached to that referent at that early date.
Google books is hopeless because lots of pulpy romance novels whose metadata apparently lacked an accurate publication date have been given obviously-wrong publication dates of 1900 or 1901. If it were possible to infer that that error strongly implies an “actual” publication date no later than 1999 I guess that would be something, but I don’t know if that’s a fair inference.
The term was already well-established among my own cohort of randy, hormone-driven young Americans by the time that I left the country around the turn of the millennium.
Yes. I first heard it at one of my son’s university graduation in the Spring of 2003. I asked what ‘benefits’ were involved, and after some hemming and hawing deferential to my advanced years, some fine young man volunteered, “itch scratching”.
My friends and I were using this phrase in the mid-1980s. No written evidence, unfortunately.
Early false leads in Google Books include
This from the 1877 Dion: A Tragedy, a historical play taking place in ancient Greece and written in antiquarian English, by Walter May Rew. Curious, I found that Rew gained fame in his latter years by being convicted of selling fake medical diplomas (perhaps to support his opium habit), and of bigamy (technically, pentagamy). Quite a scamp.
The OED’s “benefit” entry is “First published 1887; not yet revised.” Hopefully they’ll get on the case.
what Ook and JWB have said feels right to me – i’m not sure when i first heard the phrase, but definitely by the mid-90s. i wonder about the relationship between it and “significant other” as (initially) largely heterosexual “clean” phrasings for practices that were much more established in gay & lesbian circles (where “fuck-buddy” and “lover” covered similar territory – and, less in my 90s circles, “trick” and “number” add subtler distinctions).
Yeah, definitely “fuck-buddy”; I think of “significant other” as more a bureaucratic (and then ironic-bureaucratic) reference to a sexual/romantic/cohabiting relationship without reference to legal status.
I don’t think I’ve ever used “significant other” non-ironically. (“Partner” is the approved non-judgmental-speak in doctor-to-patient communication in these parts; I think it’s so in Bureaucrat, too, but I’m not certain.)
I use SOBAD for the Significant Other of my Beautiful and Accomplished Daughter. (He knows Latin, and is therefore Worthy.)
I think of “significant other” as yet another not-quite-successful attempt to describe in English a romantic relationship without formal marriage. “Boyfriend”/“girfriend” come off to some as childish; “partner”, too formal and unromantic.
SO for me belongs to situations where you don’t know someone’s technical status, are tactfully trying not to distinguish between people of different status (especially in the days before gay marriage), or are saying something publicly which might be relevant to a bunch of people, some married and some not. I can’t imagine any actual bureaucracy saying it, but it does have that feel of being vague to the point of euphemism.
I’m not sure when I last heard it – ‘partner’ to refer to a spouse has definitely become more acceptable than it was.
It’s a perennial problem, which has driven people to desperate measures.
I think of “significant other” as more a bureaucratic (and then ironic-bureaucratic) reference to a sexual/romantic/cohabiting relationship without reference to legal status.
I think of it as more social than bureaucratic: on wedding invitations or used by Reform Jewish and liberal Protestant clergy. However, Google Books finds it first in academic writing in the healthcare world, as in Congressional report from 1972. It seems to have meant someone such as a friend who could provide emotional and maybe practical support but was typically not in a sexual or romantic relationship with the person.
What about bidie-in, Jen (which hasn’t made it to Wiktionary or been mentioned here before)?
I liked to refer to my FWB Beatrice as my Other Significant Other. Before we were married in 1984, Gale and I called each other posslecues; before that we were partners.
“The plural of spouse is spice.” –R.A.H.
There once was an old man of Lyme
Who married three wives at a time,
When asked, “Why a third?”
He replied, “One’s absurd,
And bigamy, sir, is a crime.”
We still haven’t found any hard evidence of the phrase before Alanis Morissette, have we? And the results of my own researches on Google Books are pretty strongly in her favor: the earliest two hits I could find were both from 1997, they both use the exact wording “best friend with benefits”, and they both give the distinct impression that they are quoting something when they do so.
https://books.google.com/books?id=M-gCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA106&dq=%22friend%22+%22with+benefits%22&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22friend%22%20%22with%20benefits%22&f=false
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Words_Don_t_Fit_in_My_Mouth/PC5bAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22best+friend+with+benefits%22&dq=%22best+friend+with+benefits%22&printsec=frontcover
I keep forgetting that the Internet Archive lets you do full text search now, and it has some possibilities: alternative weeklies, college newspapers, high school yearbooks, skin magazines. And yet — nothing before Morissette.
It’s not in Green’s.
I recall a very long discussion in Internet comments from 1995 or 1996 about the difference between “fuck buddies” and “friends you have sex with.” The phrase friends with benefits never came up.
I definitely knew what Alanis was on about (or was alluding to) when I first heard HoF, which could not have been long after it came out. Meaning, I’d heard it before. Has she herself never been asked about this?
To me, “significant other” is too redolent of 1970s pop psychology for bureaucratic use. The heteronormative bureaucrat might have used John Cowan’s POSSLQ. The terms don’t match each other but still less match FWB.
I also remember the 2011 movie as proof that the term was now mainstream for corporate suits to have noticed and sought to monetize it.
“Fuck buddy” was Jane Lynch’s proposal to Steve Carrell in The 40-Year Old Virgin (2005); I don’t remember if she also used “friends with benefits”, but they were more colleagues than friends and the blunter term better suited her character.
In “The Deal” (1991), Jerry and Elaine supply no label for their arrangement, but then Seinfeld often derived comedic value from such reluctance to name things, most famously in “The Contest”.
The SpringerLink source cited by Wikipedia is by Elisabeth Vanderheiden, “pedagogue, theologian, intercultural mediator, managing director of the Catholic Adult Education Rhineland-Palatinate”. The relevant portion is:
CBC News, 2019 says
The CBC article is by journalist Daniel Schwartz, not by Alex McKay named by Vanderheiden. McKay supervised the study Schwartz was reporting on but the article doesn’t suggest McKay himself mentioned Morissette.
How can anyone “primarily believe it to have originated from the 2011 film known as Friends with Benefits” when Head over Feet predates it?
I think the idea, poorly expressed, is that the phrase was coined earlier but not widely known until the 2011 film. This idea is false but not ridiculous.
Obviously, it wasn’t well known to some people, but the both the phrase and the cultural phenomenon it described were hardly obscure before 2011. Friends With Benefits was actually the second mediocre romantic comedy about the topic to be released by Hollywood that year, following No Strings Attached (which coincidentally starred Kunis’s former television boyfriend and later real-life husband Ashton Kutcher).
Contrast “Bucket List”, originated by the eponymous 2007 film.
“2011”
I knew it in around 2001-2-3. I did not even speak English.
However, that some primarily believe in 2011 can well be a fact, depending on what this word “primarily” means:)
This idea is false but not ridiculous.
It is kind of ridiculous – the film title was deliberately using a phrase that already had wide currency in 2011 among younger Gen Xers and Millennials, as I remember well. I‘m fairly sure that was the pitch to the studio – „Ok, it’s a romcom. Now, you know that phrase ‘friends with benefits’ ? that‘s the movie.“
And also I guess a reference to what for me is the most disgusting title of a series ever.
“and the cultural phenomenon it described” – this “cultural’ sounds disturbing. “That’s why friendship between boys and girls leads to lechery”. It is not some young people who sleep with strangers anyway who do it because why not, it is a Culture!
Can a spouse (say in arranged marriage) you’re in love with be called a spouse with benefits?
Well, no. Most friends are not “friends with benefits”.
Strangers are not friends; they’re not included in “friends with benefits”.
I don’t know if they’re people who object to communication between boys and girls because sex, and still do not support arranged marriages. But the idea that people who sleep with friends are people who sleep with strangers anyway, that is that sleeping with friends follows from their immorality, could be used as a counter-argument against the idea that immorality follows from frienships.
Practically of course I know young people who are all for sex, but don’t know what is inter-gender friendship. Also I know about some people who are against such communication, because arranged marriages.
“significant other”
“Husband” (anarthrous [**]), hat tip to JFofM for the link from another thread.
[**] nor any possessive pronoun.
Brett mentions the movie No Strings Attached, which came out earlier in 2011 and has a similar premise — and was announced in March 2010 with a working title of Friends with Benefits.