Can men and women just be friends?

"Friendship, friendship, what a perfect blendship, when otherfriendships will be forgot, ours will still be hot." - Lyrics to anold-fashioned song

Are the front pages of the newspaper getting you down? Does itseem that no one knows how to deal with the plane crashes,kidnappings and crises in the Middle East? Do you sometimes wantonly to hunker down and get on with domestic life?

Where do you find succor, shelter and reprieve?

In friendship, that's where. Friendship, the theme for the'90s.

How else to explain the long lines waiting to get into the movie"When Harry Met Sally . . . ," an updated, old-fashionedboy-meets-girl story in which members of the opposite sex do notimmediately attract. Instead, two people get to know each otherfirst. They actually talk, laugh, take long walks, even argue. Theensuing confidences, complaints and confessions lead to an intimacythat eschews the bedroom . . . for a while.

The movie is positively revolutionary - or retrograde, dependingon your age - confirming what most of us knew before the sexualrevolution persuaded us that we didn't know anything. Men and womenare different, and though they may eventually want the same thing,they don't play by the same rules in trying to get to it, and theydon't always crave it at the same time.

Rob Reiner, the director, told Nora Ephron, the screenwriter,that he wanted to do a movie about two people who enjoy being "only"friends because they knew if they "had sex" it would ruin everything:"And they have sex, and it ruins everything."

For the girl, sex suggests emotional commitment. For the boy,sex is something that forces him to figure out how long he has tostay around ("30 seconds or all night") before he can say "thank you,ma'am" and be gone.

If you're a trend-watcher (and who among us isn't?), "When HarryMet Sally . . . " addresses current yearnings for friendship betweenthe sexes in a way that the earlier movie "Fatal Attraction" finallydrew on a collective contempt for the liberated "other woman."(Remember how the warm, lovable and sexy character was a wife andmother?)

Of course, it's always risky to generalize from the popularculture, but audience reactions to this movie suggest that youngsingles are experiencing a new awareness, the shock of recognitionthat the sexual revolution has betrayed them in more ways than one.In one huge theater, young men and women in the audience groaned inunison when Harry and Sally finally fell into bed, everyone sensingit was the beginning of the end.

When Harry, sated, wants to make his quick getaway, and Sally,satisfied, wants him to hold her for hours, real intimacy evaporates.Gone is the easy talk, the endearing confidences, the trivialpursuits. Like Adam and Eve after biting that apple, they feel anurge to cover themselves.

What's happening, it seems to me, is that women are beginning torediscover what their mothers and grandmothers understoodinstinctively - that falling into sex is not the same as falling inlove.

Harry tells Sally that man can't be friend to woman withoutdesiring her sexually, but that sex usually intrudes on friendship.Is this a contemporary Catch-22? Maybe, maybe not. You have to seethe movie.