friends with benifits

One of my dearest female friends is in a relationship with a friend of her own. It’s not an unhealthy relationship, but the man has made it clear to my friend that it has a definite ending as he needs to move away for a job. She understands this, intellectually anyway. But there’s some question as to whether our intellect can overrule our emotion in every instance and in every situation.
I suspect that the more time we spend with another person involved in intimacies, the more intimate we get regardless of our overall intentions. I would even go so far to say that it’s inevitable. That like that old premise in “When Harry Met Sally,” men and women can’t just be friends. Well, I mean that they definitely cannot just be friends if they’re actively engaging in a sexual relationship.
I know my friend knows that, so intellectually, she’s cool. But I also know that matters of the heart can often short-circuit our rationality, leading us to engage in behaviors that, in the long-run, may not be emotionally the most healthy for us.
These thoughts led me to look up the research literature on “friends with benefits,” and I was pleasantly surprised to come away with a few citations where this phenomenon has actually been studied. These kinds of relationship most often occur in younger adults (high school and college-age students) who are still actively exploring their sexuality.