What Harry Got Wrong

I've been falling asleep to reruns of Family Ties lately. It's my current nostalgic TV of choice for the nights I can't sleep—something familiar and low-stakes, set in a world that feels both distant and oddly recognizable. Not every old sitcom holds up. But some of it is startling in how relevant it still is.

There's an episode where Jennifer, the youngest daughter, is upset because kids are teasing her for being friends with a boy. And her mom sits down with her and says something like: you need to practice being friends with boys now, as a kid, so you can be friends with them as an adult. She goes on to explain why cross-gender friendship actually matters. Why it's a skill worth building. Why the teasing is wrong, and the friendship is right.

It's a throwaway moment in a forty-year-old sitcom. And it's exactly correct.

A few years later, pop culture gave us a very different message.

When Harry Met Sally came out in 1989 and became one of the most beloved romantic comedies of a generation. I loved it. Most people I know loved it. It's warm and funny and achingly romantic and Nora Ephron at her absolute best.

And right there in the opening scene, Harry delivers his now-famous theory: men and women can't really be friends. Because the sex part always gets in the way.

We laughed. We quoted it. We let it become shorthand for something we half-believed anyway.

And I think a whole generation absorbed Harry's version instead of the Family Ties’ mom's.

Here's what that cost us.

We started treating real friendship between men and women as basically impossible. Or at minimum, inherently complicated, always a little suspect, never quite safe to trust. We looked sideways at opposite-gender friendships, in ourselves and in others. We treated the Harry theory not as one character's cynical worldview but as received wisdom about how things actually work.

And in doing so, we quietly closed a door.

Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just…gradually, the idea took hold that certain connections couldn't be what they appeared to be. That friendship was always secretly something else waiting to happen. That the mom in Family Ties was naive and Harry was just being honest.

I'm not here to argue about whether Harry was right or wrong in his particular case. Or whether the movie's ending proves or disproves the theory. That's not the point.

The point is how quickly and completely we absorbed a cultural message, delivered in a charming, quotable, incredibly watchable package, without stopping to ask whether we actually believed it. Without noticing what we were agreeing to.

That happens more than we think. A movie, a song, a throwaway line from someone we admire, and suddenly we have a belief we didn't consciously choose. A limitation we didn't consciously accept.

The Family Ties mom was teaching her daughter something true: connection is a skill. Friendship across difference is a skill. And skills require practice—they require being allowed to try, to fumble, to build something real over time.

What would it look like to reclaim that? To look at the messages you absorbed—about friendship, about connection, about who you're allowed to be close to and how—and ask: did I choose this? Is this actually true? Or did Harry tell me, and I just went along?

The stories we absorbed about connection shape how we connect. That's worth unpacking — and that's exactly what therapy is for.