The friends-with-benefits arrangement has been romanticized, ridiculed, and dissected in approximately one thousand romantic comedies. And yet it keeps coming back, because for a lot of people, it actually works—especially when the last thing anyone wants is a relationship.

The appeal isn’t hard to understand. A FWB situation asks very little of you emotionally. You don’t need to know their career goals or their complicated family history. You don’t need to have the talk, define anything, or show up in any of the ways a relationship demands. What you get instead is physical connection, a degree of genuine care, and enough space to stay inside your own head, which, depending on where you are in life, might be exactly the point.

There’s also something to be said for what a FWB can do for someone who’s taken themselves off the dating market entirely. Whether the reason is a bad breakup, burnout, or just a season of focusing on other things, getting back into dating after a real hiatus can feel like starting a car that’s been sitting in a garage for two years. A friends-with-benefits situation can ease that re-entry. There’s already comfort there, already some version of trust, and your heart’s not on the line, so you’re not white-knuckling the whole thing.

Research has also linked sexual frustration to poor decision-making and heightened emotional reactivity, which isn’t exactly a revelation, but does suggest that having a reliable, consensual outlet does more than just scratch an itch. It can actually clear enough mental space to start working through whatever you’ve been avoiding.

That said, a FWB arrangement only functions well when both people are honest about what it is. The ones that go awry almost always do so because someone knew they wanted more and said nothing, or because the terms shifted and nobody addressed it. Boundaries communicated clearly from the start are the ones that hold. The ones left vague don’t.

The FWB dynamic isn’t for everyone, and it’s not a cure for anything serious. But for someone who needs to feel like a person again before they’re ready to feel like a partner, it can be a surprisingly effective bridge. Not every connection needs a destination. Some of them just need to get you somewhere you couldn’t get to alone.