So you are only allowed to have opposite sex friends if they are sufficiently ugly? I'm just a crazy old hippie, but in my day, people outside of Saudi Arabia thought it was perfectly OK to talk to, or even flirt with, people you weren't in a relationship with, as long as you observed certain boundaries. There was not always agreement on what those boundaries were, but they definitely didn't prohibit conversations separated by thousands of miles of real estate. I talk about this a bit more here. https://medium.com/@teedrockwell/yes-there-can-be-opposite-sex-friendships-without-quotations-marks-4bc0aa3ca5f5