Thirty-five years ago, the world was introduced to Harry Burns and Sally Albright, two bumbling New Yorkers who fall in and out of each other’s lives before finding love 12 years after meeting.
“When Harry Met Sally…” has since given pop culture memorable lines like “I’ll have what she’s having,” fashion touchstones like Harry’s sweater and trends like “Meg Ryan fall.”
Billy Crystal reflected on the film’s endurance on Sunday TODAY, saying “there’s so much truth and love in that movie.”
“There’s so much romance in that movie. There’s so much confusion in that movie about relationships that that’s an eternal situation for people,” he told Willie Geist for the Dec. 15 edition of “Sunday Sitdown.” “And young kids now, they’re into the phase of their life where they may be falling in love and, ‘Is this the right thing?’ It took Harry and Sally 12 years to figure it out, you know?”
The film’s tagline notably posed a philosophical, even existential, question: “Can two friends sleep together and still love each other in the morning?”
The question is explored both in the story’s plot and its dialogue. After meeting via a carpool from the University of Chicago to New York City, Harry and Sally bump into each other over the years before striking up a friendship. Whether or not their relationship can stay platonic becomes the driving force of the film.
Harry argues, in one of their earliest run-ins, that men and women can’t just be friends “because the sex part always gets in the way.” And at the risk of spoiling the 35-year-old film, he’s seemingly proven right by the end.
After Sally hears that her ex-boyfriend is getting married, she tearfully calls Harry. When he comes over to console her, the pair sleep together for the first time and find themselves on vastly different pages the next morning: Harry wants to go back to being friends, and Sally tries to end their friendship forever.
In the movie’s finale, Harry sprints in the snow to profess his love to Sally at a New Year’s Eve party, a scene that some on X have recently said “literally changed the trajectory” of their lives.
The movie’s screenwriter, Nora Ephron, who died in 2012, said that the film wasn’t about answering the question, “Can men and women be friends?” Instead, the movie is about the differences in how men and women view friendship, she wrote in the introduction to a 1990 printing of the script, per Entertainment Weekly.
“The truth is that men don’t want to be friends with women. Men know they don’t understand women, and they don’t much care. They want women as lovers, as wives, as mothers, but they’re really not interested in them as friends. They have friends,” she said.
“Women, on the other hand, are dying to be friends with men. Women know they don’t understand men, and it bothers them: they think that if only they could be friends with them, they would understand them,” she added.
But how would that question be answered now?
We asked some of the most popular authors today for their take on the core question at the heart of the film: Can men and women just be friends? Or, updated for 2024, can two people who are attracted to each other just be friends?
Here’s what they said.
Emily Henry
Emily Henry is the author of several romance novels, including “People We Meet On Vacation,” which she’s described as an homage to “When Harry Met Sally…,” and “Book Lovers,” featuring a main character named Nora Stephens, after Ephron.
“People We Meet on Vacation,” currently being adapted for a film starring Emily Bader and Tom Blyth, follows Poppy and Alex and their friendship from college to adulthood, sustained through annual vacations.
On the question of whether two people attracted to each other can just be friends, Henry says, “I actually do think so.”
“I think Poppy and Alex could have stayed friends, they just had to make the decision,” she says. “You can’t be half-in and half-out, you have to make the decision and really commit to it.
“For a lot of us, attraction comes and goes, but friendship is forever,” she adds. “I wonder what Nora would actually say because the movie, it’s like they get together, but was she really saying they can’t (be friends), or was she just saying these people belong to each other? I wish I could ask her.”
©Columbia Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection
Yulin Kuang
Speaking of the “People We Meet on Vacation” film adaptation, the screenplay for that project was written by Yulin Kuang. She’s also set to direct the adaptation of Henry’s “Beach Read,” and in April she published her debut romance novel, “How to End a Love Story.”
Kuang says she’s a huge “When Harry Met Sally…” fan.
“I have never lived in a world without it, which feels correct,” she says.
In fact, the writer had the “When Harry Met Sally…” screenplay printed out and kept it on her desk, “so I could absorb its energy by osmosis.”
Looking back on it now, she gives a clear answer on the film’s question.
“Can men and women be friends? Yes,” she says. “Can two people who are attracted to each other — that one gives me pause.”
“Yes, but if I was very attracted to (a friend), I would have to do some unpacking about that in therapy,” she adds. “If it was getting to the point of, ‘We’re in crush territory,’ I think that would be a little dangerous.”
As to how the film answers its own question, Kuang described it as a “specific story,” rather than a generalization. Because both characters feel relatable, like real people pulled from the world, it’s understandable to view the movie as a commentary on men and women, she says.
“But ultimately, it’s really just a commentary on Harry and Sally,” she says.
Kennedy Ryan
Kennedy Ryan is the author of more than 20 books, including “Reel” and the upcoming conclusion to her “Skyland” series, “Can’t Get Enough.”
Ryan says “When Harry Met Sally…” is an example of “nailing the happily ever after” with the New Year’s Eve love confession and kiss.
“That’s like, hall of fame happily ever after,” she says.
Like Henry and Kuang, she thinks people who are attracted to each other can stay friends — but “it can be complicated.”
“I say that just because I have several friends who are guys who I’ve known for years,” she says. “Now, I also have had friends who were guys who, it didn’t work out that way, where you thought that it would be fine being platonic, and then one catches feelings for the other, and then it gets complicated, and you can get really hurt and lose friendships that way.”
She maintains it’s possible with specific boundaries.
“I think it just comes down to being clear about what you both want and when things shift, being honest about that,” she says.
It also depends on if you find them attractive, or, if you’re attracted to them.
“If you are attracted to someone, and I say this as a romance novelist — like, I live by this stuff — it’s the draw, it’s the pull, and that’s something that, if it’s strong enough, it’s hard to ignore,” she says. “But also, if you are attracted to someone, you have to ask, why is this not a romantic relationship? And when you interrogate that, maybe it helps you deal with the attraction.”
Tia Williams
Tia Williams is the author of the romance novel “Seven Days In June” and 2024’s “A Love Song for Ricki Wilde.”
Prince Williams / WireImage
Williams calls “When Harry Met Sally…” a comfort movie.
She says she remembers seeing “When Harry Met Sally…” in theaters when she was 13 and was struck by the film’s central question.
“Back then, friendship was — everything was defined in very restrictive terms and put in these very traditional buckets,” she says. “If you’re friends, that’s platonic. It means you’re not having sex, and you never will.
“But I think that the idea of friendship has evolved. I mean, when we get to ‘Sex and the City,’ we have the idea of f— buddies, and people that you aren’t pursuing a relationship with that you’re really just friends with, that you’re also having sex with,” she adds.
She describes the film’s essential question as, “Can you platonically be friends with someone that you are attracted to?”
“No, I don’t think you can,” she says. “I don’t think there’s any way to be platonic friends with someone that you desperately want to have sex with.”
She argues if one is attracted to a friend, the dynamic can no longer be described as platonic.
While having the friendship between Harry and Sally inevitably turn into a relationship may seem “puritanical” — “if you’re attracted, you have to be lovers” — Williams argues the film’s depiction of romance defied gender normative roles of men and women not understanding each other.
“It’s showing there’s friendship within a relationship,” she says. “In ‘When Harry Met Sally…’ they were actually friends for years, and then fell in love. Women are people. Men are people. We can have friendship, respect.”
But, “they were never going to be just friends,” she adds.
Emma Straub
Emma Straub is the author of the novels “Modern Lovers,” “The Vacationers,” “This Time Tomorrow” and more.
Straub, who grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, describes “When Harry Met Sally…” as a “tour of my childhood.”
“I would love for every rom-com to be this smart and funny and let its characters read books. Harry is often reading books in this movie and that is meaningful to me. And they just have smart conversations,” she says.
She says “of course” men and women can be friends, and so can two people who are attracted to each other.
“I think if the circumstances had been different their friendship would have continued for the rest of their lives, quite happily,” she says. “I feel like it’s a very boring answer, but I think yes.”
“I feel like I have a lot of male friends, and so I believe that of course it’s possible, even with someone as absolutely charming as Billy Crystal,” she adds. “I think I could absolutely just be friends with Billy Crystal.”
And while the film ends with Harry and Sally in a romantic relationship, she argues the film “does actually prove that men and women can be friends — I’m willing to say it,” she says.
“What I believe to be true is that romance is really about timing,” she says. “That’s what you see in the movie. There are all of these misses in terms of timing for them, and then the timing is right. But it doesn’t mean in the multiverse, in the Harry and Sally multiverse, that it always would be.”
Jasmine Guillory
Jasmine Guillory, whose next book, “Flirting Lessons,“ comes out in April 2025, is the author of nine romance books, including “The Wedding Date.”
Guillory says “absolutely” people who are attracted to each other can be friends, because attraction isn’t the only determining factor of whether or not a relationship can work.
“I’m attracted to so many people who I recognize that our relationship is perfect as it is, and I would never want to do anything to it,” Guillory says.
The film also shows that a person can be attracted to someone, but not meant for them — or at least, that version of them.
“Yes, (Harry and Sally) are meant for each other. But at the beginning of the movie, they aren’t. And I think that happens in life, right?” she says.
“There are people who you may have known 10 years ago who, if you had had a relationship then, it would be terrible, but now it’s perfect,” she says.