This column might be about finding love and relationships (or sometimes just a good lay), but there’s one more thing you can get out of someone from the opposite sex, and is just as difficult to achieve: friendship.

Growing up, I was daddy’s little girl. If my mom said I couldn’t have ice cream after dinner, I’d run to my dad; if my mom said I couldn’t stay out past eleven on a school night, I knew dad could be convinced. I was never really a tomboy (except for that brief period when I was five and told everyone I was a boy, but that’s not important right now…), but I always got along with guys better than I did with girls. Anyone who has seen Mean Girls and/or was picked on by other girls in high school knows why. Girls can be horrible to each other. Girls can be judgmental, catty, and sometimes just plain bitches. After being tormented by other girls all through school, I found it incredibly hard to get close to girls, and incredibly easy to get close to guys.

Sadly, something I have discovered in the post-college world I now inhabit is that it’s no longer easy to find guys to just be friends with. After you get your diploma and toss your hat up in the air, you’re thrust in to a world where everyone seems to be looking to pair up, and no one just wants to hang out and get a beer.

Sometimes you’ll make friends with people at work, but often you’ll want to keep your work life and your weekend life separate, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll find your weekend-life group of friends has dwindled since graduation. People tend to scatter after college, and often you’ll find that the plans you had with your friends to get a house together in San Francisco, or wherever, has fallen through, and now you’re living in a city with just one or two good friends. So now you want to make more friends, and now you come upon one of the greatest unspoken challenges of being in your 20s: making friends, especially with the opposite gender.

Here’s a scenario that seems to be repeating in my life lately: I’m hanging out with friends at a bar hanging and a guy strikes up a conversation with me. He’s friendly, funny, he’s a writer like me, and he’s got some great anecdotal stories about his first job working as a PA on “Conan O’Brien.” In other words, he’s a catch. He asks me for my number and I hand him my business card. I should be thrilled, except there’s one big problem: I’m not attracted to him. Whatsoever. So how do I forge a friendship with someone I’m going to have to let down?

These are the three options I’ve tried:

1) Give him your number but don’t pick up when he calls asking you out to dinner.

This is a massive waste of a perfectly good business card. Don’t hand out your phone number if you don’t plan on picking up the guy’s call. Although I will say that if he hadn’t asked for dinner and instead invited me to a museum or something else in a more platonic setting, I would have called him back.

2) Go out on a pseudo-date.

I went out on a date with a guy who had awesome credentials but not-so-awesome looks. We got along really well, but at the end of the night I still just wasn’t attracted to him. Even though we had a good time together, and I managed to dodge the goodnight kiss, I blew him off when he called asking for a second date. Looking back on it, I wish I’d tried harder to be friends with him, but I was new to the game, and gave up too easily.

3) Go out and make it subtly clear that you’re not interested in sex.

This is by far my best suggestion. From the get-go, you should set the ground rules. If the guy asks you out for dinner, suggest some happy hour drinks (way too early for a goodnight kiss or a drunken sleepover); if he asks you out for drinks but you’re not ready for one-on-one time, invite him out with your friends. Then, when you are hanging out, try to sneak into the conversation something about a guy at work you’re crushing on or about your vow to be single until you’ve moved out of your parent’s house, found a job, gotten your trust-fund payout at age thirty, whatever.

In my experience, it is possible to forge a friendship with someone of the opposite sex post-college, it just takes a little more work and cunning than it did while in school, and it’s bound to be more awkward. But if you’re a guy’s girl like me, and mean girls have scarred you for life, it’s worth it.