In your darkest hour, your guiding light won’t always be a romantic partner.
So there is this idea that a man and a woman can just never be friends. They can never just enjoy each others company, or go have a good time together, or simply support each other. No there always has to be some sort of meta game at hand where one (the stereotype usually points at the guy for this) trying to get into the other one’s pants.
I’ve got a slightly over ten year old friendship that says otherwise.
It was my second year of college and I was about to start my first real job, working at a Spencer Gifts. I’m sure you’ve heard of them. Quirky little stores that sell horror movie figures, posters of nearly nude people, drug and alcohol related items, and the occasional starter level sex toy (seriously unless you want to try your first sex toy on the cheap or need a gag gift don’t buy the stuff there). But who knew one of the greatest gifts I had ever received would not be an item from that shop, but a coworker by the name of Mel?
If a punk rocker, a drag king, a drag queen, and a goth chick could somehow come together and create a child it would be her. Being something of a loner and having an appearance that most others would call freakish she didn’t have a lot of friends and wasn’t all that social. Those other people are really missing out. I no longer recall who made first contact but I’m glad it was made. She may not have been very social but once you got to know her she was just plain awesome.
I remember the first Halloween we worked in that shop together. In my efforts to try something different she volunteered to do a makeup job for me. Pulling out her tackle box of makeup (yes she kept her make up in a tackle box), and working her skills she laid a silver spiderweb over my left eye that you would not believe.
It’s her I have to thank for first hearing Anders Manga, getting in touch with my inner goth, and what I’ll just call “learning how to be naughty.”
I could continue taking you down memory lane but I won’t bore you with the trip.
She’s also been there to hear me out in my times of need. When I had no one else to turn to, I knew I could turn to her. She is not big on advice but she is a comforting presence that radiates even over the phone when we talk on the phone (the shortest phone call I’ve had with her is like 2 hr.) For the last several years we’ve lived a few hundred miles apart but we kept in touch. Now that I’ve moved and we’re a lot closer I will make the most of it. Getting back on topic, through all the ups, downs, and all arounds there is one thing that has never happened.
I’ve never even so much as thought about trying to make our friendship anything more than platonic. I really have no explanation for it but in this day and age where its presumed that a guy can’t be a close friend to a woman without being all about the nookie I know that that presumption is nonsense (at least for me it is).
All good things must come to an end and I have to say that that when this good thing comes to an end my world will be wrecked. But I’m going to enjoy my good times with Mel while they last.
(Oh and she got me into Voltaire.)
—Photo puuikibeach/Flickr
About Danny
Awsome piece guy! Hey, a good friend can come in different shapes, sizes colors, or sexes! Who says it has to come to an end? Good friends are forever. Even when they leave this world first, the’re always in your heart.
Who says it has to come to an end? Good friends are forever. Even when they leave this world first, the’re always in your heart.
If I got anything to say about it the only way this friendship will come to an end is when the “til death do us part” (see what I did there?) clause is enacted.
Yeah, that last line of mine was a little bit of self reflection. I’m a bit older than you and even though you may all come into this world about the same time, it doesn’t mean you get to leave togeather. Just saying that the old saying “You sometimes don’t truly appreciate what you have until it’s gone”can be brutally true. DON’T let that happen!
True. True.
I loved this story. I’ve always thought the idea that a straight guy and a straight woman couldn’t be friends absolutely ridiculous. Of course they can! Not everything’s about sex.
Truthfully I actually forgot one other major detail.
She’s married….for 6 years (they got married on New Year’s Eve)….to a guy she’s been dating since high school (for perspective she is 31).
But supposedly even that doesn’t stop a guy from trying to make a move on his female friends. Well for me it was never an issue because as I say I’ve never tried anything with her.
*Gasp* What? You’re not a horndog willing to have sex with anyone female, married or not? I do not believe it! (That is complete sarcasm, by the way).
I actually have quite a few guy friends…my best friend in high school was a straight guy. It was really weird though, because I actually worried I wasn’t attractive because he didn’t ever try to make a move. I mean, it makes no sense…he knew I was gay and he just wasn’t interested in me like that.
I think the assumption that straight men and women can’t be friends is actually quite harmful, really. For one thing it discourages people from forming close relationships with people of the opposite gender. But also, like with my friend and I, it can cause tension (particularly in high school) where there isn’t any. The lack of sexual tension in itself becomes an issue.
And even if you weren’t gay its still possible that he would simply not have a romantic/sexual interest in you.
Men: More complicated that most poeple would have you believe.
Right, sorry I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I added the bit about me being gay as part of the explanation for why I wasn’t attracted to him.
Ah. I dig.
Great post, but I disagree with your point. Or, more accurately, I’m skeptical. I’m… suspicious.
See, I’ve been that guy whose friends with a girl for a long time — years even — and it was only after I lost touch/grew apart/moved away/whatever that I realized just how much I “loved” them and wanted them to reciprocate those feelings. So I acted the part of the best friend, shoulder to cry on, and all around Nice Guy ™. Inevitably, it only led to my own bitter resentment down the road, even long after the friendship had dwindled to the occasional status-update on Facebook we’d click “like” on. It took a toll, taught me some lessons. I learned that not only me, but lots of other guys as well are incapable of being “just friends” with a girl. Possibly because we always tended to pick girls for friends who were really attractive people, physically and mentally.
So nowadays I’m suspicious when guys say they’re “just friends” with a girl. Oftentimes the guys are single, lovelorn, while the girls are nice, smart, and pretty. Call me jaded or gutter-minded but I notice the sexual tension, the awkwardness from one or the other, the hilariously tragic romance that half-heartedly kinda-sorta doesn’t start.
This isn’t to say you can’t, aren’t, or weren’t genuinely friends with this girl. But 1 guy in a 1000 are long odds… Which isn’t me saying guys are “a horndog willing to have sex with anyone female, married or not” as HeartherN puts it. I’m just saying *most* heterosexual men don’t seem to build relationships with heterosexual women in that way. It’s an exception which proves the rule.
Or maybe I’m just out onna ledge here and everybody’s giving me the side-eye? So it goes.
I agree men and women can be friends, some of my most adored friends are guys. But I do believe that, somewhere along the line, even if you never act on it, thoughts do occasionally linger about taking it to a non-platonic level, if only for a moment.
At some point or another, with my few, very close male friends, the thought has come up (and passed, thankfully) with either or both of us. The positive is that we never acted on it, because we all inherently knew what we had as friends wouldn’t necesarily translate as lovers, and the weight of crossing that line would bring our friendship down.
Years into these friendships, it invariably comes up and we can joke about it, being glad we kept our pants on.
I’d say it can be all of those things. I”ve had long term friendships with men that I was attracted to (but who weren’t interested in me) and we managed just fine. And I’m sure the reverse has happened (though they never told me if it did). I’ve had good friendships with men. I think it’s possible. It’s also to hold two feelings at one time, the love and the attraction and to just let that be what it is.
You Zek there is actually a classmate I had in college that I did fall for and kinda did the whole Nice Guy thing too. I finally got the guts to say something…and she gave me the silent treatment for three months. I was down about it for a very long time (even long after the woman in question and I drifted apart) but then I came around to realizing that expressing attraction on my part was not wrong. And even the fact that she turned me down is no big deal, what bothered….hurt me, is the way she excecuted that turn down.
This isn’t to say you can’t, aren’t, or weren’t genuinely friends with this girl. But 1 guy in a 1000 are long odds… Which isn’t me saying guys are “a horndog willing to have sex with anyone female, married or not” as HeartherN puts it. I’m just saying *most* heterosexual men don’t seem to build relationships with heterosexual women in that way. It’s an exception which proves the rule.
See I’m not entirely convinced that the odds are that long or that its most men that fit that bill. I truly wonder if it is instead that the situations where neither the guy or the woman have a desire to take it to another level are simply so seldomly talked about (while highlighting the ones where there is such “meta game”) people tend to think they don’t happen that often.
Because let’s face it people like drama and there’s no drama in a man and woman having a relationship where at least one of them isn’t burning with a desire to make more of it.
Danny,
See I’m not entirely convinced that the odds are that long or that its most men that fit that bill. I truly wonder if it is instead that the situations where neither the guy or the woman have a desire to take it to another level are simply so seldomly talked about (while highlighting the ones where there is such “meta game”) people tend to think they don’t happen that often.
Well, perception often creates reality. What we see inevitably characterizes how we act. Perhaps people are so used to not seeing men and women in platonic friendships that now they’re rarely initiated?
Of course, it’s entirely plausible that people just never talk about them — your point about people just lurving them some drama is well-put — but then wouldn’t we still know examples of them from our personal lives? I’ll hazard to say that *most guys* don’t seem to know many, if any, heterosexual people of opposite genders in platonic friendships. Shoot, quite the opposite, people seem to know a great many guys who, for one reason or another, hooked-up with or got turned-down by some female “friend” of theirs. So are these experiences rarities and fictional gossip, or are they a regular happenstance?
Honestly, I can’t say for 100% certain, but my experience — which is pretty damn extensive, actually –and the experiences of the people I’ve met says otherwise.
If you have read postings of mine you know that I was branded gay during high school and didn’t get to date. Naturally when I got to college I wanted to make up for lost time. But I was a little gun shy.
I was in a unique situation because I was only about forty miles from a large city and in a tiny college town. Also, I was from a town in between the two. As I got to know the girls on campus I went slow cultivating friendships as well as dating.
Because i didn’t go all horndog I got to really rub it in the faces of the guys that had harassed me in high school because often I would have three or four girls go home with me for the weekend. The girls loved getting to go shopping in a reasonable sized town. I never had to worry about dates but more importantly lots of friendships and almost all of them were women.
About ten years later as a marriage was ending I reconnected with a close female friend. But unfortunately she was too close of a friend. So even though she was very receptive to my sexual overtures my mind could not go from her being a friend to her being a lover.
Later in therapy for PTSD for my marriage (yeah, that bad) I learned that this does happen. So in some cases once a friend always a friend.
I’m glad that you appear to have made up for lost time in college and I’m sorry about what you went through (because if you needed therapy after that divorce it had to be terrible).
About ten years later as a marriage was ending I reconnected with a close female friend. But unfortunately she was too close of a friend. So even though she was very receptive to my sexual overtures my mind could not go from her being a friend to her being a lover.
I imagine there are a few women in my life now that if I were to try to think of them as more than a friend it would simply not compute.