Friends, lovers, or nothing
You see
There can only be one
Friends, lovers, or nothing
We’ll never be an inbetween
So give it up
–John Mayer/Friends, Lovers or Nothing
With most people you interact with on a regular basis, you have some sort of defined relationship. Sure, there is overlap, but you have work colleagues, acquaintances, friends, and lovers. Sometimes you put an “ex” or “former” in front of it. Maybe a friend morphs into an occasional lover. Maybe a former lover morphs into a friend. Maybe there is a colleague from work who you also hang out with outside of work.
There are, though, some people who just don’t fit entirely into one of those categories.
Maybe they’re a former lover who is still important to you, but being lovers is not an option. Maybe you’re too close or just have too much history to be friends if one or both of you are currently in other relationships. What do you do with those people? When you have a limited number of people in the world who you love, like I do, then you feel very strongly about the people in your life. I hate to lose even one person who I love. It’s a pretty rare occurrence for me, and I want to hang on to as many of them as I possibly can.
I hate to get hung up on the definitions. I certainly don’t want to even remotely imply that my friends are “just friends” but there are a few people in my life who are more than friends, but not lovers, and I’ve never been quite sure how that’s supposed to work. They are people who I love, but who are awkward to be around in some way. Awkward for our partners, awkward for us. Or worse than awkward. Painful at times.
Former lovers who you didn’t love but always liked are fairly easy to deal with, as long as they aren’t completely clueless about how to behave. Former lovers who you love, but weren’t in love with, are also easy to be friends with.
This is all assuming that you have understanding current romantic partners, of course.
Of course, a lot of people also say that men and women can’t be friends at all, because men just want to fuck women. I have to call bullshit on that. Perhaps we do want to fuck each other, but does that mean we can’t be friends? Does it mean that just because we want to fuck each other that we will not be able to be faithful to our current partners? Not in my experience, although there are obviously some people who are far more of a challenge in that regard than others. There are also probably people who can’t get past wanting to fuck each other and can’t be friends.
I think it just depends on the people.
If you’re hoping that I’m going to come to some sort of conclusion on the best way to handle this, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I’m all gorked out on cold meds, and I am even more emotionally/logically/philosophically challenged than I usually am. ***
Plus, I just don’t know.
I tend to handle it like I handle every emotional challenge: by being completely inept and relying on luck and the good will of the other people involved to figure something out. Mostly that seems to work for me. People who know me well enough to love me seem to realize that although I am a dork, I am a dork with good intentions. Maybe that counts for something.
I think it will be alright.
I’m almost sure it will.
***an example of just how gorked out I am:
I just washed my hair with hand lotion. It didn’t work very well.
Looking forward to some interesting dreams….