With Friends Like These

I get along with guys. Now, I wouldn’t say I get along with all guys, but then again I don’t get along with all girls. I like to think it’s a question of character – does something click, does something spark? Just as I would come to expect the same in my romantic relationships, I search for that indescribable something with my platonic relationships as well.

Male/female relationships however, can often become convoluted. By what? You ask. Well what do you think? Sex. More often than not it is the man who becomes infatuated with the woman. Is this because they always wanted it to develop into something right from the beginning – I don’t know, you tell me. I’m not saying this is always the case, I’m just saying out of most of the guys I know, they wouldn’t mind if it did.  

In my life I’d say I’ve only had a handful of male friends. I can be pretty discerning with my friendships in general, having had my fingers burnt before by the autonomous ‘fake fucks and opportunists.’ My first one was in secondary school and we used to sit next to one another in class. If I’m completely honest, I just wasn’t attracted to him. Now had I been, this may have been a very different thing. The problem was he was attracted to me.

When you’re 15, this doesn’t pose much of an issue. You’re selfish, you’re flakey, you’re completely absorbed by your own issues, your own crushes – other people, especially people who aren’t a) your best friend b) your love interest, pale in comparison. So when his friends started telling me that he liked me, I brushed it off. I just don’t feel that way, I don’t want it to ruin the friendship. You know, the usual rhetoric. I wasn’t about to say, the thought of you being my boyfriend and doing those things boyfriends and girlfriends do makes me feel nauseous. I know that’s cruel – but love, or lust in this case, more often is.

He was one of my closest friends. We saw each other outside of school, we texted, we talked and I genuinely did value the friendship. However, after he admitted his feelings for the third time, things started to go downhill. He started to see other girls and would relish the opportunity to tell me all about it. At the beginning I enjoyed. He seemed happy, confident, he was dating and most of all, our friendship had survived the usually life threatening ‘friendzone’ and just become, you know, friendship. But then it just got weird. I guess you could say it was the overcompensating. I love when people confide in me, I think it’s what makes your friendship stronger, but he was selective in what he told me, as if to get a response from me. When he didn’t, he just disappeared entirely. I heard recently that he’s now strung out and addicted to smoking weed, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

Between that time and now, I’ve had a few more male friends. One of them, again, I guess I did place in the friendzone. I knew he liked me, but I didn’t like him in that way, yet he seemed determined to have some kind of relationship with me, which in turn I gave back as friendship. Now, while I am a very strong person, I can also be very weak. When people fight to get into my life and bury themselves so deep I cannot pick them out from under it, I just let them. Does that make me complicit, should I have fought more? Maybe. Do I however feel guilty?

I do feel guilty about this one. Again, I didn’t feel that way about him, but I was at a stage where the feelings he had for me were flattering and there is nothing more attractive than someone being attracted to you. He made me feel good and bad about myself in equal measures, good because someone was obsessed with me, smitten with my looks and personality, and I was actually very insecure and needed validation. Nonetheless, I did feel bad. I felt bad because instead of closing the door I kept it open just enough that he felt able to crawl back in. It was demeaning and he seemed willing to demean himself. This only stopped after seven years when he finally met someone who truly liked him for him.

My other male friend was gay. This relationship lies within a spectrum of its own, with no place amongst my female relationships or my male, romantic or platonic. In this relationship, sexuality almost became redundant. We were two people brought together by mutual love and care, we would speak for hours, share a bed, holiday together. There was never any competition, like with past female friends. There were bitchy moments, yes, but he would never try to cut me that deep. We were bound by a friendship almost so pure, it has surpassed friendship. In this case, this person became like my family, due to the complex and fascinating nature of the gay community itself. ‘We get to choose our family,’ says Ru Paul, our favourite TV host, who we watch with obsession. And he’s right, because we chose one another.

If only all friendships were as easy as that one. Sometimes they are, like my friendship with my last, and current ‘only’ male friend. He’s engaged, happily so, and has been in a relationship for about eight years. This friendship, however, brings up the very interest dichotomy that is ‘male/female brains’ and how some men can be more feminine and some women, more masculine.

One of my best female friends subscribes to the more ‘masculine’ brain. For years we never talked about feelings, about family or about real relationships. These subject were touched upon, but never analysed, as I would do with my other close female friends. And yet, we spent countless hours together. We holidayed, slept over, went out for drinks, nights outs, benders – whatever. There was never a moment of silence, we laughed so hard I think that is why, to this day, I still have slight abs. It was so easy, so uncomplicated. It was like having ‘a male best friend’ in that sense, just minus the issue of ‘friendzoning.’

But back to my engaged friend. He is like having ‘a female friend.’ He is not gay, of course, but he is malleable. Some would say a social chameleon, and to be honest, he’d probably like that. He can work with the boys, blend in, put on a gruff voice and speak football and birds – but then he can sit with me and we can talk about our feelings, our relationships – hell even our fears. Perhaps this is just the nature of multifaceted people. There is not one face, but many, and they can turn that face to a different occasion and show sometimes a smile, or even a grimace. That is not to say these people are manipulative or two-faced even. Quite the contrary. They just show every aspect of themselves, where others are sometimes afraid to show even one.

I do like people. I like interested, diverse, complicated people. I like people who don’t always get along with other people, people who sometimes do and say the wrong thing. I like humanity in people – and I liked to see negativity too. My friendships are my friendships for the good and the bad, and they are beautiful because we learn to love people for that very reason. My engaged friend is good and bad. He sometimes refers to me as ‘one of the boys’ because I too can blend, just as I can adhere to ‘gender types’ and gossip with my girlfriends and then make crude, disgusting jokes with the boys. And of course, this blends again and we do these same things with people of the same sex, because like I said – there is more to being female than having a feminine brain and likewise.

This, interestingly, brings me back to one final person. We were never friends, I still to this day will refute any claims that we were. We established our relationship with banter and flirting, and then a probably ill-advised one-night stand. This one-night stand would have stayed within the realms of one night had the universe not thrown our personalities together and the reaction was – explosive. We got along. We really got along. Now, we could have been friends, maybe in a different world. If we’d have met each other when we were younger, perhaps, when friendships so often solidify and endure, despite other external factors – their ‘history’ alone seems to keep that person in your life, even when they are not in your life, because you are ‘old friends’ and you can get away with neglecting one another. But we never were. We knew each other based on two things – attractivity and sex. We were attracted to one another’s looks so we had sex, it wasn’t until after did we realise one another had a personality, and then later still, that these personalities worked. The coming together of two people, I have realised, is almost like a formula – though occasionally a formula that cannot be explained. We were from two different socioeconomic backgrounds, our friends were different, our jobs different – even are races. But did we get along nonetheless, yes? And would I have loved him as a friend? Most definitely.

But this relationship was convoluted. When you start to adhere to certain practises, going out for dinner, the man paying, texting here and there, catching up, planning another dinner – you no longer are friends. You are in the strange and often uncertain realm of ‘seeing one another.’ And you are not seeing one another because you plan to become platonic, that is one thing we can definitively take out of the equation because it has no place being there and never will. The problem is when you start to care about someone, someone who is not your friend and not your boyfriend, but just someone – that relationship needs to go one of two ways. In this case it went nowhere. I will not go into the reasons why – let’s just say external arbitrary factors, but our relationship was no longer even based on sex. There was mutual respect, trust, I confided in him and he in me. When he needed to talk, he spoke to me, just as when I wanted to talk, it was he who I wanted to go to. But I didn’t always – because the lines were blurred. HE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND, I told myself. It has been a long time since this started, and not much time has passed since it finally ended, though I am glad that it has. In our time he has seen other people and I have seen others also. We have tried to hurt one another, tried to stay in touch, lost touch, stopped caring – all the things and yet none of them, that you would do with your friends. It became strange to me how close you could grow with someone, and how much care you could develop when there was little to nothing holding you together. When I said that we should no longer speak, he said to me ‘but first and foremost I thought we were friends.’

I thought this was interesting. I knew why he said it – it was the last thing to hang onto, the last resort to keep this relationship, whatever it was, intact. But in doing so it undermined everything we had that was not and never could have been associated with being friends. We were never friends, I said calmly. I can count my friends on both hands – and he wasn’t one of them. He still has lots of female friends – purely platonic. He’s the type of guy who can sit as a girlie brunch and have a fantastic time. In his desire to hang on to whatever we had, he dumbed it down to being friends – friends who are attracted to one another. Friends who have sex, friends who talk at depth, friends who kiss and cuddle and tell each other things they wouldn’t necessarily tell others.

So were we friends? Maybe in some ways. It depends what your idea of friendship is, I guess, because after all aren’t these things so often relative. But the question is: do I think men and women can be friends? Of course. The proof is in the pudding. However, I do not necessarily think that this is a matter of gender, all people are different, their needs, their desires, their wants – hell their dreams. Like I said before, I do not get along with every guy I meet, or girl for that matter. But when I do, gender does not apply. The thing is though, like everything, relationships evolve. I have had enemies become friendly acquaintances, become best friends, become my family and later still, seen best friends become acquaintances, who then became my enemies – so who knows where anything will lead. The thing is though, we can’t ignore the fact that in a male/female heterosexual relationship, involving two single parties, usually at some point someone will want to be involved in a romantic and sexual relationship – and not even necessarily with the other person at first. But after a while, is it that crazy to think ‘why not them?’ Because after all, if someone’s good enough to be your best friend, they’re sure as hell good enough to be your lover too The only question is: do both parties want it? Because that’s a completely different question after all.