Friendly Fire/Favor
Whenever you get together with long-time friends, it doesn’t take long to see just how much and how little you’ve changed. This past weekend, I didn’t just see any old friend, but one of my closest friends who happens to live on the other side of the world.
Since I began writing this column she’s inspired a lot of my themes and provided me with plenty of anecdotes, and for that I am eternally grateful, especially because each anecdote usually got her in trouble with her boyfriend at the time. As usual, there was no steady boyfriend to introduce her to during this visit, but I guess in a lot of ways that’s better, because too often we let our friends’ opinions of our lovers color the way we see them.
In the last six years that we’ve known each other, we’ve had a lot of men in our lives and in our beds. Though she spent the majority of college in monogamous relationships, and I spent my time trying to avoid them, we always had plenty of notes to compare and now have found ourselves on the other side of college looking for different things again. While I try to climb the corporate ladder at home and flesh out a long-lasting relationship, she’s trying to figure out how to succeed outside the 9-to-5 world and enjoy her freedom abroad.
To say our friends’ differences complement us is an absurd understatement. Their experiences inform our decisions as much as our own trials and tribulations. There are times when their relationships mirror exactly what we want to avoid or precisely what we hope to find: that whatever the result, we’ve learned something in the process. Of course their individual interactions are not something we can recreate so the lessons are at best generalizations.
Worrying what our friends think about our new paramours also illustrates how highly we regard their opinion. I think about this when I analyze how I introduce a new lover to my friends. Some I’ve kept to myself almost exclusively. Others I brought out on the very first date. I don’t know if I felt that some would fit in more than others, or that some were just not that interesting to begin with. Some lovers seemed to fade in the glare of scrutiny, while others either flourished or floundered if my friends found them favorable. Sometimes when my friends did approve it made the guy seem less desirable.
When I think about my friends’ boyfriends, I’ve probably only liked about 50% of them. But it was only those friends that allowed their relationships to profoundly change them that damaged our friendship in any way. Relationships are divisive by design. They take up the attention that is often provided by multiple friends, in one easy package. But if dating has shown me anything, it’s that you’re more likely to have the same friends down the line, than the same boyfriend. So it pays to be understanding when your friends go on hiatus and viceversa.
Eventually I assume my friends and I will settle down, or at least most of us will. Whether we like each others’ husbands, boyfriends, partners, or otherwise (or not at all), I hope our shared history and time spent in the dating trenches will keep us close to one another. After all, our friends all add different flavors to our life, but it will be our lover(s) that will make that life a meal.
B.B. Nichols lives and works in New York. He has been writing Everybody Does It since 2005.
Appeared originally on Homo-Neurotic.com on 9/29/09
Since I began writing this column she’s inspired a lot of my themes and provided me with plenty of anecdotes, and for that I am eternally grateful, especially because each anecdote usually got her in trouble with her boyfriend at the time. As usual, there was no steady boyfriend to introduce her to during this visit, but I guess in a lot of ways that’s better, because too often we let our friends’ opinions of our lovers color the way we see them.In the last six years that we’ve known each other, we’ve had a lot of men in our lives and in our beds. Though she spent the majority of college in monogamous relationships, and I spent my time trying to avoid them, we always had plenty of notes to compare and now have found ourselves on the other side of college looking for different things again. While I try to climb the corporate ladder at home and flesh out a long-lasting relationship, she’s trying to figure out how to succeed outside the 9-to-5 world and enjoy her freedom abroad.
To say our friends’ differences complement us is an absurd understatement. Their experiences inform our decisions as much as our own trials and tribulations. There are times when their relationships mirror exactly what we want to avoid or precisely what we hope to find: that whatever the result, we’ve learned something in the process. Of course their individual interactions are not something we can recreate so the lessons are at best generalizations.
Worrying what our friends think about our new paramours also illustrates how highly we regard their opinion. I think about this when I analyze how I introduce a new lover to my friends. Some I’ve kept to myself almost exclusively. Others I brought out on the very first date. I don’t know if I felt that some would fit in more than others, or that some were just not that interesting to begin with. Some lovers seemed to fade in the glare of scrutiny, while others either flourished or floundered if my friends found them favorable. Sometimes when my friends did approve it made the guy seem less desirable.
When I think about my friends’ boyfriends, I’ve probably only liked about 50% of them. But it was only those friends that allowed their relationships to profoundly change them that damaged our friendship in any way. Relationships are divisive by design. They take up the attention that is often provided by multiple friends, in one easy package. But if dating has shown me anything, it’s that you’re more likely to have the same friends down the line, than the same boyfriend. So it pays to be understanding when your friends go on hiatus and viceversa.
Eventually I assume my friends and I will settle down, or at least most of us will. Whether we like each others’ husbands, boyfriends, partners, or otherwise (or not at all), I hope our shared history and time spent in the dating trenches will keep us close to one another. After all, our friends all add different flavors to our life, but it will be our lover(s) that will make that life a meal.
B.B. Nichols lives and works in New York. He has been writing Everybody Does It since 2005.
Appeared originally on Homo-Neurotic.com on 9/29/09
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