Recently I had an encounter of the female to female kind. This other female is the current girlfriend of one of my ex-boyfriends with whom I spoke from time to time. Call me unconventional or masochistic, but it's really hard for me to dispense of people even when they deserve it. ( but that is neither here nor there.) In any case, I received a text from her saying that someone had sent her my phone number and told her she needed to talk to me. ( Talk about a WTF moment.) Being that it was never my intention to be a reason for her to doubt the man in her life (who is also the father of the child she is carrying,) I met her with just as much surprise as she received when she got a text telling her that the man of her dreams was stepping out...
THIS RIGHT HERE IS WHAT I HAVE TRIED TO AVOID FOR YEARS.
I freely offered her information, with apologies and candor, hoping that we could get to the bottom of whatever was happening. I've never felt more like the other woman (though there were no shenanigans to speak of on the part of her partner and I.) Putting myself in her shoes and defending the guy who in all reality has not been a good friend for a long time... its just a lot of actions all in one play that don't seem to make any logical sense as far as self-preservation is concerned.
This one story speaks greatly to the rest.
Trying to be respectful of one another requires a higher commitment than just a promise and a word. It's almost like once someone has entered into a relationship, it can often be seen as something that begins to absorb all other parts of them and their independent lives. Friends, interests, free time, values, longings; they meld into one. It makes sense when people talk about 2 becoming 1 in a marriage, because by the time they reach the alter, most people have changed into a compilation of the people they were on their own, the person they are with their partner, and the person they became afterward. That's not to say it is a negative thing to meld with someone. Shit, we all thrive on the prospect of striking a chemistry with someone that fills us up in a way that nothing else seems to match...
Chemistry. That's it.
It's the one thing we can still have together, without being together. Now I know that some naive person is going to criticize me for saying this, but whether or not anyone will admit it, the opposite-sex friends that we keep around have some kind of draw for us. Some would call it a Freudian response to attraction, but we like to keep the company we like. Whatever it looks like, and whatever it has to be for it to still be. Sometimes that means settling for less than stellar guy friends who are pussy-whipped and forget that even though he have boobs, we can still hang out. Other times it means settling for being friends because we can't be anything else. I know it isn't as cut and draw as that in real life. Most things are not that simple to explain away. Friendships, relationships, attraction, interactions... these are things people have been spending the whole of human existence trying to understand and explain. (And they are still trying, which doesn't make much sense to me.)
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