Screwing Friendship

Everyone but the most obnoxious, most flatulent, or the most evil, cruel, and deranged of us, have friends.


They are our mentors and confidantes; our companions and saviors. The people who will take us home when we’re drunk, and hold our heads as we puke, or sit beside us in jail cells. Friends will act as your conscience; they’ll let you know if the person you’re dating is an asshole, because they don’t want you to get hurt. They’ll go up arms beside your family to threaten and possibly beat the shit out of someone causing you grief. They are the people who listen to us bitch and moan and brag about our lives, without judging us too harshly for it.


This next series of articles will be an analysis and tribute to our friends, and the bizarre ways they affect our lives, for better or for worse.


My father once told me that all straight men have thought about sleeping with their female friends. I instantly, instinctively, dismissed him as insane. Like any modern woman, I have male friends, and I never, ever sleep with them. Male friends, I decided, should be regarded as brothers, and treated with the same casual affection and bitchy teasing I used on my own family.


The policy worked just fine…that is until I found myself in bed with one two summers ago.


‘Leo’ and I had been friends for years. We met in college, and disliked each other on sight. I thought he was an overbearing, arrogant ass. Leo thought I was a phony. On top of all this, he was dating a friend of mine, and that made him strictly off limits. Things got more complicated when I hooked up with his best friend, a naïve, obnoxious frat boy who went to Europe with the intent of sticking his penis in everything but the light-sockets and then coming back to my loving arms.


After two semesters of hearing the frat boy brag about his sexual exploits long distance and the endless nagging from concerned friends, I decided I was fed up with his selfishness and immaturity. I ignored most his emails, went to a fetish club, and even went to second and third base with a couple of men. When I realized I didn’t care who he was sleeping with, I breathed a sigh of relief, for I knew then that I was free. In the meantime, Leo and I grew closer. We went for coffee, to movies, out with friends, all casual, innocent stuff. Then one weekend we went to the country with for party, one thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, he was down in me in the process of giving me some of the best oral sex I’ve ever had. Nearly two years later, his best friend, my ex, has disappeared into obscurity, and Leo and I are living happily ever after.

True as it is, the story seems to be right out of a bad romance novel.


Bestselling author Debbie Macomber made her fortune with the disappointingly sexless romance novel, This Matter of Marriage. The book is the story of two close friends, Hallie and Steve, who become attracted to each other, and, despite a lack of detail on the part of the author, presumably have sex, fall in love, get married and make babies. Friends sleep together all the time, crossing the strictly platonic, non-sexual line that will likely mess up their friendship forever. Some, like Leo and I, end up having happy meaningful relationships. Others are not so lucky, and end up destroying a perfectly good friendship…which begs the question:


When it comes to our friends…


Is sex an option? Or is it strictly hands off?


The easy answer to that comes down to whether you value sex, or the friend, more. But unfortunately, life isn’t easy. Say you do have sex to satisfy a mutual need, perhaps resulting from a combination of bad dates, past relationships, and the general need for pleasure and physical intimacy; you’re looking at a few possible outcomes.


If the sex is good, then, who knows? Romantic love might join in the mix of easy, platonic feelings you have for each other. You could fall in love, and, like in the textbook romance, end up living happily ever after.


In another potential scenario, the sex could bring to light some dormant feelings, and one party could fall in love, while the other doesn’t. You see it on sitcoms all the time, and like on those lame ass television shows, its one of the many ways sex can screw up a friendship. With only one person in love, the other is stuck with the predicament of figuring out which lines to draw in order to stay friendly and fucking without out all the emotional baggage that comes with a normal, healthy relationship. If the line can’t be drawn, one option is to stop having sex, and hope that the friend looking at you with puppy dog eyes will get the message. If that fails, then its time to suck it in and have “the talk”; that awkward, clear-the-air-talk you find yourself having towards the end of a bad relationship. Unfortunately, these don’t always go over well, and in that case, the end result usually means going your separate ways, thus kissing a perfectly good friendship goodbye.

However, if the friend is bad in bed, you’re stuck with the problem of how to switch from ‘fuck buddies’ back to the easygoing relationship you had, sans sex. My friend Diana found herself with this dilemma when she tried sleeping with a male friend she’d been hanging out with. The guy turned out to be pretty limp in the sex department, and, after about a month of trying, told him they’d be better off as friends.
Sure enough, things got awkward after that. Now they hardly speak to each other.


Or take Mary and Jo, two fairly good friends, completely unsuited to each other by virtue of the fact that he’s a shameless womanizer and she’s an innocent, no sex before marriage type. They decided to upgrade themselves from just friends to friends with benefits, presumably going to first, second, possibly third base, while doing all the standard boyfriend/girlfriend stuff all us happy couples do. Between him bitching about a case of blue balls so bad he’s “waddling”, and with her so prudish she regularly vetoed words like “pussy” and “masturbation” in the all-female discussion groups I’ve had; I’ve never seen a pair so far on the road to disaster. At first I thought I was judging too harshly…that is, until I discovered that Bob had been cheating on her; getting his ya-yas out, presumably to ease his discomfort so he could resume the immaculate relationship he had with Mary. Mary put up with it, because like all women in their first relationship, she deluded herself into thinking she couldn’t do better. When Bob got a job out of town, Mary followed him, only discover that he’d resumed his philandering ways, sticking his penis in any female that let him. She returned home and is in the process of recovering. The chance of them ever being friends again is slim to none.


The moral of their story is this: fucking often fucks up friendships. In this modern society, lovers come and go, but good friends, the kind that will sleep outdoors if there’s a sock on the doorknob, and nurse you back to health after a hangover, are one in a million. While there are cases of friends making the transition to a “happily ever after”, the chances of that, or safely shifting back to “just friends’” after one or two sexual escapades are not good. If you’re looking to get laid, you’re better off hooking up with someone whose friendship you don’t value so highly, so that if things get uncomfortable, you can always make a clean break and get on with your lives without worrying about messy politics.


Screenwriter, Sophie Irene Loeb once said that platonic friendship was “[T]he interval between the introduction and the first kiss”. Unless you’re absolutely certain the two of you can part friends, or live happily ever after, you’re better off not complicating things with sexual activity. That interval could be the best thing two people will ever have.


Don’t blow it.

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