the solipsist in love

Friends with sexual tension

Last night during my cock-obsessed hours, I happened to leave the TV on a channel that started showing Will and Grace reruns. It’s not a show I choose to watch, but I tolerate it if it’s on. Anyway, I managed to catch a couple of the subplots; one revolved around Will running into an ex at a restaurant and making a big fucking deal about it. He was suddenly worried that he’d made a mistake in ending the relationship. When he finally talked to the guy, his ex reported that he was happy and his life was moving forward and he was seeing someone new.

Will came back to Grace devastated. And Grace held his hand and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, honey. It’s always hard to hear that your ex is happy.” And you could tell that the audience wasn’t sure whether this was supposed to be funny; no one laughed, but you could feel the tension. It’s a terrible, selfish thing to feel like crap about an ex being happy with someone else, but isn’t that just how it goes?

I talked to one of my more recent exes – Jon – tonight for the first time in about two months. He asked me what was new and I told him I’d broken up with that crazy poly couple (his response when I’d told him about the relationship two months before had been “That sounds terrible;” he had been right, though I didn’t want to admit it then). And then he told me he was seeing someone. I congratulated him; luckily for me, it’s a lot easier to fake sincerity over IMs.

This is a tendency of mine, if you haven’t noticed: I like to cling to past relationships, to look back and say, “yeah, that wasn’t so bad… he was a good guy… i really cared about him… we had something. Maybe there’s something worth going back for.” And I just like to have that option available. Never mind that Jon and I aren’t very sexually compatible (he’s extremely passive and his sex-drive is as close to non-existent as a 26-year-old male’s can get), and he’s also strongly opposed to open relationships, so there’s no way a romantic relationship would have worked out between us. As long as I’m settling for sexual/romantic arrangements that fail to satisfy my needs, he would have been a decent candidate. We had such a nice rapport: he was easygoing and comfortable and affectionate and goofy and intelligent and domestic. A really good balance to my moody insanity.

Bah.

I read a blog post tonight about how to handle a breakup. It was written in a blog that I’m coming to find irritating in its relentless positivity (but that’s a topic for another post). Anyway, in the first section there was mention of how the end of a romantic relationship doesn’t have to mean the end of the friendship, too. You can preserve the connection, the intimacy and the love you feel for one another and just remove all of the romantic baggage. Wow, that sounds really nice, doesn’t it?

But here’s the problem: I’m not at all sure it’s possible to be friends with someone you were once sexually or romantically attracted to (see my blog post on this topic, “Your guy friend wants to get into your pants”). Poly Dude was of this opinion too, more specifically that men and women in general are not capable of being “just friends” without sexual tension. Sex is always in the equation, whether or not both parties acknowledge it. In fact, because Poly Dude was bi and incredibly attractive to both sexes (sigh), he felt that friendship in general was not possible without sexual tension. In his opinion, then, there is no pure form of friendship in practice. His girlfriend Kristen and I disagreed with this, saying the problem was exclusive to men, though ironically my friendship/relationship with her came apart because she developed strong sexual feelings for me. I think I generally manage my female-female friendships without any significant sexual tension, though this may be simply because of brutal, largely unconscious repression mechanisms at work in my psyche.

But with men, I’ve come to expect that either I will want to have sex with a guy or he will want to have sex with me. Most men are willing to have sex with any given woman, under the right circumstances. Because of this, I can never get too close to a guy “platonically” because the more intimate we become, the greater the possibility that he will somehow misinterpret and try to make a move on me. Alternatively, even if he doesn’t misinterpret my behavior, his attraction to me might turn to resentment at not sleeping with him. Both of these scenarios have occurred in my life with boys I considered very close friends. Maybe they were just idiots and it’s unfair to generalize. But so far I haven’t found an exception to the rule.

I was thinking about this regarding Luke, who told me again the other night that he was happy “just being friends” when I said I wasn’t interested in casual sex. But come on. The level of attraction there is ridiculous; it’s force unto itself. Do I think we could hang out casually and not feel that lust coursing between us? Fuck no. Not possible, no way.

But when I think about it with respect to Jon I just get sad. It reminds me that the level of intimacy that we aspired to together is no longer possible between us. Maybe this is just how people in our society are programmed: you reach the deepest intimacy with your primary partner, the one you share your body and your life with. No one else. Maybe it doesn’t have to be this way. I don’t know. That’s a topic for another post.

Related reading:
Your guy friend wants to get into your pants.