Archive for August 20th, 2009

The editor’s post about the male friends issue seemed to create quite a foment. I am here to clarify the problem at hand. I was the one who was complaining.

Now, I have no problems with male friends. I have always had piles of them. I value them very much, they have been there for me in crucial moments, and made up the majority of my socialization. I get two things out of these relationships – I can mate-search and hopefully also enjoy good conversation.

However, there are different types of male friends. There are those relationships with which Nietzsche would agree – those in which there is such revulsion that no attraction is possible. I haven’t had one of those.

There are those in which there is a tacit agreement not to hit on one another. We are intellectual friends who are probably slightly attracted to one another, but for reasons such as distance and temperament are not actively attempting to pursue a relationship – yet.

Then there are those in which I wake up one day and realize I have somehow gone from friend #2 to the unacceptable: female friend who has become male friend, and hears stuff that makes me go “TMI!” There is a difference between a guy casually mentioning other girls and telling me all about his gigs. At this point, I see no point for me to pursue the relationship further because I don’t want to be with this guy even in the abstract as I have been repulsed and the conversation has soured (we should have stuck to literature).

Now, there are all things in between. Sometimes there appears to be interest on his side in a relationship. But that can drag on and on and on – for years! At some point I start to wonder why I’m keeping him around (see, good conversation will have kept him around – but only for so long if he hits on me, as I will start to weary of the empty chase).

I suppose what it comes down to is that my male friends are guys who, by and large, I’d like to go out with (that’s why I don’t have male friends with girlfriends. That would just be weird.) – at least in the abstract! So, if he makes himself someone I wouldn’t want a relationship with – by, say, talking about other girls to excess, after all I don’t want to be that woman who in ten years writes Dear Abby to say her husband is always looking at other women’s legs and it’s driving her to the breaking point – then he’s walking a thin line.

I won’t be so extreme as my mother (I rarely am in views about dating, probably why I have the problems I have) and say that if he mentions someone else, he’s gone. But if he does it enough, the attraction fails and he may fall off my wagon. After all, in the life according to Pia, male friends are as rare and wonderful as rocks – metaphorically.