Screwing Up Friendship

Look, indulge me with this, okay?  I'm not sure where it's going but I promise I'll steer clear of Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail — essentially the same film merely with a different cast theme music. But if you behave yourself and don't fidget I promise by the end of this post I'll work in a reference to High Fidelity.

Now, this week I laid Sally and Harry's eternal dilemma — can men and women really be friends — at the feet of the lovely people of Twitter, and was pleasantly surprised by the volume of response.  Clearly I am not alone in banging my head against this particularly bad-arse Venus-Mars conjunction.  I should point out that a lot of valuable and insightful research material (in 140 characters or less) arrived under cover of Direct Messaging, the Twitter equivalent of an unmarked brown envelope.

Because, yes, ladies and gents, we've got ourselves a

hot potato, and if Twitter is anything to go by nearly all of us have something to hide.

What struck me most was the air of Shakespearean tragedy surrounding these sad little tales; the theme of star-crossed friendships ruined by the imperative to put Male Part 'B' into Female Part 'A'.  As soon as the beast with two backs entered stage right, the friendship disappeared pursued by a bear.  And the most touching, hopeless, thing of all is that the majority of you regretted losing a good friend.  Men and women in equal measure.

So, it seems to be an open and shut case.  Men and women just can't help experimenting with their genitals, a situation non-conducive to friendship.

But wait, what's this?  A glimmer of hope in the desolate landscape of friends with benefits?

A small proportion of respondents claimed that of course it was possible, that they had many good friends of the opposite sex and the thought of boffing them fully tested their gag reflex.  Hurrah! I thought, and danced my little party jig, the one I save for very special occasions. 

This story will have a happy ending!

On closer inspection, however, all was not as it seemed.   Each happy, shiny optimist fervently avowing that they had succeeded in doing what the rest of us had failed to —  ie, learning the lesson of Zammo Maguire of just saying 'no' and applying it liberally all over our privates — wasn't being quite truthful.

Prima facie, it all seemed above board.  However, all of their assertations ended with "but", a small word so clever in design that it can almost go unnoticed even as it negates the entire preceding sentence causing an argument to crumble into a dusty handful of wishful thinking.

"Of course men and women can be friends, but of course being gay helps."
"My best friend is male, but I've known him since primary school - it'd be like committing incest."  (You can see how that might work as a damper.)
"A very good friend of mine is a girl, but I secretly fancy her."

El Hombre shares the view of the last respondent:  that in a friendship of opposites at least one of those involved fancies the other and is secretly just biding time until the planets align.  Or enough alcohol is consumed...

Here's my favourite:

"You can be great friends with a member of the opposite sex but not if they have a  partner."  (See Billy Crystal above.)

This is the one I slammed up against. 

Personally, I had been happily bumbling through life having non-sex friendship with lots of different men.  I like men; they make me laugh; I feel incomplete without a bloke-pal with whom to swap inappropriate spastic jokes.   So I was the biggest evangelist about men and women creating and maintaining beautiful friendships. 

Yes, you've noticed the imperfect tense creeping in there, haven't you?  Get ready with the Kleenex, Bambi's mum is about to take a bullet.

Trouble is, I'm no good at reading signs.  I've been told on more than one occasion that I give off an air of "You realise, of course, you have no chance of shagging me but you're welcome to try"  that, ahem, 'drives men wild'.  I promise you, this is not true, the most I aim for is "Please don't hate me". 

El Hombre has observed that a man could be dry-humping my leg and I'd just think he was being friendly.  Unless it is specifically spelt out to me, in simple words, to my face, I am oblivious to anyone fancying me.  I possess Stevie Wonder's acuity of deciphering body language.  I am a mating-ritual retard.  The fact that I'm married is testament to El Hombre's infinite and gentle patience.

All this analysis is the reaction to a very good friendship collapsing.  I'd become great pals with a married man. Sadly his wife was a proper nut-job.  Okay, okay, she may not have been a nut-job (she was) but from day one she had me in the cross-hairs of her paranoia.  Inevitably this had an effect.  Our tree of much-chumminess fell victim to Mrs Friend's brutal restrictive pruning.  Consequently it failed to thrive and eventually died, but not before sending out last-gasp suckers of resentful compromise. 

Sex was the culprit and I didn't even get any. Mrs Friend, however,thought we were a-gettin' plenty, and that was enough.  I found myself in the bewildering position of being treated like a mistress by both Mr and Mrs Friend, but without experiencing the post-coital complimentary custard cream in a faded two-star shag palace on the coast.

Sex, inevitably, will be an issue in some form or other in your friendship, sure as disease is linked to obesity.  You can't go round it; you can't go under or over it.  Somehow you just have to negotiate your way through it. 

One of my favourite tweeple starkly tweeted this:

"I'm not even sure they [men and women] can be twitter-friends without thinking about shagging."

And he is absolutely right.  How do I know this?  I'll tell you:

I'd been feeling a bit down and angsty, and one of my twitter-pals picked up on this and sent a really caring message.  It was beautiful.  Now, if this twitter-pal had been a girl I would have sighed with a small smile, and dabbed at the tear welling up in the corner of my eye in response to her thoughtfulness.

As it stands, the twitter-friend was male and for a split second I had a mental image of me straddling him on my ergonomically-designed chair and riding him hard around my office.

And that, ladies and gents, is why men and women can never be friends.