Friends, you say..?

Ah, I’m back! Let’s see what we have today… A few years ago, on New Years’ Eve, a friend asked me, “So tell me, how do you stay ‘just friends’ with a girl? I’ve never understood that…” I thought it was the easiest thing in the world… Of course, at the time, he was going steady with his girlfriend of two years and I had no one. So I say, “Nothing simpler. Just don’t think of her as a girl!” He just laughed and shook his head and that was the end of the conversation. Somehow, I got the feeling that he wasn’t laughing at my answer, he was laughing at me. Until that time, I had never really liked any girl that I knew or had known… Of course, there was the occasional Hot Chick that I lusted after, but then, who didn’t? And let’s face it, I never had a shot anyway. Ok, I’m straying off my point… It took me some time and a few more new friends, before I realized why I was laughed at. You can’t not think of a girl as a girl. You can’t be ‘just friends’ with a girl. There’s always a ‘feeling’ of something. It may not be sexual, it may not be romantic, but it’s something. You don’t get the feeling when you’re hangin’ with the guys, you don’t feel it when you’re with your best friend. But put a girl into the picture with you and see how it slithers out of the shadows to hang right over your head. You look at her differently from (not 'differently than' -thats just American) all your friends. It’s the law of nature, of procreation. Men were made to take women, not just hold their hand. Society and social mores gradually euphemized reality to a state where all men do not simply take women, (sometimes they take men!) but eventually take them, through courtship. This courtship… It’s what holds a man from outright claiming his woman, the ritual, as it were, that curbs the primal instinct to spontaneously mate. This primal instinct within us all is why you can’t stay ‘just friends’. Forget television and movies, they'll always remain fantasies; alternate realities.

You can be ‘friends’, even ‘best friends’, but not ‘just friends’.