Hello teamliquidians!.. I've posted a lot of crap but actually never made a blog post, and since people usually use them to ask questions about this kind of thing, and this subject is a secret, I'm gonna talk about it here.
Some context: I'm right now a 24 year old 7th year medicine student, I'm average looking, but I really haven't engaged myself in any sports or training for the longest time, so that takes some points away. When I entered college, I immediately met a nice girl and started a relationship (Thing I now deeply regret. Not the relationship, but the fact I started right away). For the first 2 and a half years we carried on a relationship that, while nice at the beginning, started getting hammered by the girl's insane jealousy issues, I won't discuss this here but thing was so hard I'm now sort of traumatized and refuse to go out with any jealous girls at all (good for me imo!). Once in 4th grade, I was recently single, while my ex immediately started seeing someone else. At the same time, I was now without a best friend (fucking jealousy destroyed it), my mother had been diagnosed with cancer, and lots of people around me had died. I was alone, surrounded by people I didn't like. Suddenly, I was deeply depressed and started drinking like a madman, destroying my reputation and sinking me even lower.
Now where am I going with all this banter. The girl I'll talk about in this blog has been my classmate throughout med school. We've always been friends, we talk a lot, we have shared tons of stuff, and she was pretty much the only person who I could discharge my shit with. We had never engaged in any romantic activity and she's just my friend, for real, plus she was on a 9-year relationship with a boyfriend and it looked pretty serious. I've always been a dude who's best friends are girls, and I've never had any trouble because of this. She's always been pretty attractive though, oh scratch that, she's hot as hell hahaha.
Thing is, about 2 months ago, she got dumped. Real bad. Guy was a jackass. So, being a good friend, I walked her through her first breakup, let her cry on my shoulder, talked to her for hours about it, and she's sort of recovering. Of course she's not totally fine, but she's enjoying life again. Through this whole ordeal, we've sort of become "party partners", we go out, have drinks, dance a while, I drop her off at home, sometimes we watch a movie, etc. Somewhere around this we joked with the idea of a casual adventure, which obviously says to me: "I want this"
Two weeks ago, we were watching a movie, and I put my arm around her shoulder as usual. This time though, she held my hand, and we were really really warm with each other. We hugged a lot etc, but then she felt a bit uncomfortable because of her recent break up, so I backed off, talked to her for a while, then left. We later talked and straightened things up, and things went like usual.
This week, we went out again. We went to this salsa club (I suck at salsa but she loves it so I'm making an effort lol), then we went for beers and I went to drop her off home. When we got there, she invited me in and we were going to watch a movie and call it a night. Movie hadn't even started, when she approached me, I hugged her and pulled her to me, then she stared into my eyes and I just kissed her. Next thing you know, we're in her room kissing and stuff. This happened in about... 10 seconds, pretty much in an instant. We weren't even drunk.
So we talked about it and decided we'd keep this casual. She doesn't want a relationship at all, and I'm not in love or anything (no matter how cool she is I just don't feel it), and she asking me to keep it casual suggest to me she expects this to happen again (YAY!). So here's the thing:
1.- I don't want to damage our friendship, she's my best friend now, and I love to hang out and stuff, without anything sexual involved. She agrees, and insisted that she wants this to remain this way and she doesn't want our friendship to change. 2.- Apparently mutual attraction is pretty strong, so I fully expect this to happen again. I mean, it's always like that right? 3.- We agreed to stop as soon as one party fell in love when the other didn't and/or if one of us starts a relationship with another person.
So the question is, can my best friend be my friend with benefits and our friendship survive? I'm new at this, but this is my best friend, and I don't want to lose her. I'd rather never kiss her ever again than lose her as my friend. What does TL think?
On January 22 2012 04:25 Muffinman53 wrote: In my experiences, friends with benefits is always a bad idea. There are very very few people who can pull it off.
Yea feelings will almost always develop from at least 1 party lolol
Nah I've tried this twice before one time it didnt work and luckily she went to another city. The other time I ended it and she refused to give up on our friendship. She worked really damn hard to keep our friendship alive and luckily it worked. But in all honest if you want to do this you are going to get hurt, she's gonna get hurt and you may loose a really great friend. Also we were only able to be good friends again when we had moved on i.e. she was seeing someone else and vice versa.
Though it's pretty hard not to be attracted to someone who gets you and is attractive to you.
lets put it like that; yes, it can go on like usual, and it all can end well. you could even mutually fall in love and life a happy long life together. not gonna deny that.
....chances that it doesn't go like that and problems arise are like 99.9999999%. its not an absolute, buuuuut..... most likely won't end perfectly fine.
On January 22 2012 04:31 ~ava wrote: You are going to a salsa club for a "friend"? I call bullshit - you like her and should start an actual relationship with her.
But she needed company!.. I'm glad to help a friend out! :D
Plus I'm sure once my friends start getting married it's gonna be a useful skill toi have
BTW thanks to all good luck wishes... Apparently I'll need some lol.
Maybe if you go out of your way to tell her you're not having feelings for her and aren't going to have them. But this entire blog seems like a love letter to her, so maybe the feeling will come.
This blog reeks of you trying to convince yourself rather than ask for real advice, as you shoot down people who are (fairly) warning you how intimacy damages platonic friendships. The basic formula for a real relationship is social chemistry + intimacy and there's a reason the term "friends with benefits" is used mockingly more often than not.
On January 22 2012 04:54 TwoToneTerran wrote: This blog reeks of you trying to convince yourself rather than ask for real advice, as you shoot down people who are (fairly) warning you how intimacy damages platonic friendships. The basic formula for a real relationship is social chemistry + intimacy and there's a reason the term "friends with benefits" is used mockingly more often than not.
I'm not shooting down people, I actually agree with most people here, it's risky as hell. I'm trying to get to know people's opinions since I don't know personally anyone who's tried this .
It works for me. I dated a girl for about 2 years "romantically" but we've been friends w/ benifits for a year now and it's been working out wonderfully. I would suggest making an agreement not to see other people though, It's very easy to get confused emotionally otherwise.
Ask her what she thinks your future is like. This sort of deal happened to me 3 years ago. here's the really short gist of what happened:
-met a girl with whom we had quite a few mutual friends(she was single) -talked alot and started flirting a little -funny situation->she told me she sorta liked me but didn't really want to get into a relationship -i kissed her->friends with benefits
While we had this relationship(3 months) she asked me "do you think we can ever go back to being just friends?" to which i said "if you mean back to the way things were 4 months ago, yea" and when i asked her she said "i don't think so, too many memories"
I don't know if it was a fluke, but things turned out exactly as above. I was caught in the moment and didn't fully register it/didn't want to believe she could really predict what would break our friendship. I tried to be friends afterwards, she didn't really reciprocate. She was sooooooooo cute though. If i could go back in time would I do it again? Probably. Were the times we had really worth a completely broken friendship? To this day I still don't know, and think about it quite a bit. You should ask yourself the same question.
In my experience, when you start getting intimate, it's hard to be as completely open with your best friend and have it be the same as it was. You can do it, but you might lose some of that emotional closeness that you had, because now there's a whole added side to the relationship that changes the whole feel of it.
EPT
.
