Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Why Girls and Guys Can't Be Friends

It struck me today that girls and guys can't be friends. That is just a fact. I tried to come up with scenarios where it would work and I could shoot holes through every scenario. First I thought, well if the guy is in a monogamous relationship (ie married or seriously dating) then you can be friends with him, no problem. But as I dug deeper I found an example where it doesn't work. It doesn't work if the guy is married because the wife is always jealous of the "girl friend" that her husband has. It also doesn't work because at some point, you will begin to consider your attached male companion as something other than a friend (and most likely he will consider it at some point too) and that could cause all sorts of wierd lines to be crossed. Or in my situation, you will have a crush on a guy and find out months later after you have been talking to him that he is married. Not a good situation because part of you will always have a crush on him because when the crush began, you thought he was unattached.

You may ask why I chose to write about this topic. It all started with an email from a friend, we will call him Ben. Ben and I went out a few times about a year ago and I decided that he wasn't right for me. Now looking back, I realize that it just wasn't the right time. So after I called it off, there were lots of times that we ran into each other and had those awkward conversations and then move on. Several months passed and we saw each other again and by this point, I thought it had been long enough that we could move into the friend category. So, we emailed back and forth and talked when we saw each other. Then I started thinking that maybe I judged him too quickly and should give it another chance. So I began to consider the possibility of being more than friends and he seemed to hint that he would be interested in going down that path again. So this weekend we had a quite enjoyable Sunday until he asked another girl for her number right in front of me. I was shocked (and justifiably so according to my married co-workers who said that they would never rule out a potential date unless they really thought of them as a "sister"). Then he had the gaul to ask if he left her number in my car. Being the nice "friend", I checked the car and found no such paper and offered to look up the girl's email (which I already had). Thinking that he might respond to the part of my email that said I had a good time this weekend or the part that wished him a fun weekend out of town. Instead, he responded "Yeah, that would be great if you could find her email". What! So prompted my deep thoughts on the fact that women and men cannot be friends. There are always ulterior motives.

Maybe just maybe if you went with the guy a long time ago and A)never kissed,etc or B)Dated, realized you weren't right for each other, and had a long time before you conversed, THEN men and women can be friends. I think I have a few guy friends that fall in category A but I don't talk to anyone that I had a relationship with so that rules out category B for me personally. Category A is even hard because most of those guys fall in the "now married" category and in general wives don't take too well to their husbands catching up with their good girl friends from college. And that leads once again to the conclusion that men and women can't be friends.

5 comments:

Greg and Callie said...

True that on your post. Greg has this same theory... "Ben" is a moron (okay, sorry if he reads this, you can delete it if you want). Have fun in Miami!!

Brooke said...

Glad you agree! Only 1 friend said that I shouldn't be upset because he thought I wasn't interested. However, he was giving the impression that he was still interested and I thought we were exploring that path. Oh, well! On to more guys not to be friends with later!

Amanda said...

Hey B,
I think you can't be too hard on "Ben" because of the previous history but I also think maybe he's trying to make you jealous? It seems like most guys would be a little more sensitive than to so obviously go for another girl in front of one of their friends but who knows. Do you think you might ask him to do something???

Brooke said...

A - So you make 2 friends who adopt to the theory of jealousy. Not going to ask him to do anything because my pride is hurt (this is why girls and guys can't be friends Exhibit 13434, someone always is leaning too far away fromn the strictly friend line). I can fill you in more in person.

Brooke said...

BTW, thinking of changing the blog title to sexinatlanta or brookeinthecity. I feel like I have sounded more and more like Carrie lately!

web stats