Beloved friends

I was too monogamous to enjoy the younger years where I should have been dating. I indulged serial monogamy when I was in my teens -- and was called on it by Alison, who was twice my girlfriend and for years one of my dearest friends. I didn't see the point of casual dating when I could for a few weeks attempt to build something with sixteen-year-old sylphs. Still, I racked up an impressive count of kisses before I turned seventeen, particularly for someone who swore they didn't casually date and looked down his nose at people who did.

Once sex came into the picture, I clung to whoever bedded me until the relationship ended, usually when it was long overdue. These were prime years where, yes, I wouldn't want to wake up in a different bed every weekend, but I took my relationships far more seriously than they had any right to be.

Looking back at things I wrote about Jen -- my last purely high school girlfriend -- our relationship should have ended before third-base.

Kate was a delight, but we also lingered for over half a year. She had broken up with me at least once before, but I charmed her back because I didn't want to lose a relationship that I thought was permanent by dint of our having had sex. (It was not that I didn't believe that I could have sex with other women -- I was sure I could with little effort -- I was dirty and common if I did.)

I did not want sex with Emily and, had she not forced me the first time, believe I would have left her within a month and not been sorry for it -- I cared about her, and we got along splendidly at times, but we were never on the same page in the relationship. Instead, I stuck around because it was a point of honor to try to salvage a relationship that had become sexual, even though I recalled hating myself and her that first morning after. Without having felt that having sex was a commitment I needed to honor, we would have been happier and sooner.

My romance with Melanie started as a torrid mutual fling, and I don't regret her in the least. We should have parted ways months before we did, but sex isn't what kept us together. For once, I made an adult decision regarding sex in a relationship -- which is no doubt ironic given that she was my lover with the most significant age difference and graduated both from our relationship and college in the same month.

Likewise, I do not regret anything much with Amber. What joined us was not sex, nor is it what kept us together.

With the latter two, I accepted that I could have sex with other people, and it would be fine. It wasn't that I had decoupled sex from love -- my urge after Melanie was to be seduced by a couple of dear friends (though I didn't pursue this) -- but it was decoupled from the idea of forever.

What I couldn't process still was going on scattered dates with women who were not *right,* women I did not think on sight I would ever allow into my bedroom. I had observed other people dating those whom they rejected after a night or a month, but I couldn't grasp the use of it. I could handle orgasms just fine on my own, thanks very much, and all this bed-hopping seemed like far too much drama for a dubious payoff.

All this is a longwinded preamble to the recent minor epiphany that I would have been happier if I had treated my friendships more like the dating I rejected. (Obviously, not with sex. Though I did stay friendly with many women whom I have kissed, I have not gone to bed with any woman not mentioned above -- though a few tried and were rebuffed with as much gentleness as the situation allowed.)

There have been several people -- women entirely -- who did not want my friendship after all, despite having said otherwise. I put them in the Friend Zone at once -- where they belonged and a place of esteem. They only allowed me in their lives assuming that it would eventually put them in the Fuck Zone. How like dating that is, where unexpressed expectations spoil things. (I would say that I accurately and fully expressed my expectations of the potential friendship, but some approach it from the perspective that people do not tell the truth and interactions are a game to be won.)

You don't stay close with all the people you go on one date with (though try telling me that before the epiphany). You don't even stay close with people you've dated for a while. I haven't exchanged a word with Jen in close to two decades, and my relationship with Kate and Emily is essentially liking pictures of their kids. (I message Melanie around weekly, and we speak for a little while, but I remain careful not to push it. Still, I do tell her on occasion that I love her, and she says it back, not unlike Daniel in feeling, if not words.)

I took the erosion of friendship harder when I assumed friendship was implicitly built to last and not that it existed for its time and no longer.

I have only a few friends who have lasted. There are others for whom I care, but it is no longer requited. Some might say the same of me, though I don't know who they could be. They should reintroduce themselves and hope it won't be too awkward.

I have a friend who hits me up for the emotional equivalent of a booty call whenever her life takes a dark turn -- which it does a few times a year. Outside of that, she doesn't seem to remember I exist. It isn't particularly satisfying -- much like a booty call, I would imagine, having had few to none of those. (There are a few interactions with Kate and one with Melanie that verged on that, but I wouldn't swear to it. With the former, they were gutting. With the latter, it was oddly clarifying.)

The difficulty is that friendships often don't have clear ends. Friendships have *ended*, but it was by degrees. There was no need for a formal breakup, no "Hey, I don't want to know you anymore. Here is my list of reasons..."

Had I allowed myself to experience less serious dating when it was age-appropriate, I would have better had the context to understand that most friendships are built on ephemeral foundations, soap bubble shimmering mistaken for diamonds.

Into my relationship with Melanie, I befriended a woman whom I called Xuan on here. Though we supposedly had fundamental incompatibilities, we did get along. (These supposed contrasts were from the dating site where we met and might have pertained to romantic disagreements that would not have come into play otherwise.) There was a day where we visited a park. When we returned to her apartment, she said she wanted to nap, so I took the hint to leave. She clarified that she wanted to take a nap with *me.* I understood then that we were not friends as I had hoped, that she desired more than a nap. I wanted to keep knowing her. I tried to think I was wrong. I lay sleepless beside her, wearing a shirt and jeans, though she switched into cozy pajamas. I listened to the traffic and wondered how much I would have to confess to my girlfriend. (Only that I lay still until I felt it had gone on long enough. In parting, Xuan told me that she didn't think my young girlfriend had the emotional capability to have a relationship with me. Nothing untoward happened.)

Xuan and I did stay friends a while longer, though my strongest memory of her beyond the nap was having sushi in New Paltz, where she told me to ignore those who told me not to put wasabi in my soy sauce. We cared for one another. Maybe I am wrong about her wanting more heat. What I know is that our friendship ended, though I cannot be positive when. Yes, when she left the area for work and then married a man, but it was gone before that, some place without a landmark.

Sex is not usually the cause for the dissolution. I do not overestimate my sex appeal in general (and those who did discount my friendship likely wanted sex, but not specifically with me). It just comes to a point -- as with a dating relationship -- where being in their company no longer felt pleasurable or necessary.

I have had friends disappear overnight for reasons that had little to do with me. I have been ghosted by a man I assumed would be a long-term prospect based on years of friendship. Any person on the dating scene would find that familiar. Maybe it is a matter of emotional immaturity, or they wanted different things and didn't have the bravery to explain. Our culture sees no reason to and has invented no method of breaking up with a friend. Distance and ghosting are just what is done, whether intentional or not.

I am not absolving myself from the culpability of fading away; I've done it. After my revelation of friendships-as-dating, it occurred to me how there are people technically on my friendship roster whom I would not be sorry if I never saw again. I don't wish them ill, but I don't have the energy. When I think back at times we have shared, I am annoyed. In other words, these people in my life are not my friends, as that is not what the word means. Continuing to extend regular invites only cheapens the definition.

Will I write them a firm letter explaining that I feel our association is at its end? Of course I won't. How forced and artificial would that sound. How I would be inviting mockery and melodrama. No, I will simply stop messaging -- in these supposed friendships, I do feel that I do more of the work keeping it afloat -- and let it die the natural death of these things. It is the one tangible difference between this and dating. If you are dating someone, even for a few encounters, it is gauche to ignore their calls and consider them somebody that you used to know. You have to call them up at the least (texting is only fractionally better than ghosting, doing it in person might be too severe for something casual) and explain that you will not continue the potential of the romance. You need to explore other prospects.

Friendships are intended to be lower stakes than most romantic entanglements (which is not to say that you don't love your best friend of five years far better than the man you have seen for most of February). One can juggle dozens of friendships of varying intensities -- though likely only a few deep ones -- in a way that even the most casual of dating would make impossible. Given the ubiquity of social media, it is not usually a chore to consider someone a friend without it meaning much. By that metric, it feels more of an insult when someone clicks the "unfriend" button. I have taken surprised offense at this in the past, but I now consider it firmly their problem. If they thought little of casting me off, I was wrong to have assumed I should continue to invest myself. No sense chasing them or even looking in the direction they fled.

If it were not for COVID, I would have met in person a man with whom I have been intermittently speaking for months. I had called him only once when he was at a bus station due to his ex-girlfriend's issues and needed someone to check-in. In a better year, we would have hung out, had dinner, bonded as more than people-who-text. We keep making vague plans to meet up, then life gets in the way. We could end up close friends, but we cannot get there if we do not see one another. I wonder if we have missed some critical period in our friendship.

Over the winter, I checked in on Aaron and Amanda a few times to affirm that I did care about them, I did want to see them, but understood that it wasn't worth chancing a pandemic. (I have had both shots and have waited a few weeks, so I did see them for a small wander and picnic in Poet's Walk recently.)

In-person, it is a more straightforward proposition to establish a genuine friendship. I name a time and place, we have memorable experiences, and our connection is further cemented (and I have someone about whom I can write rather than this introspection). Writing to people, even calling them, when we have not anchored the other's existence is a pale shadow. It is all words -- my medium, granted -- easy to discard and neglect.

Over a year ago, I was messaging a woman less than an hour's drive from me. She worked in fantasy publishing -- though not in a way directly useful to me -- and was staying as a house that her family owned. I don't remember specifics beyond that. I couldn't recognize her on the street. All that lingers is that I drafted a message and could not send it because she had unliked my profile, rendering me invisible and all our messages erased. It was as though we had never spoken, though she had sent the last, detailed letter to which I was replying; she did not vanish because I had somehow offended her. However, though I might have liked to explore it, we were not friends. The occasional disappearance of someone on a dating site is de rigueur.

I have met a few potential friends from that site, most amounting to nothing. We were not what the other person needed. In small part, it has been that they accepted that I was sincere about my emphatic declination of sex from them. Since I wouldn't visit their bed, they didn't care to grace my living room.

(This was literal once. I invited a maybe-friend to a party. She came with one of her lovers, scoped out my friends, and left within a few minutes. I have not seen her since and don't consider it a significant loss. We were not meant to be close.)

Conversely, there are a few people who, even years after having last seen them, even a *decade,* I persist in knowing that I love them. Melanie is the only former romantic partner on the list, though I have positive enough regard for others. Daniel will always be on that roster because we reached a mutual comprehension that we have something inseverable.

There is a woman whom I regard well enough, admire even. In speaking to her again a while ago, any illusory mantle I imposed upon her finally crumbled. For a decade and a half, I hadn't considered the possibility of our ever indulging some adolescent lust. Still, I had formed her relationship initially from the tease and wanting of her sexuality. In this more recent conversation, I saw her as she is and had always been if we had not for years occasionally reminded the other that our mouths may be warm and inviting and our hands gifted and experienced. I did not love her, though I know I said I did fifteen years ago and meant it as much as I might have. But always, I was in fear of revealing myself to her in case that might be enough to convince her to never, in a more concrete sense, reveal herself. Sex -- even when one or the other of us were romantically entangled, even when neither said anything except for smoke-thin implications -- was our mortar, though not the stone itself. She is, as I noted, admirable far beyond how soft and tempting her breasts seemed then, how full her lips as she whispered in drunken boldness that she would one day have me in her bed. She never did. We could hardly be said to have even kissed.

Are my relationships with those I believe I shall love to my grave absent sex? Not entirely. I've kissed a few, though one only as part of a competition of who could kiss better (I lost). I would have gladly made love with another and regretted it only slightly. I would have loved her no less for it.

I have sought out people with whom I had a presumed connection in a less mature life. I can't in total say what I was seeking from them, though a part was thinking -- fearing? -- that there was some element of love left there. Not love, but the *components* of it, some nucleotides that could have formed into love with the right spark. It is not to say that they are not deserving of love, only that we did not love one another. Liking and/or lusting is as far as it could get, and there is no wrongness in that. Love doesn't come with an obligation. There can be a responsibility; you can want to help them. It simply cannot be the bedrock of the relationship.

I had a best friend for almost a decade, but our friendship began its death when I was single, and she became bothered that I didn't pursue her. Did she ask me on a date? No. Was she *really* single? Not really. (She was stringing along two or three other men, one who was married.) But that I wouldn't still have a crush on her as I did when I first met her at 20 or 21 was unforgivable. It wounded me that I was apparently always just a fallback to her.

I had Melissa, someone in my life who was once exciting and fun; I enjoyed her company and at times called her my best friend. But the fondness drained from the friendship as she became more erratic and needy once her mental illness and drug addiction carved her out. I came to dread her call, not knowing what she wanted from me but knowing it was not an offer to spent time together. To give herself the excuse for rejection, she made it hard for people to love her. From romantic entanglements, it could be a quirk. From all her relationships, it just made her lonely.

There are people whom I loved for years or only a season. Then something came between us -- moving, a new partner, a baby -- and we drifted. I can't fault most of them. I am grateful for our time together, even though it could not be forever. It was enough, though it may have felt unsatisfying in parting.

There are people whom I see regularly (or as regularly as one can in the pandemic) and others whom I look to love. I am, in my nature, a loving person. I am also able to remember having rushed too quickly into the fatuousness of a new friendship. I can't throw open the window and love the whole world, or what does my love even mean?

I sometimes wonder how many more people I will love in my life. It is not to my knowledge drawing to a close, but my life is not in first bloom. My fur has been loved off in places. Those I've loved in the last twenty years (because how could I know any of the meaning of love before?) number only a handful, most of whom I have not seen in years and may not see again in this life. Who will be added to this coterie, and how? I am not starved. I have and have had love.

I don't come from this now from a place of hunger, but plenty. I have been poor, though it has been years since I counted out my pennies to cover groceries or begged to keep my lights on. When I was closer to that line, I liked few things better than enjoying my friends' kind hospitality. I want to be that for others, but I cannot foist it upon people as though to keep them in my warmth.

Daniel cautioned me once that it was wrong to save other people. It seems like buying them. He recognized this urge in himself and pulled back. People have to want help more than they need it, which is a ding to one's pride. Once gifts are involved, even given with the best of intentions, the friendship can be tainted. If anything were too dire, money would be forced into palms, but not before.

Soon in Xenology: My facility staying open?

last watched: What We Do in the Shadows
reading: Daimonic Reality