Friends with Benefits?
© BeverlyRL (sxc.hu)
I don’t really get this concept. Well, I do understand that it seems like an easier way to still get to get laid without you actually needing to call it a relationship of some sort anymore for some reason.
That reason – of course – most likely being that that your friends would pretty much automagically assume that s/he is just using you even though they’d hate to say it to your face out of consideration ie. not wanting to cause any more grief and stress that has a potential to ruin otherwise perfectly good friendship.
I just think such arrangements are both intellectually and morally dishonest – not to mention unnatural.
For one it wastes people’s time who could otherwise have a chance at finding a companion they really want to be with and not just have a screwing timetable with.
As you get older you start to lose that market value which is based solely on one’s looks, every passing year, or day in fact. I hate to put it this bluntly but that’s how it works. It’s a fact of life.
Only some people just age a bit better than regular folks. Life just ain’t fair is it?
But there are those sweet looking grannies and grandpas, right?
So?
You think old people are asexual? I’m not that old to yet know it personally but since men at least are biologically capable of producing offspring until the day they die, I’m just going to go on a limb here and call it bullshit.
That grandpa probably is sweet and all but he still wouldn’t mind an opportunity – provided he could morally allow himself to – to have sex with a much younger woman who seems like a hell bent on wanting to spend the rest of her life with him.
Of course it doesn’t usually go like this.
I guess it’s commonly just a sincere desire to have someone like that guy or that lady to be with who’d be as gentle, wise, funny and pleasant. In other words someone who generally seems to be at ease with him/herself.
In other words you like the idea, just not the picture.
So, you start eating more chocolate, concentrating more on you so-called career and your so-called extra curriculum activities, watching and reading more soap opera dramas and so on.
Generally you start putting on a little bit more weight every year until one day you realize that you are fat, OR you go the opposite way, you start to slowly but gradually wither away until you are reduced to nothing but dust and bones.
You start dressing more blandly, you turn more inwards. In a word you’re learning to hate love. And when you hate love, you hate yourself. And when you hate yourself, you hate life. You become sour and recluse and just no fun to be around with.
And that’s why you end up being alone, and more often than not, also end up staying alone. Surrounding yourself with one or a few or even a 100 so-called friends who are probably mostly in a similar situation, still means you are alone. In fact it positively reinforces your idea that you’ve come to like so much that you are and were right and that everyone else is to blame.
People are rarely in a position where they’d constantly have a symmetrical influences of power on one another. I argue that in these so-called fuck buddy systems somebody’s getting more out of it than you do – simply because they can.
In other words they have a bigger influence on your behavior than you have on her/him. It ain’t fair but it’s most likely true. Maybe in 99 cases out of a 100 or thereabouts?
The more romantic types would probably just call it affection or at the very least having fond feelings for someone. Me, I just call it love.
Not necessarily the everlasting kind, but love none the less.
In today’s day and age people just no longer want to admit it because they – I assume – think it would show their own vulnerability, their private sensibilities.
And I guess they are right in thinking so.
At least the stories people tell me when they are drunk enough (which is pretty common phenomenon here in Finland at least) about their more or less failed relationships seem to support this line of thinking.
They cared more. They wanted more. S/he (more often he, though – which however shouldn’t necessarily be taken as a sure sign that men are more insensitive or just plain abusive compared to women) wanted less. S/he cared less. S/he called it quits.
Yup, you loved him/her more than s/he loved you.
And since sex – I argue – pretty much always entails at least a measure of real feelings that anyone would even consider bothering to do it at all, there’s a better chance of you two ultimately ”finding” one another – once again, or for real this time – than in a case where you two would no longer even see each other, maybe not even talk on the phone, let alone correspond in email, like you probably once did.
I think it really is that simple. Not always, but much more often than almost anyone would care – or rather dare – to admit.
If you don’t appreciate yourself, no one else is going to appreciate you much either – if at all. Respect yourself by being true to yourself.
***
I personally tend to think that people start to love themselves only when they start letting go. In a positive sense, however. Not in a negative, self-defeating, fashion.
You start dropping that extra baggage you yourself put on your shoulders all those years ago which you kept carrying on ever since because you kept saying to yourself, most likely when no one was looking, that it could become a reality, some day, one day. At least kind of a, if not entirely.
And you kept noticing how you actually started taking away little chips out of the block each passing year even though you refused to just flat-out toss the damn thing away then and there.
Killing a dream is never easy and always hard. That’s why you kept keeping the dream alive. At least faintly breathing in this semi-comatose state, so you could argue with yourself that it’s still officially alive.
This very old dream I might add. In fact ancient most likely. Most likely a dream you never truly wanted to live, just something you wanted to experience, to feel.
Why so few people actually realize their dreams is probably because those dreams were only dreams to begin with. They were make-believe that at least managed to keep us going some place.
Folks who do realize their dreams, are – I argue – in fact living in the past. They simply never got over it like most of us do and have
You see that dream was our true religion. The one thing we wanted to believe in. It gave us a reason, it gave us motivation. It gave us a purpose.
People tend to suck at letting go because we’re more or less programmed to not quit. To not admit to defeat. Ever. Even when we’d be much better off if we did.
I just guess it’s a combination of biology and psychology that works particularly bad in modern times. When we were still hunting mammoths not letting go meant you either got to live or got to die.
And most of us wanted to live.
Today’s world is abstract. So abstract in fact that we no longer can mentally afford to think that we are wasting scarce resources on stuff that any random guy or gal would instantly recognize as nothing but a pipe dream, an illusion.
Because we know the right stuff just might happen. It might. The mammoth that got away didn’t return. Every bone in your body knew it wouldn’t. The only way to even have a possibility of ever eating that sucker, was to go after it now, not tomorrow, not next week, not next year. Now.
We shouldn’t try to blindly follow our illusions but to rather use them as motivational tools that would enable us to get to know ourselves better, to get to test and ultimately question our wants and our desires as opposed to just taking them as given.
Ugh, the Great Kitty has spoken.