My sister sent me a link to a hilarious blog entitled “THE GROWN-ASS WOMAN’S GUIDE TO: HAVING VERY, VERY GOOD SEX“, which then led me to “THE GROWN-ASS WOMAN’S GUIDE TO: FRIENDZ WITH BENZ“.
I was literally wincing as I read it, not because it was poorly written, but because OH MY GOD HOW STUPID I HAVE BEEN – specifically with John Doe. (Not him, AGAIN, you’re thinking. Well, the only way you’ll learn from my stupidity is if I beat you over the head with it repeatedly, so DEAL WITH IT).
So, why was I wincing? I’m SO glad you asked. I will share with you some of the excerpts that made me cringe extra hard.
First:
Hard truth first: This is a relationship
The number one fallacy of the friends with benefits ideal is that it is this easy breezy, oh-so-casual, no-muss no-fuss, no-communication-outside-of-3am-texts-saying-”sup” situation, and that is an obvious recipe for disaster.
Not calling someone your boyfriend or girlfriend is not an excuse to avoid having those mature emotion-conversations that boyfriends and girlfriends are supposed to have sometimes. Likewise, just because you don’t see someone when it’s light outside doesn’t mean you can treat them like a pile of garbage.
John Doe and I were NEVER on the same page and this lady is not kidding. Recipe for disaster. His ideal situation would have been the above (no communication outside 3am texts) and mine was a modified version of the below (ending with a white dress, 2 kids, the whole bit, so that one time when my friend, who is one of HIS best friends, was all, “it’s not like you want to MARRY him, right”? I was all (thinking) YES I DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO but said NO!):
Make sure you’re on the same page
This means being honest with the other person—and yourself. If they say, “I do not want to go out with you, but I think it would be fun for us to sleep together,” and you say, “I agree,” you’d better actually agree, because otherwise you are setting yourself up for a world of hurt and confusion. And, gals, no offense, but I think at one point all of us have said, “I agree,” and finished that thought in our heads with, “…that we will keep up this farce of not having feelings but that one day you will be mine. It is foretold.” It is not! He will not! Probably! Mean what you say, everyone!
This EXACT THING happened once, except he said, “I just want to hook up,” and I said, “I want to be in a relationship,” and we just kept on not being in a relationship while I hoped he would change his mind. HE WON’T. EVER. I mean sure, immediately after that horrible conversation I moved on to Dr. Evil, and then Mr. Titspervert, and then back to John Doe, because why wouldn’t I want to continue this cycle of masochism??
Just be calm and cool and talk about these issues as they arise, and you can avoid the passive aggressive text fights and weird bar confrontations that we’ve all seen as the result of Friends with Benefits gone awry.
This is her advice as it pertains to things changing – one of you develops feelings, meets someone else, etc.
John Doe and I, unfortunately, have had the weird bar/party confrontations more times than I can remember. Drama, drama, drama. And for what? The occasional romp?
In present day, I get this. From 2007-last Tuesday, I didn’t. I listened to Afterglow by Vanessa Carlton on repeat and imagined how it could have been different. So unproductive!
After the FWB post, I stumbled upon A NOTE TO THOSE LYING IN BED AFTER A BREAK-UP (I am like legit obsessed with this site now and have known about it for less than an hour). The very first paragraph made me LOL, as they say on the interwebs:
1. Stop listening to Adele
I know. She’s singing what you can’t say. She is strumming your pain with her fingers and killing you softly with her song. But it’s not helping. You’re adding sad to sad. If it were your leg broken instead of your heart, you wouldn’t break the other leg to feel better, because you’re not an idiot. So stop with the Adele—and that goes for Patsy Cline and Smokey Robison, too. Sorry.
One day I was on the brown line on my way to work and the girl standing next to me was blasting “Someone Like You” on her iPod so loudly that I could hear it clear as a bell. Not only that but she had her eyes closed and was rocking back and forth. I wanted to be like, “Girl, I have been there, let me buy you a glass of wine, but please turn off Adele. It’s 8 in the morning.”
Although – now that I think of it, aren’t 95% of all the songs ever written in the history of man about heartbreak in some fashion? I mean, what are we supposed to do, listen to fucking Justin Bieber non-stop? Pass.
Anyway, I wish I had gotten it sooner – that FWB is a relationship of sorts, you both need to be on the same page, unless you’re a fan of disasters, and you can’t treat each other like shit. It’s hard to “get” that when you’re drowning in your own broken heart, and your friends, bless their hearts, try to reason with you, or in some instances when you’re at a mutual friend’s birthday party and for some reason he asks you to dance to some shitty song, four of them storm over to herd you away from him because they hate him and how he treats you but you’re so dense you don’t GET IT. And you’re all, “What do you bitches think you’re doing?” because they just roadblocked your way to happily ever after, or at least your way to getting a little that night.
Good times.
A Series of Very Bad Decisions 