More on Friends and Lovers

I've had sex with seven men. Three of those relationships began as simple friendships. I've been sexual with two women, both good friends of mine. That makes a total of nine sexual partners over the course of the eighteen years that have passed since I first became sexually active.

And I'm still friends with eight of these people. Nine, if a Facebook-only friend counts.

Last night, I had dinner with three of them (my husband Parker, and our friends Lilianna and Rick). On the way home, we stopped off to see another (my boyfriend Travis, who is moving into his own place, and who needed Parker's help to move a couch and dresser). Later that night, another one called me (Scott, who wanted to commiserate about how lame Mormon parents can be). Then, early this morning, I got a call from another (Drew, whom I fondly call “my darling Ex”).

This is why my friend Erika's statement about not fucking one's friends made no sense to me. I guess the underlying fear is that sex ruins friendships, but that hasn't been borne out by my experience.

It's true that the transition from being romantically involved with someone to being just friends can be painful, but those kinds of hurts generally fade, and what remains is something worth preserving – provided there was anything of substance there in the first place.

Which brings me to the topic of casual sex.

For years, I claimed that I just wasn't “into” casual sex, even though I didn't have a clear idea what casual sex might be. Now, I think I have a better idea.

There are two kinds of casual sex:

1. Casual sex with a friend. In this case, although there may be no “romance” involved, both people genuinely like each other and are committed to maintaining their friendship.
2. Casual sex with someone who's not a friend. In this case, the connection is almost entirely physical: there's little interest in developing a relationship of any kind, except insofar as basic social niceties are sometimes necessary in the pursuit of sexual gratification.

The jury's still out on #1, but I can now say with complete conviction that I am not interested in #2.

My opinion is that being friends is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for being lovers.

It probably won't surprise you to learn that, in my own life, my one experiment with casual sex is also the only exception to my rule: he's the only lover I've had who is not currently my friend (except on Facebook). This is because he wasn't my friend to begin with, and, during the five months or so that we were lovers, our social intercourse was just about nil. We were attracted to each other, sure, but we basically didn't have anything to talk about.

In a previous post ("Photographers I Have Known"), I made it sound like the reason I broke off that relationship, if something so casual can even be called a relationship, was because I felt competitive with the guy's wife after he emailed me some photographs he'd taken of her. Actually, though, I had already resolved to end things with him: it was feeling increasingly weird to me to be spending so much time with someone I hardly knew, someone who really wasn't interested in letting me get to know him.

In that entry, I made my break-up letter to him sound much more glib than it really was. Here, in part, is what I actually wrote him in June of 2009:

“Much as I like you, and much as I've enjoyed the evenings we've spent together, I don't think I am really cut out for a relationship this casual, even though its very casualness had originally been appealing to me after so much relationship drama with [Lilianna] & co. I'd been mulling this over, some, before our last date, and had intended to talk about it then -- not as a decision, but more as a conversation I wanted to have with you -- and then found myself completely unable to bring it up. And since then I've come to the conclusion that, if I can't feel comfortable talking to you about how I really feel about something, I ought not to be having sex with you. (I say this not in terms of some kind of global judgment about the way things ought to be in relationships, but simply as a statement about what suits my own personality.)”

His response to this was basically mild regret: “Ah well, I suppose we aren't looking for exactly the same things. I do feel a little bad that you didn't feel able to talk to me about it though. I guess I'm not the easiest person to get to know. If you change your mind about dinner this week, or anytime, the offer is always open. No strings attached.”

Then – and this surprised me – he concluded with this quote from Thich Nat Hanh:

When I have a toothache, I discover that not having a toothache is a wonderful thing. 

I had to have a toothache in order to be enlightened, to know that not having one is wonderful. 

My nontoothache is peace, is joy. 

But when I do not have a toothache, I do not seem to be happy. 

Therefore, I look deeply in the present moment and see that I have a nontoothache; 

that can make me very happy already.

 
So, who knows? Maybe we could have been friends.