Just Friends-- After Meeting on a Dating Site?

Normally I don't like to read my work email during hours that aren't 8:30am-4:30pm on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays or Fridays. A job-related problem came up last night as I was lounging on the couch in oversized sweatpants. I had to open up my dreaded inbox. Crisis averted after a few moments of panic and a couple instances of almost throwing up. Apparently, though, I wasn't the only one having a day of uncertainty; because I opened up my work email, I found that a work friend was having his own issue to deal with-- one that didn't involve work but that somehow found its way into my work email.

"Will you be in tomorrow?" he wrote. "I have a girl issue to discuss with you."

After a morning equally as stressful as my night, I finally found a second to catch up with friend to get the 411 on his situation. He explained that he had gone on a date. A really good date, for all that that's worth. I couldn't help but wonder what the issue was. Could he be like one of us girls who gets upset when things are going well for us? Was he about to sabotage something good out of fear of letting himself be too happy?

Yes, it was a good date and yes, they most certainly had a great time. They had such a fun time, in fact, that he really wants to go out with her again. Minor detail: he's just not attracted to her.

The problem was much simpler than I expected. The solution, on the other hand, might not be so easy to determine. Could he just tell her that he wants to be friends with her-- and then actually remain her friend? he wondered aloud. NO, I answered.

But why not? Why couldn't they just be friends?

Are you really looking for new FRIENDS? I asked him.

No, he answered.

I asked him if he thought that this girl was searching for more friends.

Negative. She wasn't and isn't.

This girl is on a dating site for a reason, and it aint because she's looking for another man friend to play Scrabble against on a Friday night. Sure, there are exceptions to this rule. Maybe sometimes we are looking for new friends; for example, we might be on the friend prowl when we've moved to a new city or we find that our group of friends has dissipated. But, in general, how often do you think people are really spending time on matchmaking sites without any intentions of finding romance and/or sexual partners? It's quite simple actually: dating sites are for that very purpose-- dating. Deep, I know.

Well, this friend wanted to know, what was my rationale behind my very solid opinion? I clearly had made a decision, and it wasn't based on the idea that guys and girls can't just be friends. (I'm a strong believer that they can be.) Past experience, though, has taught me that people who meet on dating sites (generally speaking) can't and won't develop friendships. Take, for example, the last time I thought that was possible. The guy and I became close "friends" and we hung out platonically dozens of times. But, each and every time we hung out, it became clearer and clearer that he had ulterior motives for our hangout sessions, whereas I really just wanted a guy friend to spend time with since I had just moved into the area.

Our "friendship" ended when he decided to attempt to pull a fast-one, but I ended that situation quicker than he could have ever imagined. Sure enough, he found himself a girlfriend a couple of months later because, after all, that was what he had truly been yearning for the entire time. (Disclaimer: no fault against him for wanting a romantic relationship with someone; I was the one who lost points for being the idiot to not see through his whole friendship act.) He had met me on a dating site for a reason and since I wasn't fulfilling his desires, he wasn't about to accept just friendship with me (a girl who he apparently was attracted to) while eager for more.

When I started to think about my coworker's situation, though, I realized that another occurrence had also influenced my point of view. Years ago when I was dealing with an on-again/off-again situation with a guy and things just weren't working out, I told him in one of those emotional, college-maturity ways that I thought we should just be friends. Funny thing is I was serious-- I really thought that.

His response?

"R, I don't NEED anymore friends. I wouldn't have been out looking for a girlfriend and gotten involved with you if I were looking for more friends."

I really believe that we can never have enough friends. That said, it's more important to develop deep and meaningful friendships, rather than stretch ourselves thin over dozens of "friends." (Same goes for how we shouldn't do that with members of the opposite sex!) But, this boyfriend's comment was the end to whatever we had between us. To be quite honest, I think it was the end of me thinking that guys and girls on dating sites (who found each other via this technology) can really end up friends. After all, if we were looking for more friends, would we really be going to the trouble to advertise ourselves as seeking romance?

The (Childish) View of Gay Marriage and Proposition 8

We all have memories from our childhood that we’ll never forget. For whatever reason, I have an absurd amount that I remember clearly, but I can’t remember the name of the new girl at work or that man I emailed with about a computer help question last week.

For me, some memories, like the one I’m about to share, really stand out years later. We were all four years old and a group of us were eating lunch around a rectangular table in our nursery school. I don’t know any of the context beyond that, but I can assume we were talking about how kids of the opposite sex have cooties. (Really, what else could we be talking about besides that, toys or birthday parties?)

Daniel, my best friend at the time, grabbed my juice box and made bumped it into mine.

“Boys marry boys, girls marry girls and juice boxes marry juice boxes!” he exclaimed with a matter of fact in his voice. Of course none of us stopped to think about how that’s not how the world works because, well, we didn’t know that. At the time, his idea seemed to make sense.

Little did I know, of course, that this four year old’s dream of how things in our society should operate paralleled the deep desires of countless homosexual and heterosexual people in our country. On a day to day basis, how many people wake up wishing they could be legally married to their partner? How many (straight) people are pained by the fact that their friend or family member can’t marry the person of their choosing? The numbers are of course beyond my wildest ideas and I have no way to quantify these wishes.

That said, we all know that gay marriage has been an exceptionally hot-button issue in this country for quite some time now, and only has become more of a heated topic in the past week over California’s decision to slam down Proposition 8, or the law that says that gays in the state can’t legally marry.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I had always considered the State of California to be a pretty liberal one-- much more than other areas of the country where minorities are still treated unfairly across the board and where legislation has only superficially outlawed their mistreatment. Even when I was in the third grade and figuratively married to my best friend, we’d tell everyone that we wanted to actually get married. Did we know the implications of this statement? No, of course not. But did we know where we should go if we really wanted to get married? Yes, to California. Disneyland, to be exact. Because who wouldn’t want to get married in Disneyland?

So now, over the past year and the vote for Proposition 8, many Americans have grown disappointed with California . We’re saddened by it’s lack of liberalism and acceptance that we had always admired as one of its impressive and positive qualities.

Fortunately for the gay population in both California and, I think we could argue, the rest of the country, California has overturned this law-- for now. Of course it’s going to be an ugly, uphill battle from here, one that will involve The Surpreme Court, thousands upon thousands of protesters and countless dinner table debates.

What’s interesting, though, is that it seems at least that the kids of my generation (or the ones that I was surrounded by) got it right from the beginning. It’s clear that none of us would have been phased by marrying a child of the same gender (in some sick world where kids could get married) and that it would, in fact, almost be considered “more normal” for girls to marry or for boys to marry each other in our culture of cooties and disgust for the opposite sex. We were kids and we considered close relations between girls or between boys acceptable. Now we’re adults and a huge percentage of our country, including the majority of voters in California, now oppose these social and romantic ties. What happened?

This is a time where I’m going to say that we have to take a lesson from the kids. Think back to your childhood, when it didn’t matter who married who, as long as they were happy. Maybe our country isn’t ready for juiceboxes to marry, and I’d honestly venture to aruge that there’s not a single protester fighting for this cause in front of the California statehouse right now. But shouldn’t we be at least ready to accept the loving and happy ideas of some innocent kids who held a very serious business meeting over peanut butter sandwiches?