Requested friendship and sexy consent
How to not have friends in the first place
Relationships confuse me
Relationships confuse me so I have hacked my relationships to make them somewhat less confusing. The obvious manifestation of this is never adding people on facebook but rather letting them add me. It has a somewhat pretentious feel to it but it means that I know that all my friends on facebook wanted to be my friends (that or they’re bikini models from Bad Münstereifel. I don’t know why they’re all from there, though it is clearly the best named place on earth) . Obviously this doesn’t mean that they’re honest to goodness friends but it does mean that they’ve made a conscious effort to be more involved in my life or web presence.
There’s an obvious flaw to this plan and it is that it doesn’t scale. As soon as a second person follows the same rule you can never be friends with that person on facebook (I once had somebody subscribe to me to get around this. That’s weird; don’t do that). And here is where we can drop the caveat about facebook friends not being real friends and the tacit assumption that relationships do not, necessarily, mean romantic relationships because this rule has the same problem for all of them. In fact, it gets far worse as the level of relationship deepens.
The benefit of doing it on facebook is that facebook friendships are inherently frivolous. A friendship on facebook doesn’t suggest the sort of consequences that inviting somebody to the cinema or out for a drink might, it just acknowledges that you know each other or that you have trouble remembering that person’s name and need a handy reference. What this means is that anybody that refuses to add people on facebook is being needlessly pretentious and/or is socially incompetent so you don’t lose out on all that many potential friends.
Ladder jumping
So how do you take somebody from acquaintance to real world friend or from anything at all to romantic partner? The sensible answer is to not overthink it, just ask and be cool with it not happening. But sensible answers were made to be disregarded by feeble human brains.
I should mention at this point that I’m not aware of a solution that will appear at the end of this text. Lasciate ogne speranza and all that jazz.
What I really need to get round to here is the romantic relationships side of it. If it isn’t obvious by now, I am not an expert in the ways of love. My credentials are that one time I had a girlfriend and that’s around five years ago now with nothing to show for it in the meantime but a total of three isolated and fruitless encounters from dating services (one each from tinder, OKCupid and bumble).
If you’ve been paying attention thus far (I clearly haven’t) then we’re now onto an understanding that expecting other people to initiate relationships for you becomes less and less helpful the more serious you want that relationship to be. Dating, however, adds an extra niggle to the proceedings.
Disclaimer: I am a middle class, white, thirty-something, cis, het male, educated to postgraduate level and living in the UK so being half latino is a bonus. That is to say, I’ve hit the social injustice lottery and have no right to complain about how hard life is.
Let me tell you how hard life is
I’m going to generalise here. Women do not ask out men.
I’m going to make an anecdotal observation here. If women are attempting to make it obvious that they are attracted to me, I have no tools to distinguish that from girls who are naturally flirty (and we know that naturally flirty people are very good friends to have so I’ll not hear a bad word said about them).
So what do I need to do if I want to have a romantic relationship? Common wisdom would seem to suggest that I should attempt to monopolise a romantic interest’s time but I can’t bring myself to do that for all the aforementioned reasons. If my presence is actively requested then I’m happy to stay with one person for as long as they like but if it’s not then surely the done thing is to mingle and give all your friends equal attention (assuming we are in a mass social situation).
But Ed, I hear you say because you’re the strange sort who actually looks at and remembers the name of the author of things you read online before you read them, you need social lubricant. I know what you mean and am going to be intentionally obtuse in my interpretation of it. See, social lubricant is anything that makes social interaction happen. I have spent a large part of the past few year employed in publishing (on the publishing floor, not in the IT dungeons) and an active member of a big, secular, non-audition community choir. For those unaware of how either of those work, it means I am often surrounded by interesting and attractive women. The problem is that, though I have many interesting and attractive lady friends, I have to assume, by dint of not being a dick, that they have come to these places to either work or sing and anything else would require them to tell me otherwise.
Lubing up society
What about what you actually meant by social lubricant? I don’t drink or do any other drugs. My ex was in the same boat and that made life easier but I like to think that drugs are not an automatic barrier to a relationship with me unless you like taking drugs you know your personality reacts poorly to or you’re an appropriate age for me to go out with and still smoke real cigarettes (you monster). The problem is that if somebody is intoxicated, I don’t know that they actually want a relationship with me.
I was recently at a choir after party (I’ll let you make your own assumptions about what that entails) and a friend of mine offered to wing woman for me. She was asking me who in the choir I was into (more people than I’d like to count) and then started making suggestions of who she could engineer a meeting with. This is something I very much appreciate and seems like a simple solution. If you can’t work out how to make openings, find yourself somebody who can. The problem is that the vast majority of people at an after party are, understandably, intoxicated. This is not a page I want to start any relationship on. I’ll not say that I want my partner to never be intoxicated but I want to know that if anything happens while they’re intoxicated I know that whatever they initiate is something they won’t regret.
And this is where it deviates somewhat from the whole facebook friend analogy and gets into issues of consent. The whole consent is sexy thing doesn’t make sense to me. Somebody could consent to have their childhood cuddly toys burnt to ashes because they’re infested with mould but nobody would blame them for crying as it happens.
Burning mould is not sexy
Active attraction and lust are sexy. Being pinned down by somebody you are attracted to is sexy. Pinning down somebody that you know wants to be in that position is sexy (n.b. revealing clothing, touching your arm or coming round for netflix does not necessarily mean they want to be in that position. They might just want to watch GLOW).
Once you add in intoxication you have a person who is not necessarily in control of their faculties. It is entirely possible that that person would behave that way regardless but this is why the distinction exists. I will not start a relationship with a drunk woman but I wouldn’t necessarily mind enjoying time with a drunk girlfriend or wife. If I know her well enough to be able to say we are in a relationship then I should know her well enough to decide whether she is doing something she would regret.
It’s much the reason why you don’t hit on girls who look 15 but there’s nothing wrong if it turns out they’re over 23 (your creepiness threshold may vary, the pop psychologist in me recommends 25 but he really shouldn’t be trusted). The youth is not so much the problem as is the state of mind (and no, I am not saying you are justified in grooming teenagers because they’re mature for their age. They’re not; stop it).
Is that the time?
Now that I’ve rambled this far, I need a conclusion that solves the issue and neatly ties a bow on all this mess and it has to be something more useful than “life can be hard”. I’m gonna go with carrying around business cards with your contact details on them so that people can get back to you if they still want to when sober. Because who doesn’t love the kind of person who gives you a business card when you hit on them?
Of course, this still doesn’t work because I’ve never been actively propositioned by a drunk girl anyway.
My point is, it’s gone midnight and I need to be up early so I’m going to hit publish and then go cry myself to sleep and not think about the life of good friendships and no sex that awaits me.
