I have to say that the trickiest concept to grasp since charging into the dating game a few years ago is the idea of “friends with benefits”. You see it all the time in movies; boy and girl meet, decide that due to a promising career or an exciting playboy lifestyle, their lives are too hectic to accommodate a relationship, and opt to engage in some no-strings-attached sex. The boy and the girl eventually realize that they can’t live without one another, renounce their philandering ways, and get married, after which they move into a lovely 2-story colonial home and have 7 children. While this all sounds lovely, in my experience all you wind up with at the end of a friends-with-benefits relationship is the painful sting of humiliation, along with the 10 pounds you gain eating your feelings. And those 10 pounds are tough to lose. So why have a friend with benefits? In fact, if you’re left feeling like your emotions have been thrown in a blender, then where’s the benefit?
M. (also known as the wolf in kindergarten teacher’s clothing) attempted to sweet-talk me into a friends-with-benefits relationship. After he politely informed me that he had no interest in participating in the activities required of dating me or anybody else, he decided to try his luck with the FWB card.
“I really like you,” he said, “and I’ve been thinking about how much I want to sleep with you…so maybe we could have kind of a friends-with-benefits thing.”
Cheap sex with a guy who doesn’t give a shit about me and who will probably conveniently lose my phone number following our interlude? Sign me up!
And as if that wasn’t enough to fill me with the desire to launch myself out of my panties (or shove them down his throat), he also added, just to avoid any unnecessary confusion, “that this isn’t, like, coming from a place of love or anything.” Hmmm. As I had previously stressed to him on numerous occasions that I am only looking for something meaningful at this stage in my life (which he vehemently agreed with), I found myself wondering how things had gone so grossly awry. Was he deaf? Did he not have a proper grasp of the English language? Did the word “relationship” in his vocabulary stand for “let’s have sex so I can kick you out of my apartment in the middle of the night and never talk to you again?” And to think, he’s a kindergarten teacher. If this is the way he operates, then there’s no telling what he’s teaching our nation’s children.
“If all you want is sex,” I asked, “then why don’t you just pick up some chick at a bar, like a normal guy?”
“Well,” he replied, “I’ve never had a casual sex relationship, so if I have one I would like it to be with someone I really like.”
I informed him that he could like me alone, or with the assistance of his right hand, but that there would be no “friends with benefits”. To me, the term makes no sense. If you’re having sex with someone that you don’t have any type of attachment to on an emotional level, then you’re not really friends at all--you're just sex partners. But, I guess for some people that in itself can be a benefit. You can get your rocks off and not have to make them eggs in the morning. Hell, they won’t even be there in the morning. But for me, the shame will. The feeling that I’ve been blatantly used and put on the shelf until next time will follow me through each sexual encounter, and will probably in some ways prevent me from meeting a real man who wants a real relationship—not some delayed adolescent that has the attention span of a peanut and can’t think any further then what he’d like to do in bed tonight.
A friend of mine asked me if I thought there was a possibility that starting a friends-with-benefits relationship with M. could eventually result in a mature, loving relationship between the two of us. Honestly, I wondered the same thing. In fact, I even considered it as a possibility. In that moment, I briefly lost sight of what I was worth, until I came to my senses and realized that my life was not the stuff of bad romantic comedy. In the end, I would be alone, hurt, and eating my way into oblivion while watching “Sex and the City” reruns and cursing Mr. Big.
Although friends with benefits may work for some, as far as I'm concerned...you have my friendship. That’s your benefit.
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