Platonic Friends
Date Friday, March 29, 2024 - 04:08 AM PST
Topic Theories


I am a man (Sit down, shut up, and stop giggling. It's a bad way to start an article, but I love drama like a SoCal wino loves 90210.). I have a lot of male friends, but I also have a raft of female friends. Most of my female friends share the same pessimistic view of the ladder theory(http://www.intellectualwhores.com/masterladder.html) and argue, rather hastily, that whenever I talk to any other one of them I'm trying to pick that one up(I am a dog, I will admit - Desperately Ogling Gentleman). Do platonic relationships really exist between men and women?


Probably my first real female friends came around in High School. Sure, I wanted to get in their pants - but it wasn't happening. So I gave up, fearful of the end result of the monologues of many comedians - that I'd wind up in the 'friends' zone. A bad place to be, for a guy, supposedly. But I wound up in the friends zone regardless - my own actions of withholding my luminous presence merely causing them to cling to me more. So, we continued to hang out, and I crossed over into the friend zone with little protest - after all, you've got eye candy and a good conversation - what's not to like?

College(Community College, to be fair, the Disco Club of Learning) proved to be another place to just sit and shoot the breeze with the opposite sex. A beautiful Argentinian girl became a good friend, having roughly the same vulgar, sexist and possibly quite prejudiced sense of humor as my own. Though I clearly fawned over her beauty, I couldn't bring myself to try and ask her out when she was showing me blatantly manipulated images of Osama Bin Laden getting his shift on with a donkey(It really is quite difficult for a 'player' to keep his 'game' on when a girl is making him shit himself with laughter). Other good friends came from my studies - the forced social contact of the terrible fear of failure driving people together despite whatever race, creed, or other beliefs would normally cause them to stab, rape, and bury eachother.

And then I entered the working world. Eye candy at work is something of a mixed social issue - "Don't dip your pen in the company ink," while at the same time you meet plenty of people who met on the job. The usual circumstance leads one to leave the job after the couple is together, and they continue dating afterward happily - because damn, you can't date your boss.

Or can you? At my first job, we had three couples that worked there - sure, the drunk ones would always get in fights and then one-half the couple wouldn't show up to work the next day, but, then again, I wouldn't think they'd show up to work hungover in the first place, even if a spousal imbroglio was underway.

Weighing the options, I opted out of the work/date pool - and just had friends. It worked out a lot better, and I got invited to a lot more parties - I just had to ogle the clientele of our fine establishment.

Back in College now, and working two jobs after a half a year on hiatus, and I have at least eight platonic and semi-available female friends on my cell-phone number list. I count them as friends, at least - I know the only saving grace is that I'm not eager to get my groove down with them. I try not to think of them as gorgeous bits of stuff - I treat them all like my drug dealer that I owe 200 dollars to.

But I'm still not convinced. Is it possible to have truly platonic friends that last a lifetime?




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