We Can't Be Just Friends

I have been the biggest proponent of men and women being friends. I was a living example. I've always had just as many or more male friends than female friends. However, the impossibility of such an arrangement becomes very evident when you are faced with one teeny, tiny, minuscule problem: the idea of not being the top girl in their life. In other words, your position in your male friends life is usurped by some random girl he ends up dating (ha! dating is so not allowed). As a friend you are not allowed to care that he spends more time with another girl, that he calls her more than he does you, that he touches her while you're around, and especially that she gets to touch him without even turning to ask you for permission! How rude! I was there first and I staked the claim years ago. It is neither fair nor legal (um, so I assume) to declare somebody else's territory as your own. It's actually very annoying to have to re-evaluate your position in someones life because some other person, an outsider no less, makes you question how you feel. And isn't how you feel the most confusing part? So, not only do I hate her for taking away my friend, I hate her for making me wonder if he is only a friend. It's just very....rude! And here I am, with multiple male friends, and short of peeing around them to mark my territory (which is gross, smelly and utterly useless for humans) I am faced with the certainty that all my male friends will one day meet a girl that will move up in the ranks ahead of me. And I hate this! Especially if there is existing ambiguity about the status of the friendship. Are we, before she comes along, just friends, more than friends, or maybe even less than friends?

I've spent the last month in Toronto rekindling a friendship with Aldo, who is somebody I've known since I was 8 years old. He had a crush on me in the 10th grade (as was clearly written in my grade 10 yearbook) and I've used that to my advantage over the years. I've always known he had a soft spot for me, and whenever I needed the comfort of a guy I would lean on him, hold his hand, cuddle and basically use him to salve my bruised ego (courtesy of all the assholes in the world). That makes me a world class bitch. I know. We stopped talking for a few years after we went to different universities but this past summer, before I left for London, we became good friends again. It helped that his closest friends are two of my closest friends (JMan, and Mac). Being friends again only made me realize why we were friends before. He's a nice guy, who is both solid and dependable, and although I've never been truly physically attracted to him, I have been attracted to the way he treats me. This is the problem. I love having him as a friend, but I don't know whether I like him in that way enough to want him to be anything more. But, because he had liked me at one point, I believed that the power was in my hands, that I could resurrect that "like" whenever I wanted. That "like" belonged to me before it belonged to anybody else, so I've become comfortable with the idea that it'll always be mine. In one form or another, I believed I would always be at the top for him.

Last night, for the first time in a long time, my position as the #1 girl was challenged by a girl I had never met before, Nikki. She's skinny, pretty and stylish. I hated her on sight, but unfortunately liked her the moment she opened her mouth. Ugh, I didn't want to like her. The dilemma was that for the last month Aldo has been "friend flirting" with me. Which means at dinner he would hold my hand under the table, touch me all the time, and wanted to spend alone time with me. We've always done this, dating back to high school, and I've allowed it, and at times initiated it because it felt good when other guys were always making me feel bad.

At JMan's house last night, me, Mac, and Aldo, plus Mac's cousin and her friend Nikki sat around watching a movie. I noticed a weird vibe between Nikki and Aldo, and then I took (or maybe stole) Aldo's cell phone to read through his texts (bad habit, but very informative). Needless to say after reading the first few texts I realized that Aldo and Nikki were "talking"/"dating"/"God knows what else". And I don't know why but I felt both anger and disappointment. As a result, he got the silent treatment for the rest of the night. And afterwards, when he drove me home, he asked if we could talk (because he so knew what I had read), and I replied, "About what?" and not sticking around for an answer promptly left the car to go inside.

Today I get a text saying he wants to talk and that he'll call me later on. I was intrigued, but by then I was safely behind my wall of indifference and playing the silent treatment game by way of the passive aggressive strategy. When we started talking he assured me he had really wanted to tell me, that he was only waiting for the right time, for the perfect opportunity, for when we were alone. The truth is, we were alone for an hour, in a car, the night before I had to fly out for London, and he chose not to tell me. It is by pure fluke (and Air Canada incompetence) that I'm still in Toronto and that I was around that night to catch that scene and read those texts (snooping is a beautiful thing....thank you Facebook for encouraging this behavior). For the last month, he actually went out of his way to make it seem like he was single, that he couldn't find the right girl, and was not even really looking for a relationship. The truth is that even if he had wanted to tell me he really enjoyed playing this back-and-forth, kinda flirtatious game with me. Telling me about Nikki would have ruined that. I may use him as a salve, but he uses me too. But, if he had a girlfriend I would stop playing our little game, and I don't think he wanted that.

I'll be honest, him having a girlfriend doesn't seem an insurmountable roadblock to me. I do think I could take him away from her by pushing the envelope with our mock flirtation, but I would never do it because it's shady and wrong and beneath me. But I'm not above thinking about it, maybe hoping for them to bomb and then being able to ignore him while I mock flirt with Mac (which I do anyway, because, well, he does it to me....oh I'm fucked). At the end of the day I told him that it didn't matter, that he owed me nothing, and that I simply didn't care (which of course I did, but he didn't have to know that). I took his insistence that he would've told me to mean that he felt a little guilt at having played this game with me when he knew he shouldn't have.

Oh well, I think this is yet another indication of why I had to write a blog about the battle of the sexes. It is much too hard to indulge in open feelings when they concern the opposite sex. The problem not only lies in defining those feelings, but also in figuring out how to deal with them in a constructive, productive manner. Whether you wonder how much you like one of your male "friends", or if the guy who told you he would call you so that you two could "hang out, and maybe grab a coffee" really meant it, you are a constant slave to the maddening man-woman thingy we all do.

As for a conclusion.....there isn't one. I'll just continue to be passive aggressive, hide behind the comfort of indifference and hope, that maybe, just maybe, 2008 will mean making more sense of the social aspects of my life. Perhaps, even understanding men and dare I say it, have a normal, healthy relationship with one. Oh God, now I'm pushing it....okay, universe do not come crashing down on me.