Lately I have been thinking about that infamous equation,
[1] Man + Woman = Sex.
The meaning of that equation is that once a male and a female feel sufficiently close to each other, assuming they are both heterosexual, they will move to a more physical relationship. Naturally, heterosexual people who are also believers of that equation would tend to be against homosexual relationships because such a relationship, namely
[2] ( Man + Man ) OR ( Woman + Woman ) = Sex
is unacceptable to the believer.
But that is a digression.
I really hate equation [1]. I would like to believe that the reason I might feel romantic stirrings toward a male friend and not toward a female friend is not merely because he’s male and she’s not. (Obviously, having never had strong romantic inclinations toward any of my female friends, it’s likely I’m not ever going to have such inclinations in the future.) But really, I do wonder about the factors that keep, say, a “straight” male and female friend from feeling like they want to be “more than friends” when they do become very good friends. With all the noise and garbage from the media these days, one would hardly think it’s possible to stay “just friends.” And what is that phrase, “just friends,” supposed to mean anyway? People in the Shakespearean era, and myself, believed that a pure friendship having no physical component was just as good as if not better than one that did. The idea of a completely pure friendship on a plane deeper and more meaningful than a physical relationship could ever be — the kind of friendship that people attempted to portray in the Lord of the Rings, but failed, because people today cannot understand or conceive of such a relationship — is very valuable to me. It’s not “just” friendship.
And yet, such a friendship does not excite the kind of passion that captures people’s imaginations when they think of romantic engagements. I guess the physical instinct is stronger than most things, particularly abstract philosophical ideas.
But I keep digressing. Mainly, I just want to know the secret that differentiates the desire for “just” friendship and “more than” friendship. It would really help the endless stream of people who get their hearts broken over one-sided longings. And I’ll admit it. Someone like me, who always sees the possibilities in things, could use some help in shutting down the “what ifs.” “What if I had the possibility of being in a relationship with this friend that’s better than the one I’m in?” –The most dangerous kind of thought. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I imagine being in relationships with other people when I’m currently in one. But the possibility exists. It even happened once, which was really a big mistake. When you try to stop being in a perfectly good relationship to pursue some hypothetical ideal which in fact does not exist, that’s a bad sign. Moreover, if the pain incurred from the breakup outweighs any happiness you could gain, hypothetical or otherwise, well, that just doesn’t add up. But then, you don’t know how happy you could be in a relationship unless you are in one. It’s not like you could know whether you’ve made a mistake or actually found the love of your life until some time has passed. Meaning is something we invent and assign to things as they enter the domain of past-tense. In a mini-max, strictly logical kind of world, maybe you could try out being in a relationship with everyone you’d possibly have an interest in, then go with the one that maximizes happiness and minimizes unhappiness. But feelings don’t work that way, the world is not strictly logical, pigs don’t fly, and happiness isn’t something you can really quantify anyway.
To put it in another way…
I kind of see the formation of relationships as a chemistry metaphor. Imagine two atoms coming together to potentially form a molecule. They will come together very quickly at first, each nucleus drawn by the other’s electron cloud. It’s that stage where you’re falling for someone, and you can’t see anything else except the positive possibilities of an impending connection. Like not being able to see anything except that enticing electron cloud.
At some point, the nuclei of the two atoms get too close to each other, such that strong repulsion is experienced. A distance opens up. If the chemistry is right (pun intended), and the stable state of the two atoms is close enough to produce some kind of bond, then an actual relationship will remain.
Problem is, bond length doesn’t say anything about the nature of the bond. Okay, maybe in chemistry it does. You can tell an ionic bond apart from a covalent bond, and so forth. But how close you feel to someone, or how close they feel to you, doesn’t necessarily say that much about the nature of a relationship. Is the shortest bond length supposed to mean the best relationship, and thus the one that should be romantic? If that’s the case, then equation [1] would be true. After a pair of friends crosses some threshold, they get into a physical relationship. Convention says that once that happens, anyone of the opposite sex must stay a safe distance from a person in a relationship because otherwise, if they enter the threshold, cheating happens. Or is very likely to happen, just like it’s likely you’ll get wet if you stand in the rain. As I said earlier, I’m not a fan of [1] and am happy to report that I have counter examples to support my viewpoint. I’ve had many very close male friends with whom I’ve never had romantic inclinations; in fact sometimes I’ve felt closer to them than to my boyfriend. But after espousing all this trivial and pointless theory, I don’t think I’m any closer to getting to the secret than when I started. This just isn’t that simple.
Well, if it were that simple, we’d have fixed broken hearts by now. And that wouldn’t do, because really, what would we do if most of our inspiration, the driving force behind so many songs and works of art, just suddenly disappeared like that?
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Tableau Blanc 