Best friends of the opposite sex-c/d?

Dud... when you develop a thing for them... It happens too often for my taste.

Actually typing that I'm not sure how true it is.

Yeah, though, classic. Making friends with someone because you fancy them and are too chicken/taken to do something about it is dud, except often you find you end up with a good friend at the end of it. So even that is classic hooray.

Having a male best friend is weird, it's kinda like having allies on the enemy side.

I also like the Oscar thing. Best Friend to see Movies with, Best Friend To Share Bad Personal News with......

Of course if you were a girl...

"I mean it's always the boy harbouring unrequited feelings for the girl, isn't it? Has anyone got any experience of it being the other way around?"

*unhappy raise of the hand*

(a) Unless it's a tongue down the throat situation, guys are notoriously inept at picking up on when a girl really likes them. I certainly place myself in this category.

(b) The way that women express attraction towards a member of the oppopsite sex is, shall we say, more subtle?

Sorry for making sweeping gender generalisations here, but it's what I feel to be true.

isn't this the attitude that spawned a thousand bad emo songs? jee-ZUS.

Maura, I was being a bit facetious. But I do think that with male-female friendships it happens more that way round. Women want new dangerous dark strangers. RWOAR! Of course, there's definitely an element of the woman would never say anything anyway, so no one finds out.

Without knocking her appeal and grace at all -- for she has plenty -- friend Karen mentioned above, who I've known for about seven years now, has never been an object of unrequited affection. I think it's because we both met after breaking up with other people, and rather than rebounding with each other we just wanted to chat and work through things. It has all turned out for the best, I think. :-)

You know, sometimes sex is just sex. It's physical pleasure, you don't have to be in love to enjoy it.

(x-post to Stevem)

Or what FFM said.

being in love != having a crush on them, but whatever works for you

Well, you don't even have to have a crush to enjoy it.

apparently not!

not to be a downer, but will someone at least back me up that if you're married, you have a best friend of the opposite sex whom you are really attracted to emotionally and sexually, and they feel the same way, then you are kidding yourself if you don't think you're on dangerous ground.

apparently finefinemusic is the world's best wingwoman

Probably yeah, I wasn't talking about Aimless' specific situtation here, just in a more general sense.

(xpost)

I'm with Tuomas and FFM here, with the caveat that I do probably have teensy, dormant crushes on all my good female friends, and that sex with them, much as it would be fun and exploratory at its core, would not be bereft of tender feelings...at my age, and with my disposition, I'd like to think it would only help the friendship (and our respective morales), but I can imagine things becoming very knotty indeed given a slight lack of eye-to-eye regarding what-happens-next.

Jordan is OTM about Hurting's situation. I have no good advice for him. Er, "good luck"?

Sorry, I mean Hurting, not Aimless.

yeah but what if http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51BAQYYP98L._SL500_AA240_.jpg

"exploratory"

I'd like to think it would only help the friendship

lol

apparently finefinemusic is the world's best wingwoman

― Ømår Littel (Jordan), Tuesday, April 7, 2009 12:35 PM (58 seconds ago) Bookmark

dude no kidding

she & I also "threw" a threesome for my ex boyfriend for his birthday

back up back up. was he your boyfriend at the time or your ex boyfriend at the time?

guys all I want in life is recognition for excellence in bromanship

seriously though, it was a frat house but none of us were in school and we didn't have jobs.. ahh, early 20s, I miss you!

oh he was my boyfriend then, is an ex now.. Funnily enough, to make my stories come across even more twisted and made up - the guy (J) I recruited for my best friend (L)'s birthday was the boyfriend of (X) when I had a threesome with him and her! Circle of life. By which I mean I drank a lot of tequila in 2001.

(another threesome. there were two threesomes. fuck.)

man, i guess my early 20's really sucked

I bet you had meaningful employment or were in school.. don't worry, my mid-to-late 20s isn't shaping up to be nearly as awesome ;)

Hurting this sucks, but you will pull through.

pause

Also has your wife expressed any jealousy? because yeah, then maybe I would think about taking a hiatus.

Ooooh, this, absolutely. My boyfriend had a work crush last year and used to flip away from Facebook (they sent each other private msgs after work) when I walked into the room and it hurt our relationship a LOT. It made me paranoid and inclined to believe the worst, and actually gave me anxiety - there were a few nights I couldn't sleep at all & when I did sleep I had dreams that this other girl was trying to kill me! Ugh. He finally switched jobs for completely unrelated reasons and once they started to see each other less/talk less he realized that he'd stepped over boundaries he couldn't really "see" in the thick of his crush. Uncool :(

I am a jealous lady.

It's one of my lousier traits.

mine too

Have tried this, but it’s either ended awkward because we’ve slept together or one of us started having feelings for the other.

We wound up getting drunk and sleeping together a few weeks ago and I feel like it cleared the air. Next day, chalked it up to being drunk and horny, it was fun but probably a bad idea, etc.. We're more comfortable talking about sex lives/relationships, offering opinions on the other's attractiveness, than we had been recently.

Also has your wife expressed any jealousy? because yeah, then maybe I would think about taking a hiatus.

― i'm shy (Abbott), Tuesday, April 7, 2009 2:06 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

Wife knows we have a close friendship. Feelings are very recent development. I still think it's possible they're fleeting/spring-fever/close quarters kind of thing. Nonetheless I talked with friend about it a little and we agreed to "maintain boundaries." I'm going to keep a little distance and see how it goes.

Two things you may find helpful, Hurting:

1) Go out of your way to make your wife happy. You will find that she may give you more attention as well and you will forget the crush.

2) Picture the reality of what would actually happen if you had an affair with the nursery worker - the embarrassment and ridiculousness of it all. Imagine yourself as a character in a movie doing that and what a putz you'd look like, and how awkward the situation would be, and (unless you actually think this person is your true soulmate) how crappy a real relationship would probably be with her compared to the one with your wife.

haha, me otm

I have a best friend of the opposite sex and though the relationship began with a lot of flirtations, it eventually bloomed into something really solid and platonic and lasting.

Classic.

im going to a club with *just* one (very good) female friend tonight (hoping to run into some other ppl there tho). feeling a bit funny about it though, cos i dont really like her occasional vaguely flirtatious jokes. it shd be obv that i dont like them much either cos of my facial expressions.

Knew this would be a Titchy revive.

the 'last updated by ____' kinda gives it away.

xp it would be more obvious if you told her it bugged you, and you wish she wouldn't do it.

*eye roll* "soooo not gonna happen."

the 'last updated by ____' kinda gives it away.

Haha well I have that turned off...

Trust me on this one - no, she doesn't know just from your facial expressions that you don't like this.

Because half of the fun of telling vaguely flirtatious jokes is the eye-rolling and squirming that follows.

Shyness and actual revulsion can be kind of hard to tell apart sometimes.

I have found that once you get past about 30, it's harder to find new friends than it is to find new girlfriends. I suppose there was a time when I wanted to nail all my female friends, somewhere in the back of my mind if not the very front of it, but now I have filed that impulse into the same part of my brain that wants to drop a baby that's just been handed to me, or jump off a high ledge that I have been led to for the great view. I have a great girlfriend already, and other great girls that I meet, even if I'm sexually attracted to them, are valuable as friends first, foremost, and only. Because for the first time in my life, they are truly more valuable to me than potential girlfriends.

interesting thread.

since like 22 or so, i've found it really hard to make new in-person friends, which, in my ridiculously cloistered world means people i work with. i've made a bunch of friends online who i've never met, though! and most of them are dudes (i'm a dude) who are writers like me, so we have that in common.

"Wife knows we have a close friendship. Feelings are very recent development. I still think it's possible they're fleeting/spring-fever/close quarters kind of thing. Nonetheless I talked with friend about it a little and we agreed to "maintain boundaries." I'm going to keep a little distance and see how it goes."

don't know the whole story here but can relate a bit, at least in terms of serious emotional feelings (sex hasn't come into play in my situation and won't for geographical/historical reasons

Historical? How old is this woman?

hah!

i didn't phrase that right, at all.

More like, we've just been friends for a really, really long time, and saw each other through lots of romantic crap - and at one point I made it clear that I had feelings for her, and she made it clear that while her emotional feelings for me were very strong, romanic ones were nil. So we've had an understanding about that forever and a day, but if you were to see our email correspondence sometimes we sound like two 10 year olds with a crush on each other. Makes my wife uncomfortable, always has, probably always will.

let me think about this - we've been friends since early 1996 or so. which is a long time, for me.

ultimately i'm really happy we never hooked up - would've killed the friendship, plus i couldn't live with her personality tics.

Since 1996 is a long time. Not just to you.

i have a work friend. we hang out at lunchtimes. we get on well. we are quite similiar. she has told me she had two sexual dreams about me ('i dont know why im telling you this') and quite frequently makes comments like 'you look handsome today'. i also didnt find out til recently that she has a bf, which was an odd detail to leave out seeing as we have talked about r/ships before (apparently she wants to break if off but cant pluck up the courage). recently, she asked me to go to an installation about sex. maybe billy crystal in when harry met sally had it right about m/f friendships.

There was this girl my family knew who led me on. She and her boyfriend have been together for almost a year, yet she was acting as though she would have wanted to be with me, and one time when we were by their house, it was her sister told me that she liked me, but she didn't really mean it, she had a few drinks in her head. Then she told me she had a boyfriend - i was real cut up inside. I felt like i wasted 5 months. But it was a misunderstanding - i didn't know her sister's head was bad. Hurt gave way to anger, and anger gave way to bitterness, her boyfriend smokes and drinks, i don't smoke and i drink only on occasions, and i was thinking of drinking in front of her next time we went by her house, and if she asks why i'm drinking, say "You can't complain, don't you like that? Doesn't your boyfriend do it?" Very bitter thought, eh? Lucky thing that remained a thought and i didn't go through with it - my family knows them and it would have come back to them - i would have spoiled relations among all of us - we're still friends. But i got over it very shortly - i just didn't think about it too much, and found reasons why it wouldn't have worked out anyway. Both of us are of Indian descent, but I'm deeper into Indian culture, but she's more Western - the only difference between she and a white girl is that she's not white - She's civilized (doesn't like to be close to the earth, eg going by the river, she likes too many of the finer things in life), and i like being close to the earth.
― Anish, Thursday, 20 April 2006 13:51 (8 years ago)

she has told me she had two sexual dreams about me ('i dont know why im telling you this') and quite frequently makes comments like 'you look handsome today'.

this is not platonic behavior