Girlfriends, boyfriends, and what lies between them

Don't you just love those first few months of a relationship when everything is all sparkly and shiny?  You spend your days walking on air and the whole world seems a little softer around the edges.  You crave time with that special person and turn to texting, talking, Facebooking, and tweeting to fill the gaps between dates.  You crow to anyone that will listen about how great (s)he is: how perfect, how charming, how funny! (giggle!)

But pretty soon, your friends grow tired of hearing about your budding romance.  They want to talk about other things - after all, the world has continued to spin on its axis in spite of your blissful unawareness.  If you don't tune in and miss their cues, you risk alienating your allies...the very friends you just may need if (when!) you fall from this man-made heaven.

As I was researching material for this post, I searched the internet for the phrase "balance boyfriend and friends."  Google presented me with the usual ga-jillion hits, only the first ten of which I perused.  Seventeen magazine summed it up perfectly: "When you're going out with a guy, it can be hard to find time for both your BF and your BFFs."  In teen-speak, that seemed succinct, if not also slightly vapid and vaguely juvenile for this audience.

I tried again, searching "balance friends and relationship" - this turned up a far more diverse offering of online self-help.  Evidently this problem is not unique to any particular demographic:

• The Root, a leading African-American publication, headlined their piece:

Ask Demetria: If time spent with a new boo is alienating your homies, try to find a happy medium.

• Ask Men, an online men's magazine, proffered this tidbit on its page:

Don't Let Your Girlfriend

Sabotage Your Friendships

• Psychology Today took a somewhat sexist turn on things:

Once a dating relationship grows and deepens in intimacy, a man is faced with the temptation to isolate from his friends and family and devote all his time and energy to his committed lover. As many women already know, if you want to keep your life in balance, you must must keep same sex friendships a priority. 

Clearly, this topic touches a nerve with us.  And it does with me, too, on a personal level.  A friend of mine has recently lost herself in her boyfriend, surfacing only when he is otherwise engaged at work or with family.  Her behavior is incredibly hurtful--simultaneously both demoralizing and angering in a "why am I not enough?"-kind of way.

When I took a step back from my emotions, I came to two important realizations, though.  The first is that she is very vulnerable in this relationship with her boyfriend, for reasons I will not detail here.  As a way to counteract that, she is spending all available time with him to try to feel connected and establish that crucial bond.  It is not my place to pass judgment on that.  The second point is that I've done it, too...and I am in no place to get upset at anyone else.  I remember that after I was newly married, I lost touch with a great many friends because I wanted to spend all my time with my husband.  Eventually, we became estranged from others and were quite lonely both as individuals and as a couple.  It was a serious lesson to me not to lose sight of that balance.  It's not easy, but it's completely necessary to the health of yourself and your relationship.

WebMD posted a very interesting piece on why friends are actually good for our health.  Forming solid connections through friendships with people has been strongly correlated with good health and longevity.  Dr. Tasha R. Howe, a psychology professor at Humboldt State University in California, says that "people with social support have fewer cardiovascular problems and immune problems, and lower levels of cortisol -- a stress hormone."  The logic is based in evolution: we are social animals, having formed groups out of sheer survival need.  When we have friends, our bodies are less stressed out because they are not fighting natural instinct.  Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, of Brigham Young University, says the evidence is clear: "One thing research shows is that as one's social network gets smaller, one's risk for mortality increases." 

Having a support network of friends is clearly beneficial. That's why it is so important for us to make new friends and keep the old--including adding new boy/girlfriends, while maintaining our previous close friendships. 

Thin Line Between Love & Hate

This morning, when I awoke at the grand hour of 10:00 am, I did my usual roll-over-and-grab-my-phone wakeup ritual.  (How many of us do this?  I wonder if I had a real person in bed next to me, would I still sleep with my phone?  Another topic for another time...)  As I triaged messages, quickly skimming and deciding what needed my immediate attention, a message from my girlfriend caught my eye: she needed to cancel our dinner plans.  I read on: she described her rather contentious divorce proceedings and how her ex was documenting all her time away from their kids, so we would have to delay our dinner so that she could be home with her babies.  Completely understandable, although sad that her ex felt this was necessary.

Message 2 was from another friend who is going through divorce.  He relayed to me that he had put his Facebook settings on super-lockdown because he felt his ex would use information against him in their divorce proceedings.  

The combination of the two messages got my thinking: how do we move from lovers to fighters in our marriages?  Is it an inevitable evolution--part of the separation process?

Many years ago, I married the man who I called my best friend.  We knew all of each other's secrets, insecurities, quirks.  The formative year(s) of the relationship were spent getting to know these things about each other and learning to love one another's flaws.  With time, however, we stopped being each other's confidante.  Kids, work, and other demands slowly took over the time we used to spend laughing and sharing.  As we drifted apart, it became apparent that the marriage had run its course and we ultimately agreed to split.  Just as quickly as we fell in love, we became enemies: judging each other's every movement, looking for motive, and distrustful of the person with whom we had once shared everything.  Best friends to total strangers in mere months.

And our situation is not unique.  While statistics about divorce abound (which party made the initial filing, how many go to trial, divorce by race, religion, etc), it is difficult to find good data on the subjective topic of contentiousness during the process.  In the United States, the vast majority of divorces (>95%) are resolved without a courtroom trial.  Still, that speaks nothing of the highly charged emotional state of both parties while they part ways--and part children, homes, cars, and bank accounts.  The fights, the testy exchanges, the snide remarks...who measures that?  And yet, just about everyone I know who is divorced has experienced it.

More importantly....can we move from fighters to peacemakers after the dust has settled?  How authentic can a friendship become when we're on the other side of a nasty split?

Ultimately, during a bad divorce, trust between parties gets broken.  In the situation of my guy friend who put his Facebook on ultra-private, he clearly doesn't trust his (ex-)wife not to misuse information.  My ex took it a step further and actually blocked me on Facebook, preventing me from seeing anything he does on the website--a setting that remains today, three years after our split.  Re-establishing trust, even to the small amount needed for a basic, no-frills friendship, requires a demonstrated change of behavior coupled with an honest discussion of what went wrong.  We have yet to let our walls down enough to move forward in that direction.  Instead, we make small talk at our kids' events and during hand-offs of the children, while steadfastly refusing to allow any real emotion or discussion to enter the space between us.  It's all very Minnesota Nice.

Is that what we've been reduced to?  The best friend I married ten years ago has now become a near-stranger in our post-divorce world.  Is there a happy middle ground?

Yes.

Because the greatest thing about people is our ability to change.

  

Friends With Benefits (?)(!)(.)

Author's note: My friend, "Jim," asked me to write about this topic.  No, we're NOT friends with benefits.  Just friends.  No benefits.  I promise.

Friends with benefits.  No strings attached.  Pillow pals.  Lots of names for what is essentially the same thing: repeated sexual encounters with the same person, without a romantic relationship or commitment.

Urban Dictionary's definition:

Friends with Benefits (verb): A healthy, fun sexual relationship between two people......Until one falls for the other, the friendship blows to pieces, and those two people find themselves worse off than they were before.

That sounds pretty accurate, given my training (none) and experience (limited).  Still, I have friends (mostly men) that swear by this act--they believe that not getting involved emotionally is better than the risks and pitfalls of a committed relationship.  

The trouble with all of it is that one person (usually the female in heterosexual relationships) ends up falling for the other.  Even with the best intentions, with the expectations clear and managed, we girls end up falling for the guy and making a mess of the whole thing.  I wondered why this was...so, naturally, I turned to the Internet for answers.

As it turns out, there's a scientific answer.  Scientific studies have shown that humans experience a hormone release following orgasm.  In women, the hormone is oxytocin--the so-called "cuddling hormone" because it lowers our capacity for fear and increases our sense of bonding.  Men, on the other hand, release dopamine--the pleasure hormone.  So while men are laying in bed, feeling happy and sleepy, women's hormones are busy convincing us that we are bonded, in love, and ready to commit to this guy.  

Mother Nature is a real *%$^, isn't she?!  That's not even fair!

This, dear readers, is why I do not believe in the concept of  "friends with benefits" (FWB).  It's scientifically impossible for women to handle.  Unless.....

1.  The sex is bad.  It's basic: if women don't reach orgasm, then the oxytocin release won't happen and the whole let's-fall-in-love-and-get-married-and-have-a-zillion-babies reaction is stopped cold.  HA!  Take that, evolution!!  Of course, the downfall is that bad sex is no fun and negates the entire reason for the experience.  Hmm...maybe this isn't a plausible answer...

2.  You avoid cuddling afterwards.  Shaking off the whole experience before the hormones can really kick in seems like it would help.  Get out of bed, take a cold shower, and WAKE THE HELL UP.  This isn't love; it's sex.

The concept gets even more convoluted when you have a real friendship with the other person.  As I was talking this over with a gal pal, it occurred to us that there's a difference between friends with benefits and acquaintances with benefits.  A friend--someone you're connected to, that you share a bond with--complicates the FWB  sexual relationship even more.  If you are invested in his/her well-being by virtue of the friendship, AND you're sleeping with him/her...how is this not dating?  How is this not a romantic relationship?  At least in the acquaintance scenario, you are not bonded by anything other than a mutual appreciation for a satisfying sexual relationship.  It seems it would be a lot more emotionally safe to keep the friendship out of it.

There.  You've been warned.