Fearing A Friendship Lost

Okay, whoever might be on the other end of this blog, soaking up the depressive stories I'm forever writing here without ever making your presence known, I have a challenge for you. I want you to imagine, for just a moment, that there is a guy (or a girl, if that's what you're into <shudder>) with whom you've become somewhat smitten over several months' time spent really getting to know one another. You have incredible sex with him, but not often. You have in depth conversations about everything under the sun with him. You and he share enough common interests in music, movies, books, and art to be kindred, and have just enough differences of opinion in each of those categories to create that necessary spark for debate. For all intents and purposes, you're as close as two people can be without it having to crumble under the weight of some confining, hetero-normative label that wouldn't accurately describe it anyway.

Now imagine that every time things reach a high point, he says that he has to be careful not to allow himself to get carried away or too drawn in for fear that he'll immediately start to resent himself for allowing such a relationship to have formed, and that such self-resentment will soon thereafter translate into resentment of you, which will only serve to create deep chasms and secrecy and distrust between you, ruining the perfectly happy and functional friendship that you started out with. When you try to press for clarity as to why there would be so much resentment right out of the gate, he tells you in a crisscrossing stream of words and sentiments that this hypothetical romance could only be defined as a rebound, which he has allowed himself to indulge in on more than one occasion in the past, only to destroy the friendship he once had with the object of said romantic rebound, and in most cases, erase them from his life altogether.

Well, that doesn't sound at all like what you want to happen, does it? As much as you care for him and enjoy being with him, the last thing you want is to feel resented by him much less risk him removing himself from your life completely! No, that wouldn't do at all. So you settle for calling what you have a friendship and leave the semantics out of it. I mean, that's what he's so hung up on after all, isn't it? The words that other people would use to define you? If all it takes to keep this guy in your life is to call him one thing while he's portraying something else, then call that apple and orange and keep quiet, right?

That's what I thought, too. But then the thought occurred to me as he told me once again how easily he could find himself loving me for all the wrong reasons, that this recital of his completely removes my feelings and my agency from the equation. Nowhere in this rhetoric of his do I have a say in matters. At no point does he ask how easy or difficult it would be for me to openly express the love I feel for him, with or without a label to classify it under. What if I prove to be someone he is incapable of resenting? What about the magic I bring to the table? Couldn't I somehow sway this ill ending prophecy of his through some minor redirection or some major cathartic endeavor? Doesn't my involvement in this cautionary tale afford me a say in how doomed we are or are not?

What say you, phantom reader? Would you accept an end before your beginning, where this conundrum yours to unravel? Or would you insist the next time he brings up how easily he could anything that he put up or shut up and leave the future to be written the way futures tend to be written -- not by the hands of those wrapped up in it, but mysteriously and with no clear path or plan or promises?

I'm not giving him such an easy way out next time. I plan to put a stop to the senseless soothsaying he uses to write us off, and instead write myself into this theme as an equal partner whose feelings have just as much a chance of making things work as his do of making them not. I'm not giving away the chance laid before me simply because he's too afraid of taking a chance on me. Where he's been afraid I will have to be more brave, and in this way we weave our wonders and our woes.