Daring Not To Fuck

This is a story I've been meaning to put up here 4eva. It happened in January, judging by my gchat log. I had received two free tickets to David Mamet's piece-of-shit new play November and gave the second one to Neighbor Steve. (Check out his blog!) Afterwards, on the subway, we were momentarily distracted from how awful the play was by the following encounter:

There was only one seat left, and Neighbor Steve offered it to me. Neighbor Steve ALWAYS lets me have the seat and (perhaps already feeling guilty for having brought him to the terrible play) I stubbornly insisted he take it. He did, and the gentleman sitting next to him turned and said something to the effect of:

"No, you gotta keep your lady close to you."

A blank pause from both of us, until I finally said,

"Well, we're actually brother and sister, so that's kinda gross."

Neighbor Steve is, of course, not my brother. But nor am I his lady.

This is a situation I have always found awkward. I have a lot of guy friends, I usually do, and when I'm out and about with one of them we are sometimes mistaken for a couple. So, what do you do? It's awkward not to correct the person (you almost worry about sending your friend the wrong message, even if that's silly), but if you say "oh we're not a couple" it creates a weird feeling that you're somehow disowning your friend. And then sometimes the person who made the mistake gives you a skeptical look, like you might THINK you're just friends, but actually this stranger knows better. Annoying. So my spontaneous lie was a refusal to feel awkward about something that shouldn't make people feel awkward, and united rather than divided Steve and me. (He immediately rolled with it and together we answered a lot of questions about "our" upbringing.)

Which is not to say that cross-gender friendships are always clear-cut. More than once I've gotten drunk with an old dear friend and we've had sort of a "we're not kids anymore" moment that led to some fooling around. Even in 9th grade I wrote a poem about how I sometimes I worried I'd fuck things up with my friend Jake by developing feelings for him. (He recognized immediately that it was about him and did not mind it being published in the school lit mag. Now that's a good friend.) And sometimes I'm not even sure what the recipe is--I have guy friends whom I love, and whom I think of as totally attractive, so is it weird that I don't want more? Is that pathological of me*, or even somehow insulting to them? Not really, of course not. But every now and then I have to ask myself the question. Sometimes I even feel the urge to justify to my guy friends why I don't want to date them, even though I don't remotely think they want to date me--nor should they. I suppose I just want to reaffirm that friendship isn't a consolation prize. It's not second place. It's its own event. And especially in the past year or so, my guy friends have done a really good job of making me feel like I'm *worth* dating--and hopefully I do the same for them, because they tend to be serious catches.

The upshot is that I'm lucky. I'm lucky to have had such great guy friends, and from an early age**. When my mother was in school, her only options on that score were her female friends' sweethearts. She had no co-ed post-Halloween sleepovers, no intellectual coffee groups that were both easy and quietly fraught with mismatched desire. I may have secretly wanted more from a few of those friends, but they were first and foremost my friends, people who shaped my life independent of sex or my longing for it. Because sure, when we went on those 8th grade movie outings I had a crush on Ben and Rebecca had a crush on Lucas (or was it Chris?), but that was part of the fun. That was almost more about my friendship with Rebecca***.

So here's to Neighbor Steve and all my other faux-brothers out there. I'm proud and pleased to be in a position where someone might think I'm your girlfriend.

(Side note: when subway dude asked which of us was older, we said me [because I am] and the dude seemed surprised. Cuz brothers are supposed to be older than sisters? Weird.)


*Y'know, cuz I'll always be alone and whatnot.
**Like that Sharon Olds poem. Sort of.
***Incidentally, it was on those same outings that Rebecca and I tested out our fledgling feminist outrage. Ben may have been cute, but asking what time "Mr. Movie" started? Patriarchal! They just didn't understand.