I got a call this morning from a seemingly upset girl claiming to be a guy friend's girlfriend. She was about to tell me off, I'm assuming, but my phone accidently dropped the call. And I digress.
Long before Meg Ryan had an orgasm over her salad, people were talking about male-female friendship. Can it work, does it ever work, and what can make it work? I have a few male friends, and though we don't get to see each other that often we have quite a good time together. But sometimes, I'll try and make a guy my friend and it fizzles, and changes into something else - a relationship or a wanted relationship (this was post-Thomas days), a distant acquaintance, or, the worst: absolutely nothing.
The media, in my experience, has tried to help the male-female friendship along - giving us television like Will and Grace and Friends, and movies like My Best Friend's Wedding and Bridget Jones' Diary. But there's always a glitch here too. Every single man and woman friendship I can think of in the media is either
A. a romance or potential romance,
B. included one or more homosexual characters that were not even interested in their male or female friend in a sexual manner, or
C. part of a foursome or threesome or one or more married couples.
Think of more films and television shows - very few exist where the male-female friendship isn't controlled by one or more of these scenarios. Another major scenario is, borrowing from Bridget Jones, the "smug marrieds" scenario. A man and woman may be friends only if his wife and her husband get along too. Or a single man or woman may be friends with couples, but there is always that pressure of the couple finding him or her a date to complete the perfect square. (As is the case in Bridget Jones – the only male friend she has and has not wanted to date or that was married was, indeed, gay.)
So what’s the safety? What can make things work? I think that society and the media will always lean away from strict male-female friendships as they have all along. And unfortunately my fiancé and I will always be left by friends whose agendas don’t match with friendship. But we aren’t concerned amongst ourselves, because we have this immense trust in one another.
And that’s what it always boils down to, isn’t it? America got into a war in a foreign country because it couldn’t trust that we wouldn’t get bombed again. The whole country has trust issues, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that each citizen has them too. Even I’ve doubted Tom’s relationship with some of his female friends, even though we have that trust, but I would never do anything to sabotage that friendship.
So naturally I question this girl that called me this morning. She obviously must not trust her boyfriend enough to go out with me, but she didn’t want to face her own untrustworthiness so she pointed fingers at me – the adulteress (which I’m of course not), the “other woman,” or, more accurately, the girl that went down to the bar the other night with her boyfriend. I feel bad for her, really. I feel bad for the whole darn country. Because before the jealousy, before the “smug marrieds” and the ex-boyfriend-turned-best-friend scenarios, there were the kids you ran around with down the street.
Now I can’t even have dinner with the kid I used to play in the sandbox with. He might be cheating on his wife, or I on my husband. It might be wrong.
It's sad, really.
Comments (1)
You know, what you say is so true. In much of the media present in the developed countries today, we see scandal and betrail. These images have been engraved into our minds as things that will happen to us. But take a step back from that even. So many women these days are obsessed with the idea of being in love. The girl who called you may be one of those. Women see things in the media that constaintly tell them how good and amazing it feels to be in love. They become obsessed with the idea of being in love, so the next man that will allow the girl to get close, becomes the one she is "in love" with. Really, it's not love though, it's an obsession with love, and the idea of being in love that they are in love with. So really, we have the media to blame, but more so, we have ourselves to blame. We must blame ourselves for giving this fire more oxygen to breathe off of. If it weren't for our consumerism in the media, the huge industry that is filled with lies wouldn't be there. What do you think?