Homo-like, hetero-like?
I've been given to think by a discussion in a locked post on LJ about friendship and people who claim that they can't somehow really be friends with persons of the same/opposite sex.
Okay, there is that whole pernicious trope of 'wymmynz b backstabbing bitches to one another', and that other one that cross-gender friendships, at least if the orientations of the individuals involved are compatible, can't really work because SEX.
And I'm sitting over here, thinking that friendship is All More Complicated.
On the whole, I don't think people make the assumption that because one's sexual orientation is whatever it is, that one will find Any Random Person of Specified Gender actually attractive.* Ditto, surely, for liking.
As far as friendship goes, I lean quite heavily on the concept of differences within persons of any given group rather than their similarity.
I cannot be the only person who around for whom it is a startling and lovely revelation to find somebody who is on the same wavelength, speaks the same language, gets the same jokes, in among all those people who, perfectly pleasant as they may be, don't ring that bell.
Sometimes, I will concede, one's bar may be set lower for this depending on circumstance - I've been in situations where encountering under otherwise unpromising conditions someone who read books for pleasure or had some other overlapping area of interest, was enough for me to wish to grapple them to my heart with hoops of steel or at least feel like a conspiracy of two against the rest.
There is also that thing - perhaps more so in one's youth, but perhaps not - where one hangs out with people and does stuff with them simply because they're there.
Anyway, just because you're a hedgehog and I'm a hedgehog is not necessarily a sound basis for being BFF anymore than a fling on the P&O going out to India constituted a social introduction.
*Plus, just because one finds someone attractive, doesn't inevitably mean leg-over situation must eventuate. There may be all sorts of factors which mean that, while acknowledging that X is not just a lovely intelligent and congenial person but also really quite HOTTT, there is no need to do anything about it. Really. Truly.
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