Theatrical Muse Reboot - #54 - Do you believe in true friendship between a man and a woman?
Why wouldn't it be? This seems like another one of those questions that really didn't need to be asked, but I guess that is a statement that could cover quite a few questions in life. A lot of things are better left unsaid but that doesn't keep people from opening up their big mouths and saying whatever those things are. Myself especially included, I am enormously talented at saying whatever is on my mind, whether or not it really is the appropriate thing to say at any given moment. I suppose my sense of propriety fell off a long, long time ago. It serves me pretty well as a rock star most days but it does kind of make me an asshole in every day life. Ah, well, I guess sometimes you just have to be the jerk and that's the end of it. I am comfortable in my own skin and I suppose that's what matters.
Anyway, I think it's perfectly reasonable to think a man and a woman can truly be friends. I mean I think even asking the question kind of reinforces the idea that all people are interested in heteronominative relationships. Hear me out, now, I'm gonna start looking like an enormous hypocrite because I really don't have a leg to stand on regarding LGBT rights, but I guess I can put a little 'ally' button on for the time being and maybe get away with it.
I presume the basis of this question is due to the unwritten assumption that a man and a woman can't be true friends because there is always the layer of sexuality in everything they do. That's kind of complete bullshit on a couple of levels. The first level is, of course, assuming that all men will be attracted to all women, and vice-versa. Now matter how much you may feel like your white bread world is threatened by it, there are gay people out there. I know it's a news flash, what with it being such a new phenomenon that it was recorded as being a common and acceptable social practice in Ancient Rome. Some men like other men. Some women like other women. Some men and women don't actually feel sexual urges at all, which is a thoroughly puzzling notion to me but it is true none the less. In these cases I don't see what gender is supposed to have to do with the capacity to be friends with someone, since the gender is not theoretically going to be in the way of anything. Sexuality is a confusing thing at the best of times and it certainly isn't some kind of binary state with only 'yes' or 'no' as answers to any question that might be posed to someone regarding what makes their dangly bits get all tingly and stand at attention.
This also kind of presumes that any given two people are wholly incapable of putting aside their sexuality, whatever it is, to be friends. That's a kind of bullshit that I find a little more personally insulting, honestly. What's up with that? Is the mysterious question-asker some kind of sex-starved lunatic who can only think with whatever reaction they're having to the latent pheromones at the time? Because let me tell you what, I'm not sex STARVED by any means but I am certainly a very sexual creature and even I can think with something other than my dick from time to time. Yes, I know, this is thoroughly baffling news in and of itself but it is the truth. It is possible to be standing right in front of a woman and engaging her in conversation and not thinking about how much you'd like to motorboat her tits or anything else crude and more inappropriate than not.
So, yes, I think it's possible for a man and a woman to truly be friends. I kind of mourn for whomever thinks this isn't true, because while I am really not the world's leading expert on how to fucking make a relationship work for more than about three seconds, I'm pretty sure there are some fundamentals I still understand implicitly. Right at the top of those fundamentals is that if you want your relationship to work--whether or not you're with someone the same gender or the opposite gender or somewhere in between on that slippery sliding scale--you've got to at least like them a little first. Friends, so you can get along, and THEN lovers. Coffee comes before sex, really.