One thing I like about Mike’s latest post is that he unwittingly concedes my point on an earlier issue. I love when that happens, and am always vigilant for inadvertant concessions. Some time ago, I wrote that there was no such thing as the “friend zone“. By that I meant that all of the efforts men putting into “avoiding the friend zone” are pointless, because the issue isn’t really that they’re missing a window of opportunity. All of those men, I contend, who are running around complaining about how they got stuck in the “friend zone” never stood a chance.
Now Mike says, in essence, that it’s either there or it’s not. He doesn’t quite know what “it” is (and who does?), but he knows that if it’s not there, no amount of will can turn a friendship into a romantic relationship. The confusing thing is that I’ve heard Mike say before–and you probably have, too, since he most likely said it on this very blog–that he believes you can build a workable relationship with anyone if you both have the will to make it work.
I’d love to challenge him and say “Which is it?!?!?!”, but I really can’t because I think the answer is both. I think that maybe you can make a relationship work with anyone if you both have the will, but that those indefinable characteristics are often the source of the will. I think that whether or not you have the will in that moment impacts your overall perspective on what consitutes a workable relationship. The “indefinable something” isn’t indefinable just because we can’t find the right label for it or an adequate way to explain it. It’s indefinable because it’s never the same twice, and because it comes as much from inside of us as from the other person.
Once upon a time, I was engaged to an engineer. We had a relationship that looked great on paper–two young, attractive, up-and-coming professionals with a shared social conscience. Seventeen years after our break-up, we remain good friends. But he was technical and reserved; our relationship lacked passion. The man I loved next was so visceral, so passionate, so unpredictable, so close to his animal nature that the relationship almost cost me my life. And so the pendulum swung, for a while, until it dropped comfortably back to the middle. When I met my ex-fiance, I wouldn’t have been open to a man like the one who followed him. When I met the wild man who swept me off my feet, I didn’t have the patience or the inclination for the kind of man I might actually settle down with one day. And in the long run, the man I would have married became a friend; the man I loved will an all-consuming passion became an enemy; the man I married was a normal person with elements of predictability and others of playfulness, warm but not a dangerous flame.
Each of those relationships formed not because those three men had some mysterious trait in common that is my “magical ingredient”, but because who they were and what they offered fit the stage of my life and my mind and my heart in a particular phase of my life. Which, in the interests of fairness, I must point out is exactly what Mike said about the friend zone issue. It ALL depends–which means you’re never going to find the answer as to exactly why something worked or didn’t work in the moment or one person returns your interest and another doesn’t. There are too many variables, and most of them have nothing to do with you.
