I Know What I'm Doing (15 page)

She said that he had an accident years ago. He fell into a gravel pit. She claims he was only injured physically and spends most of his days with in-home physical therapists and some medical marijuana. How does one fall into a construction site gravel pit and NOT HAVE IT AFFECT THEIR BRAIN? He totally seems like someone who fell on his head. It made so much sense now. Medical marijuana doesn’t make you knock on someone’s door all night—hauling some rocks knocking about in your noggin does.

She told me that she would talk to Billy and explain to him that not everyone likes visits from neighbors. I thanked her and when I got back to my apartment I realized that I never put the muffins down in front of her. I kept them in my lap and absentmindedly brought them back to my apartment. I’m a monster.

Two days later, as I was walking out of my door Billy opened his down the hall. He said, “I have to talk to you, Jennifer.” He was angry and his phlegm was boiling inside of his esophagus.

My stomach dropped. Face-to-face.

He said, “Your boyfriend was rude to me the other night. Very rude. And I complained to the building manager about it. You will be getting a warning soon and might have to move.”

Suddenly I was just so
over it.
A montage went through my head of the years and years of crazy roommates I had had—from the girl who cried loudly at seven a.m. waking me up like an alarm clock that needs Prozac, to the weird hippie couple who boiled leaves from the city street to make tea, to the cockroach infestation of 2005, to my ex-husband and his many attempts to get me to use a clip-on reading light in bed, to the loud toddler stomping above me. Enough was enough. I was finally going to live free, live alone on my own terms, and I was not going to have any kids smoking pot on my stoop or a construction-site accident victim making me feel uncomfortable.

My eyes focused in and I said, “Billy. That is not true. My boyfriend wasn’t rude. [I tried not to sound like I was lying about having a boyfriend.] I was there. I heard him. YOU were rude. You do not need to ring someone’s bell late at night. I don’t want tickets to a comedy show and I didn’t come to this building to make new friends. I came to have some peace and quiet. You can tell the building manager on me all you want. I’m not moving. And you will not be making me uncomfortable in this hallway anymore.”

He coughed. “Okay.” And went back into his apartment.

I walked down the hall feeling like an adult. I stood up for myself. I set a boundary. I had summoned my inner Angelina Jolie and I didn’t even have to get a bunch of painful, tribal, white-woman tattoos to do so. Once I was alone in the elevator heading down, I burst into tears. There’s no hard-and-fast rule about the face of bravery. Those tears didn’t mean that deep down I’m not someone who can handle “face-to-face” combat. They just meant that standing up for oneself is a nuanced process and I would be inhuman to not shed a tear for someone who once fell headfirst into a gravel pit. Maybe I would leave those muffins at
his
door.

13

YOU CAN PICK YOUR FRIENDS, BUT YOU CAN’T PICK YOUR FRIENDS’ NOSES. ALTHOUGH SOMETIMES YOU CAN HAVE SEX WITH THEM.

Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer.

—JEAN DE LA FONTAINE

I
disagree with the basic premise of many romantic comedies that presuppose that a man and woman cannot add sex to their friendship without complication or falling in love. In most movies, hearts either get broken or the friends-turned-lovers come together in a big scene on a significant historical bridge or on the viewing deck of the Empire State Building. It’s always somewhere involving heights where these souls decide to spend the rest of their lives together. I blame the thin air and altitude for casual lovers and close friends coming to the conclusion that just because they’ve slept together it means there has to be pain, consequences, and eventually marriage and a baby carriage. I think, no, I
know
that having a Friend With Benefits
can
work out. And by work out, I don’t mean it leads to taking an elevator to the top of a 102-story skyscraper and exchanging “I love you”s. I just mean, as the Rolling Stones told us, “. . . if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”

My therapist says that a Friendship With Benefits situation is taking a huge sanity risk by having sex with a man who is emotionally unavailable for a traditional relationship. This is due to the production of a chemical called oxytocin that makes women bond with every man they sleep with whether they like it or not. But I know that there are women out there who have been in a place in their lives where they too are emotionally unavailable for a “real” relationship (ahem) and I’m a strong advocate for a Friend With Benefits seeing us through.

I don’t believe in stereotypical gender norms that men can “just have sex” and women can’t. I also don’t believe that sex without a relationship is “just sex” either. And I don’t believe in oxytocin. I mean, I believe that oxytocin is
real
. I know it’s not Santa Claus. I obviously don’t doubt that it’s a hormone that actually exists, but either the science of how oxytocin works is partial bullshit or some women are just outside of the chemical equation.

I’ve done some research on oxytocin—the key word here is “some,” but here’s what we’ve got.
Oxytocin
(/
/;
Oxt
) is a mammalian neurohypophysial hormone.

What?

I’ll say it in laywoman’s terms. Oxytocin plays an important role in sexual reproduction (both sexes) but in particular during and after childbirth. It’s released in large amounts after the distension of the cervix and uterus during labor and after stimulation (no, not kissing—lactating). Okay. So far, this hormone doesn’t apply to me. I’m barren by choice.

But recent studies show that oxytocin plays a role in various behaviors like orgasm and social recognition. It’s sometimes referred to as the “bonding hormone.”

I have another hormone called “common sense.” If I’m with a man—even if the sex rocks my world and I feel like snuggling with him afterward—if I know that he’s the wrong guy for me due to our different lifestyles, values, and the simple fact that I don’t think he would be a good boyfriend, I do not get attached. Something in my DNA—call it my commonsenseytocin—just naturally kicks in and I can get out of bed and make it to my morning Pilates class without an urge to cancel. In fact, I think that the men and women we
should
have a Friends With Benefits situation with are the ones who
don’t
provide us with a sense of security. Safety, yes. I’m not saying sleep with a runaway convict. (Although it seems to have worked out pretty well for Kate Winslet in the movie
Labor Day
.)

If I know that my FWB is someone I would not want to “pair-bond” with romantically, then it’s easy to see it as just sex because I’ve already decided that it can’t be more. If you’re sleeping with a good guy who thinks you’re girlfriend material but just doesn’t want a girlfriend you better make sure that you really don’t want him as a boyfriend either or else you’ll get crushed. You’ll feel constant dread and anxiety wondering why he isn’t falling in love. This will only serve to make you feel unlovable. If you’re truly thinking (and not in a defensive way),
I don’t want to be your girlfriend either
, then it’s the perfect non-relationship.

Sure, there have been exceptions, moments I’ve lost my mind for someone only to feel perplexed a few weeks later with
What was I thinking
? I’ve had dalliances with acquaintances, knowing they were emotionally unavailable. I can admit that in those cases the oxytocin was probably flowing through me like hot lava through a volcano about to explode but, full disclosure, I had feelings I wasn’t admitting to at the time, hoping the guy might magically change his mind.

Popular romantic comedies do not help support my campaign for the acceptance of Friends With Benefits. Every movie seems to start with two friends, let’s call them Guy and Girl, who go on depressing dates with other people who don’t understand their jokes. Then Guy and Girl meet up for breakfast and commiserate about their awful love lives. Guy is a player who says crass things about his date like, “Her boobs weren’t big enough and she wanted to get married.” Girl disapproves of this dirty playboy platonic friend of hers but feels she’s really learning about the male psyche through her brutally honest friend. Guy, despite his penchant for big-boobed, emotionless girls will say something sweet to Girl that lets the audience empathize with him while they yell at the screen, “You two should sleep together! Even though he seems emotionally stunted he’s perfect for you to marry because he’s sitting right there!”

Someone must be putting oxytocin in the movie theater popcorn because moviegoing audiences aren’t happy until Guy and Girl end up together, even though it’s clear they really don’t have much in common. They have a good rapport and enjoy eating together, but even though Girl didn’t respect Guy during the first half hour, suddenly that doesn’t matter. They have sex and now they realize that they always loved each other . . . and that’s the reward that everyone wants. Monogamy.

Why do Friends With Benefits who remain just Friends With Benefits make some people so uncomfortable? It calls into question the one thing that separates a marriage from a friendship—sex. And if other people have figured out how to have the sex, friendship, and freedom, maybe married people simply don’t want to know. Married people will explain that their marriage is more than just fornication—bragging about how they have intimacy without being intimate that often, as though there’s maturity involved with not having much sex. Do you ever get the feeling that to your married friends you’re some character in a video game who is jumping but just can’t reach that next level of enlightenment? We know that when they first met the sex was what made them giddy about each other. Nobody meets someone and proclaims, “I’m so turned on that I’m going to show up at his house in flannel pajamas and we’re going to sit on the couch and not have sex, but have
true
intimacy by eating pizza!”

I’m sick of hearing that something is going to go wrong if you have a fuck buddy. Okay. Something
might
go wrong. So what? Something might go wrong in
any
relationship. That’s life. Look at life itself. Life itself “goes wrong” because each and every one of our lives ends in death. I’d say that’s pretty much the definition of
something went wrong.
Yet we still get out of bed every day. Maybe one of my girlfriends will suddenly start acting like a scheming liar. I’m not going to not have friends for fear that it might
go wrong
. So goes the same for a fuck buddy. Who else are we supposed to have sex with until we meet someone who is relationship-appropriate? Strangers? And don’t tell me that the Universe will provide us with the perfect partner once we clear all extraneous men and women out of our lives. I promise your next great love will find you, even if your fuck buddy is in your apartment once a week.

I had a successful Friendship With On-Again/Off-Again Benefits for almost twenty years with a male friend who I’ll call “Gypsy.” I’m calling him this because though he and his grandparents are all California natives, he’s always talking about how his ancestry is made up of Jewish Gypsies of a nonspecific Eastern European area. And he’s also somewhat of a gypsy in the Stevie Nicks sense. He’s a true artist, whether he’s painting a watercolor interpretation of his dreams, playing multiple instruments on tour with a band, or using the Internet not to watch porn but for researching the best places to live in the world if you want to have access to a full-time shaman.

I’ve never fallen in love with this man and he hasn’t fallen in love with me. We know that we aren’t “the one” or even “a one” for each other but it works because we can ignore each other for weeks, sometimes months, and nobody gets offended. We’ve never been at a loss for words around each other and we keep no secrets. I could tell Gypsy anything and he would never judge me. He would laugh and tell me something even worse about himself. We have an intimate friendship but neither of us wants the other to become their domesticated mate. I never want to live with Gypsy and come home to him burning spaghetti and asking me, “How was your day, honey?” Truthfully, having lived that scenario with a few men—even men I’ve
loved, loved, loved
—I found that level of togetherness to be overwhelming. I like people asking how my day was—just not the second that I walk in the front door. I’m easily overwhelmed if I don’t have a few minutes alone every day. If I come home to too much mail waiting I can lose my patience and yell, “Just wait a goddamn minute, please. Stop pushing yourself on me, you envelope! I’ll open you after I’ve taken off my shoes and cleared my head.”

During the years that I was married, Gypsy and I simply had platonic lunches together, not those hedonistic sex party lunches that you’ve heard go on all over Los Angeles. When Gypsy had a hot Hot Yoga–teaching girlfriend he refrained from sex with me as well as from eating, opting only to drink the Master Cleanse for a month. When we were both single at the same time we were there for each other during bouts of loneliness and horniness. When we occasionally lost touch there was no teary good-bye or break up. And
that
is the benefit of being friends. We just knew that we’d see each other around. Our Friendship With Benefits arrangement took much care, respect, communication, and acceptance from the hot-and-heavy beginning through to the platonic conclusion. In a lot of ways it was like a marriage without the whole “I have to talk to his mom” or “throw his dirty underwear into my load of whites” expectations.