Guy Friends

So I am again seeing the guy I was seeing for a year and a half and then broke it off with, but it isn't what you're thinking. We really are friends.

"He only wants you around for one thing," I was told by a so-called friend soon after. "I'm a guy, too, and I know about these things."

Oh, yeah?--so that's why you are talking to me, buddy?

"If you think it's friendship, you're in denial."

Well, gosh, I know what friendship looks like...a real friend is that rare person you can tell the truth to. That doesn't come around every day, don't I know it.

My father was a talker. He wasn't an emoter, but he liked to think, and he liked to discuss. He particularly liked theology. Raised a Bible-quoting Baptist, he met my mother when they were in their late teens, and by the time I was born (before either of them turned twenty) she'd turned him atheist, merely by listening to his beliefs and replying, "You really believe that stuff?"

My grandmother tried to repair the situation by whisking me off to overnights that culminated in a trip to church on Sunday morning; when I was returned home, my father sat me on the couch for a debriefing. I was six or seven at the time this went on.

"You know, there is no God," he said. I nodded. "You know that all that stuff your grandmother told you is made-up stories," he went on. I agreed. (I particularly didn't like it when my grandmother had informed me "if you made a mistake printing the Bible, you would go to Hell because it was a holy book and had to be perfect!" I thought that was horribly unfair and an odd thing to bring up to a kid. My grandmother was a little whacky, as my father well knew.)

My mother was the quiet and reclusive one. She wasn't the type to have girlfriends over for coffee and chat in the afternoons. She still isn't, and neither am I.

I remember one sunny fall day we were all driving home from the apple orchard, and my father said to my mother, "When I throw this apple core out the window, where do you think it will hit?", and the two of them, only high school graduates, started a discussion about angles and velocity that lasted several apple cores out the car window and most of the way home.

I always had guys as friends. I was unassuming, like my mom, and easy to talk to, like my dad, and boys talked to me like friends. I never had a boyfriend until I was almost seventeen, and that was an overwhelming experience involving lots of hurt feelings and obsessive feelings and the tiny, immature beginnings of a capacity for passion--all too much for a sixteen-year-old, by far. My next boyfriend worked out better--a sweet guy to pal around with, someone I could never have fallen in love with but enjoyed pretending to, and when I broke up with him he was sad and called me hopefully for a long time afterward.

My first boyfriend and I developed an annoying and irresistible pattern of getting together for a few weeks every few years when we were both in between relationships, getting on each other's nerves and quarreling, and then parting ways in an offended furor. We did that for over a decade, believe it or not.

I have been single since my husband moved out in late 2004. A few men have bought me dinner over the years, and that has been nice for sure, but what I really crave is an ear to listen and some sound advice and a laugh or two. In recent months, with this big turmoil going on with me and my ex-husband, the people who have been the most rock-solid for me have been two men. One is a guy I work with who has become a real friend--the kind of friendship that works both ways--and he gives me hugs, and is quite amused and understanding when I start to squirm. The emotive thing will always be a mildly alien area for me, I think.

The other was the guy I was seeing for a year and a half. He was a physics major in college, and I'm sure he could solve my parents' apple core problem in about ten seconds. After two weeks of me cutting things off, I e-mailed him again. I considered it carefully first, but there is always the element of the unknown...is this one burned out? Can we really be friends?

I went to see him last Thursday. It had been three months since we had seen each other. I told him what had been happening with the ex and we ordered takeout. With the Discovery Channel in the background, we talked about other stuff, made each other laugh, ate the food,  played some footsie and fell asleep.

I hear that best friends make the best marriages. That's all I'm saying about me and committed relationships. I don't know if that's anyplace I can get to, but I do know that I'll take one good friend over a boyfriend any day...and it sure does help that I know how to be good friends with guys.