The most loaded phrase in the world is, "Let's be friends". It either means you're being friend zoned, or that you and an ex are going to try and make a go of salvaging a friendship. The problem is that we're often not mature enough to go from a romantic relationship to a platonic friendship. I'm friends with most of my exes, and acquaintances with all but one (the ex-fiancee, whom I have zero desire to ever know again). But it wasn't an instant process. Rarely was I able to salvage anything out of the wreckage in the immediate aftermath of those relationships. It took time and other life experiences before I went back to apologize and before they were open to hearing me out. After all that went down back in December, G and I took a couple of weeks to cool off and figure out what we both wanted, before ultimately deciding it would be a shame to lose a decade-long friendship. The thing is, G and I have never tried our hand at platonic friendship before. And despite the fact that we're both pretty decent at this whole friendship thing, we can't seem to get a handle on how to be "just friends" with one another.
This is not the first time G and I have said we wanted to be just friends, but it is the first time we've actually tried to follow through with it. In the past, we've either fallen quickly into hooking up again, or we've backed off entirely when we found out the other was in a new relationship. Ironically, we've been able to be half in and half out during our hook ups, but it's been all or nothing during our friendship. Despite this, we've both been able to call on one another when we need to, whether we're on speaking terms or not. She's been there when ish has hit the fan on my end, and I've been there when life gets too loud for her. I wrote at the beginning of the year about how we finally got a chance to go through the remnants of our romantic relationship and determined that the spark was not as bright as it had once been. In that post, I said that we were kind of lingering in the in-between of not knowing what the future held, but being sure we were not going to end up together. And then we had our first friendship...uh...attempt on Sunday when the two of us, Y and our little ones had brunch together.
My heart always melted the second I laid eyes on G, even when we weren't dating. She's always felt bad about the fact that I adored her even when we were just hooking up, even though I knew it was nothing more than a rest stop, so to speak. I could never shut off my feelings for her. But at a certain point, I had to shut off some of them so I could be open to the possibility of finding someone new. And I think she suppressed her feelings because she felt guilty about always being ready to hook up, but not to give things another shot. She thinks I don't know her, but I know her and I've always attributed our demise to both of us not being ready for what we'd stumbled into, albeit in very different ways. But eight-ish years later, our lives have changed dramatically. G's son is a lot younger than Miss N and it trips me out to look at him because he is like her clone. They have the same eyes and it is so odd to see the eyes I adored for years in her little dude. There are those people you just know are going to be wonderful parents someday and I always felt that way about G. Becoming a mother has changed her in wonderful ways. She's more patient, more settled. We were both wanderers the first time around and now we've both discovered some sort of purpose in being parents. It's not the way we though we'd end up, and not how we probably wanted to end up, but it was how it was meant to be.
I like G as a friend, I always have. She's one of the best listeners I've ever known, she makes me laugh and she's always up for a debate about anything and everything. She's loved me when I was very unlovable and she's pushed me to be a better version of myself. I'd hate to lose that kind of friendship. She's the kind of person you need in your life, someone who will call you out on your crap and make damn sure you don't dwell on your disasters. Whatever the future holds for us, I hope that our friendship endures. It seems a shame to have fought such a battle of emotions for so long, only to end up never knowing one another again.
