SelfAbsorbed.ME : ‘It’s Your Life, We Just Write it Funnier’

Yesterday, I began thinking about a topic that’d never really occurred to me before:

At what point does ‘getting to know you time’ with someone of the opposite sex morph into ‘just friends?’

Is it necessary that someone exhibit explicit romantic intentions from the get-go?

And most importantly, in what time frame do you need to get things heated up before becoming permanently platonic?

My only experience with these kinds of issues occurred with a male friend of mine we’ll call Grin. Grin was, and still is, the human result of what my ideal cooked up man would be like as far as looks, nationality, personality, and intelligence. Unfortunately, a lesser version of Grin, Mr. Grey, commanded all my emotional attention at the time – so while I was interested in Grin, I felt like I had enough on my man-plate, and never really got into it. Nevertheless, we’d meet up as friends, hang out and one another’s houses, and occasionally party together.

Then we started helping each other out with some business ventures and it became clear that our relations heading anywhere near the world of intimacy would be highly inappropriate.

Then he seemed too attractive. Untouchable. It’s like when you can appreciate a piece of artwork while having no desire to buy it. At a certain point, the romantic tension snapped and ceased existing.

Then we crossed that line and started telling each other about our love lives. For Grin, his obsession with this woman named Giulia who only lived in New York part time and who I saw as painstakingly average and uninteresting. For me, my rocky relationship with Mr. Grey, who he also knew.

The moment that our rubber band of romantic tension didn’t just snap, but got swept under the rug and forgotten, was when I met Giulia. Grin had made me aware that the woman he liked would be coming out with our group of friends that night. I chit-chatted with Giulia at the bar for twenty minutes thinking the entire time that Grin’s wonder woman had yet to arrive. It never occurred to me that my ‘perfect’ man would be interested in a woman who could be categorized as average. I expected a Giselle look-alike to saunter through the door.

This is when attraction didn’t just die, but got murdered and stepped on.

Men: I don’t think you realize how much other women define you by the woman you have on your arm. Shallow, but true.

It’s like when one of your male friends is dating a poll dancer with acrylics. You think – “Oh! That’s what he’s looking for? Really?” His stock plummets in a crash that’s impossible to recover from. You’ll never look at him the same way again.

When I saw that Grin’s obsession was a clearly very nice, but not an attractive, employable or exceedingly interesting woman, his transformation into ‘normal guy’ instead of ‘guy of my dreams’ was complete. Who am I to judge her? Giulia may be a fantastic individual, she just wasn’t what I was expecting.

Grin and I are close friends to this day, yet I still stop to wonder if we could’ve been the incredible power couple that exists in my mind. We were both attracted to one another, but somehow we missed the romantic boat. It’s like we had tickets for the cruise but ended up running around the marina lost for six hours. The timing was off and I guess my initial statements query if there’s a concrete time frame is for love.

Two weeks?

Two months?

Who makes the first move?

And why is making that move after you’ve got to know each other so much scarier than making a move with someone who you’re just lusting after?

I guess because when you’ve come to know and appreciate one another, there’s so much more at stake. Sometimes so much at stake that you’d rather keep the person in your life as a friend as opposed to losing them in a romantic tragedy.

Obviously, you want to get to know each other first.

Obviously, you don’t want to get to know each other so well that the thought of kissing the other person feels like incest.