Friends With Benefits

Her: I thought you wanted to be my boyfriend?

Wombat: I do.

Her: When?

Wombat: Not right now.


Expectations kill relationships. They're the rocks that wreck super-tankers and sailing boats alike. No relationship is safe from them, and no chart shows them all. GPS works perfectly most of the time, but without knowledge of where not to go, metre-accuracy will only tell you precisely where you ran aground.

The ocean called "Friends With Benefits" is one with an unusually jagged coastline. As enticing as the concept appears, I fear most of us compartmentalize the 'friends' and the 'benefits' as if they can be. Like a watercolour Venn Diagram in the rain, those two can only bleed into each other with potentially messy results. Art is rarely the outcome.

Doc30ty highlights my point in her post. [link] Her male FWB half clearly didn't include exclusivity in his mental image of FWB. His thinking was more Benefits with a Friend, dare I say an expectation at variance with that of our beloved Doc30ty.

There are three ways to find a FWB relationship:

Friends first -> add benefits.

Simultaneous creation of friendship including benefits.

Beneficiaries first -> add friendship.

Is one way better than another? That's not for me to decide. What experience tells me is that my expectations will differ from my lady friend's, and the problem with that is that we both think there won't be any complications arising therefrom.

This is the temptation of the FWB deal: the simplicity of it appeals mightily, but it's impossible for any of us to not expect stuff beyond the raw acronym. We set sail in light winds and smooth seas but wake that night to the sound of crashing waves on gnarly rocks.



Bottoms Up, Landlubbers!



Diagram from here [link]

Edited for tense and incorrect plurals, as well as overuse of 'variance' - the usual thesaurus of Wombat idiocies.