Twenty Questions

I keep discovering that if you're going to be the kind of person who asks questions about strangers' private lives, it's best to have a ninja approach to the matter.

For example, from Sunday:

Me: Hello, my name's Wombat.

Middle-Aged Woman: Hello, I'm Liz.

Me: So you and Ray are a couple? (Motioning to man standing next to her.)

MAW: (Slight hesitation.) We're married, but separated.

Me: But you look so cute together. (Lying through my teeth)

MAW: (Looking at Ray, standing at her side smiling like a goof) It's complicated.

At which point she launched into a surprisingly detailed description of why their three-year old marriage slumped to its current state of them being cocktail companions, but neither sexual nor domestic partners.

Two points:

1. Age does not give people wisdom.

2. If you're going to ask personal questions, just launch into it. They're dying to tell you.




Bottoms Up Non-Sexual Married Couples!



Photo of Hayley Tamaddon pic from here [link]

Harmony and Disharmony

Marriage can contain most other kinds of relationships, but when one gets loose: trouble.



Bottoms Up, Musicians!

Previous Wombatgram here [link]

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.