Boyfriends

Yesterday, after a long period of silence, I heard from my old friend ADD. I worked with ADD many years ago at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard and I would have gone crazy there if not for his friendship. Some upheavals in his personal life have kept ADD out of touch lately, but I don’t care how long it has been, he will always be one of my most cherished friends.

Coincidentally, the quote with the “A Word A Day” yesterday was:

“Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship. “ – Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900)

Now I think Mr. Wilde was a very talented man, but, in my opinion, he totally missed the boat on this one. Some of my best friends are men and that is nothing new.

Growing up, we always lived in neighborhoods that were oddly deficient in girls my age. Girl playmates had to be imported by car which required parental assistance and planning (which I found quite the dreadful concept when young), so my playmates were mostly boys. My best friend in kindergarten was a boy and I was the only girl at his 5th birthday party, where I won all the games – not only was I taller than all the boys, I was much more coordinated (the way girls tend to be at that age).

Another factor in my relationships with the male of the species was that my father had totally abandoned the idea of having any sons by the time I came along and decided to do all the “father/son” things with me. I had a great collection of Tonka trucks for my sandbox (including a fire truck that hooked up to a garden hose so it could shoot real water), train sets, electric car sets (slotless so you could change lanes) and so on. And these material possessions made me very popular with the neighborhood boys. Time spent with my father tended to consist of woodworking, hiking and going to construction sites to crawl around the inside of half-completed houses to check out the designs (this was when we lived at Sea Ranch, a community filled with architectural wonders).

And it didn’t stop there. As an adult, I like cars, construction (still), sports, electronics and computers… in other words traditional “guy things”. Then I started working in an industry that was 90% men. In my building at the last place I worked there were three other women: our division secretary (who was a good friend and I was matron-of-honor at her wedding); a laboratory technician (an odd little woman who owned, I’m not exaggerating, over a dozen cats and would occasionally bring one or two into work with her); and a near-silent, painfully shy, chemist (try as I might, I could never strike up any conversation with her that was not work-related). Unfortunately, I could not waste time during the day with my friend the secretary since her desk was right outside the boss’s door. That left me to find friends among my fellow chemists and engineers who were nearly all men.

I’m not saying that male/female relationships are not possible with all people. And I find it interesting that most of my male friends have been, for lack of a better word, geeks. Scientists, computer guys, engineers and the like. Why? My guy-friend MDT think it's because those careers draw people with the type of personality who have things in common with me and want me for a friend. In other words, geeks stick together. RWT feels that nerdy guys get so much of the “let’s just be friends” line from girls in high school and college (RWT has an impressive amount of experience with this phenomenon) that they are actually forced into learning to become friends with women and keep that ability throughout their lives. I sometimes wonder if it is just a percentages thing… only a certain percentage of people have friendship potential and when you mainly hang around geeky men, you’ll end up with more geeky male friends.

However, I do not claim for a moment that male/female friendships are just like same-sex friendships. There are things I tell my girlfriends that I would never admit to my guy-friends. And there are topics I talk about with my male friends about that most of my girlfriends really have no interest whatsoever in discussing.

From my side of it, I've never had to battle much against romantic feelings surfacing during my friendships with men. But I do see how it could occur in some cases, especially if no effort was made to avoid it. My father is fond of saying, “we are not animals and have control over our actions and feelings”. Not very romantic, but I find it to be apt. I go into male/female friendships knowing there will not be anything else other than friendship. The reasons why can run from not being attracted to the person in a romantic sense, other relationship commitments (such as marriage), that the friendship is in a professional situation where anything more would be inappropriate, and so on. But the biggest factor for me is that I value these friendships so much that I would hate to do anything to mess that up.