![Are You Ready To Be Friends ... With Benefits? [EXPERT]](http://images.tangomag.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/node-full/image_blog/close.jpg "Are You Ready To Be Friends ... With Benefits? [EXPERT]")
If you're thinking about having sex with a friend, be very careful, because it is not easy to preserve a friendship once you have sex. We think we can control our feelings, but it's not so simple.
It’s that time of year again, wedding season, and if you have a long term boyfriend you may be feeling that the pressure is on to get that marriage proposal. The complaint that I’m hearing most from women in this situation is “I’m sick of going to weddings and being asked when I am finally going to be a bride?” If the wedding happens to be for a couple that was dating for less time than the woman who is still waiting to be engaged, then this phrase is uttered with an even greater sense of frustration and often with a fair amount of profanity. <
Women can fake orgasms. Men can fake entire relationships. This juicy tidbit marking the romantic distinction between males and females recently made its way onto my Twitter feed. Enjoying a brief chuckle after reading it, I soon realized how closely this alleged truth hits home: my friend Jay is in a fake relationship and I’ve been wondering if I should tell the girl.
Jack and I had our first romantic interlude on the 4th of July. Back in college, going out with someone usually meant deciding to end up in the same place, so I wouldn’t have called it a proper date. We met at Boston’s Charles River Esplanade, watched a couple bands and some fireworks, then Jack leaned over and said, “I dig you.” The rest was history. Over the years, I’ve come to believe relationships are meant to teach us how to relate authentically yet continue to be our most genuine selves. Some folks need to learn selflessness, others intimacy, and some just need to learn to put the toilet seat down. Kicking off my relationship life on Independence Day with Jack was hardly an insignificant twist of fate. This first real love set me off on an endless quest to learn the meaning of freedom. See, Jack already had a girlfriend. Thus, our year-long liaison was an education in
Recently, I met up with a couple old friends, a married woman and a single gal enjoying the fruits of a new romance. I told them about all my turbulent relationships, joking about the slackers and bad boys, the commitment-phobes and jerky alpha-males who’d come into my life since we’d last seen each other. “Oh, I’ve been there loads of times,” my married friend said after I described my most recent run-in with a sexy, relationship-shy stoner. She’d been there loads of times? Shocking. Married women, especially once they’re moms, seem to me so organized and fulfilled, it’s hard to imagine any of these poised individuals knocking around with losers. But once I thought about it, I remembered all the other married women I know who’ve admitted to the same sordid pasts. My friend Sonya’s husband is a successful TV producer with a taste for fine wine, classical music, and most interestingly, fidelity. But
A few years ago, I saw a BBC documentary about phobias in which an adult woman was being treated for her lifelong, incapacitating fear of birds. Now, fear of heights, closed-in spaces, lawn mowers, I understand. But who’s ever ended up in a hospital or morgue after suffering an aerial assault from a band of militant pigeons? In Ohio where I grew up, flocks of geese were shot every spring because they crapped everywhere and ate berries out of old ladies’ gardens. Not because of the frequency with which they were implicated in human maulings.
