FW (questionable) B

By Andrea Nemerson

andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I've recently come out of a messy divorce and decided that the best thing for me is a little no-commitment fun. I had a handy male acquaintance who was interested, so he quickly became my "friend with benefits." He's interested in the benefits but seems a little lacking in the friend area: He's very sweet when he wants to be intimate, but when we happen to run into each other in a social setting, he pretty much ignores me in favor of his longer-term friends (the friends don't know our relationship has moved up a notch). I know our thing is all fun and games, and I'm not asking for a committed boyfriend role, but am I expecting too much of this casual sort of arrangement in asking more from him then treating me like the acquaintance that I was before? Ideally I'd want to be treated at least as nicely as all the other girls he is flirting with, and maybe a little special occasionally. I've tried to address this with him, but he always leaves me feeling like I'm being overly emotional and controlling.

Love, Is This a Benefit?

Dear Ben:

"Friends with benefits." Yuck. When did the unpleasantly transactional "FWB" supplant the far crasser but more honest and pithy "fuck buddy," and where did "fuck buddy" go? Gone with the wind, like a fuck buddy who gets a better offer? By either name, anyway, it's a potentially problematic setup: great when everyone's on the exact same page, but so, so fraught with hidden pitfalls and potential misunderstandings. As with polyamory (no, we're not talking about that again!), few people can really do it well, and done poorly, it's just another way for people to treat each other like crap. Surely we had no shortage of those before?

Although the FWB idea sounds so much cozier than its alternative, the onetime hookup, it can require of its participants a faintly chilling sort of psychic manipulation — not of their partners, but of themselves. How easy is it, after all, to see someone steadily and nakedly and not develop at least some expectation of importance in his life? And how damaging might it be, over time, to pretend that no such expectation exists? Popular as the arrangement might be these days, especially on campuses, you are not going to convince me that a good percentage of the time one "friend" is not dying a little inside every time the other zips up his/her jeans and gives a breezy little wave good-bye till next time. It may not be cool, but it is human.

But back to you. I think you may be having a perception problem. I don't see this as a case of "friends with benefits" gone less friendly, since I missed the part where you were ever friends, exactly. You were acquaintances; some of your friends are friends with some of his friends. Which is nice, but the two of you had not established any particular bond of your own. The part of the FWB arrangement that makes it potentially safer and sweeter than random hooking up — the "friends" part, wherein it is assumed that you like each other and have some interest in each other's well-being — was missing from the outset. What you had was a guy who thought you were hot and was waiting around for a chance at you, which he got. He now has you relegated permanently to the "girls you fuck" category. It's possible, if unfortunate, that he has those other girls, the ones he's flirting with at parties, filed under "girls you date." I don't think he'll be going through his files and recategorizing everything any time soon. It's too bad, but we don't want to forget that the Rules girls outsold (and still outsell) the fuck-me feminists for a reason. A few dozen centuries' worth of double standard cannot be expected to erase itself from the cultural record in a couple of decades just because some of us think it stinks.

I think he's made it very clear, by snubbing you in public (his friends don't know your relationship has "moved up a notch" because, in truth, it hasn't), that he isn't interested in treating you "a little specially." I'd just say he's a bit of a heel and leave it at that, but considering the built-in vagaries of the FWB arrangement, I'm not sure he's doing anything all that wrong. A more sensitive person would have noticed your dissatisfaction, or not been a dick about it when you tried to bring it up, but an argument can also be made that he is perfectly fulfilling his role as he understands it — guy who shows up and has sex with you. And there's the problem with FWB right there. While it can work, and work brilliantly, only seldom (postcollege, anyway) is it really what both people want. It will nearly always be a substitute for something better, and we don't always treat substitutes very nicely, do we?

Love, Andrea