Friends With Benefits
“. . . Never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
I always forgot socks. Always. He spent a tremendous amount of time teasing me about it, and I spent a lot of time complaining about the ice cube he called his dorm room. Eventually he just began providing socks when I walked in the door so I could stop the same complaints. As a rule I still really hate socks, and I am pretty sure that he'd still make fun of me for it.
I never showed up without my socks because I took a serious interest in a relationship, but because I needed something from him (Boy, college me was a real treat!). Looking back, I couldn't have been more selfish. I am appalled at the lack of respect I had for this person. Although I treasured that space because it allowed me to avoid, it was very destructive overall. When I was there, I wasn't lonely and I didn't have to deal with whatever it was I was going to think about when I was alone. But instead I undervalued a person.
Recently it occurred to me that friendships can take on their own spin of the friends with benefits dynamic. It's that person you only text/call/email/ask to coffee when your issues overwhelm you, but you never really take on the responsibility of asking about their's. You vent and leave. Over and over. This benefits you because you get to express outside your realm, without actually having to deal with the core problems you're facing. We essentially ask them to play bellhop to the whims of our emotional baggage.
I am fairly certain there's been about 20 movies made about how the classic friends with benefits type relationship doesn't work. You'd think that we'd catch on, or at the very least pretend we know better. But we don't. We don't because we like knowing there's an option in our life that lets us remove ourselves from our reality, glean some sort of satisfaction and then go back to life as usual without any personal investment whatsoever.
To be clear, I want to say that we all need a safe place to land and a person that lets us put all of the stuff inside us out on the table. I think it is an essential need within a person to know that there's a sounding board, and secret keeper in their life. I am not saying that is wrong. What I am saying is that taking, taking and taking in a relationship is wrong. Showing up on anyone's metaphorical or literal doorstep in any relational capacity to only take what you need and leave is wrong. If this person is your friend, your parent, your coworker, your partner, it doesn't matter. What matters is mutual investment.
How many people are we not investing in that are continuously investing in us? How often are we depriving them of their sounding board by using their time without giving it back? I see this in my own life, and it makes me feel like the selfish person I was back in that college dorm room. I don't like seeing that, because I want to be better than that. I want to pursue relationships that offer mutual satisfaction, no matter how much I want to just toss my junk on someone's lap and bail. That shouldn't even be an option anymore. It won't be an option anymore.