Post 21: Getting it Over With

originally created as Column Twenty-One, January, 2001

Post 21: Getting it Over With – Having Sex with a Platonic Friend

Can it be done? Does it ruin the friendship? I had a friend, Gadi who I was crazy about for years. A male friend of course. But when he was interested in me, I wasn’t available and vice versa. When I got divorced, Gadi was in the country and available and I thought – at last, my chance.

So I wore the sexiest dress I could find and even got a little drunk, something I rarely do, but he was worried that I would fall in love with him, and that it was too soon after my divorce and so he let me kiss him but would not go to bed with me.

Another few years past and one fateful night when we had come back from a night out with a group of friends, Gadi’s car was parked near my place and he had to go back to my house to pick up his car, and once again I was wearing a sexy dress (not the same one as during the first attempt - I don’t keep Monica Lewinsky style stained dresses hanging in the closet for months). I thought I might seduce one of the guys in our group of friends. (You may have noticed that I’m not great at seduction although men start up with my female friends. I go to the hairdresser and cosmetician to try to look put together and the men run straight to my girlfriends! Must be my expert manicure – my nail polish shining the way directly to the woman sitting beside me). So my seduction attempts did not succeed (I didn’t really attempt, even though I may have fantasized about it) and Gadi and I both found ourselves driving home together. It was understood that we do NOT sleep together, that we had been friends for over 12 years already, and that we would not ruin our friendship with doing something silly like sleeping together. Only that night he was particularly lonely and curious and this time he decided he would take the chance. I did not resist. What he didn’t bargain for is that it would be so emotionally intense, and so in the morning, after eating breakfast together, he said that it was nice but we should leave it as a nice memory and continue being friends.

It happened once again, after a party we once went to for one of the national holidays, only this time he had been drinking, and it didn’t match the emotional intensity of the first time.
So I realized it is sometimes better to get things over with and that you can go back to being good friends if the basis for friendship is there in the first place.

I thought that I could do it again with a man that I met five years ago. Don and I were friends for almost eight months and we were both sleeping with other people (in the days that I used to have sex). I thought that once again I could “get it over with” once or twice and that’s it. I was sure that it would be a disaster. The problem is that we didn’t get it over with. It ended up to be a relationship that lasted three years. Gadi and I had managed to “get it over with” so I thought the same thing would occur with Don. Don and I eventually split up (twice!) over many issues but he’s never let me say “let’s get it over with” without a sarcastic chuckle.

Since this writer doesn’t really want a boyfriend at the moment, she has nothing to get OVER but can get ON with her life. Anyone want to join her for an exciting weekend of filing personal paperwork and ironing half a wardrobe? Maybe those sexy dresses are lying somewhere buried beneath the pathetic pile.