Separate checks, please.
Oh no, we're just friends.
These orders aren't together.
Him? He's like a brother to me.
I can't remember a time in my life when I haven't had at least one incredibly close male friend. Some of them I remain friends with, while some have moved or drifted away. But from Pokemon cards to practice rooms, late-night video game marathons to late-night Facebook chats, swing sets to cell phones and every step of the way in between, there's always been some guy in my life with whom I can just be one of the guys... yes, even though I'm a girl. I've had female friends too, most of the time, but for whatever reason I've always felt closer to the men in my life than the women. Girls can overanalyze. Girls can be petty. Girls can fight, girls can talk, girls can hurt you. I've felt it before and I've done it before; I'm not proud to admit it, but sometimes that's the way girls are.
Guys, though? Guys are different, somehow.
Some girls drop their IQs by twenty points every time they come near a Y chromosome. Some girls spend months trying to impress a boy whom she's unintentionally convincing she's kind of a skank. I know, because so many times I've been the girl that boy turns to after the awkward conversation is done and whispers, "Okay, I'm kind of creeped out now." I'm the girl who gets the look that says "Get her off me, I can't breathe." And in the end, I'm the girl that boy texts later that afternoon just to talk. Because even though they look kind of stupid sometimes (sorry boys), guys are surprisingly perceptive about who sees them as a person versus who sees them and whispers "LOOK HERE HE COMES! How's my hair?"
Maybe my nearly religious belief in the platonic, my policy of boys as friends not food, is part of the reason I've never had a boyfriend. Maybe trying to see guys like guys see guys has made guys see me like they see guys too. I'm okay with that, though; in the end, I'd rather have a best friend for five years than a beau for five minutes. In the end, I prefer having someone I can complain to and at and with than be tangled in the web of concealment and awkwardness and eventual heartbreak that a relationship so often means. Sure, I've been accused of being in love with my guy friends before. Sure, I've been the subject of awkward "are-they-dating" questions, to which my responses have varied from an enthusiastic "no" to an overly dramatic faking of my own slow, gagging, death, complete with extensive post-mortem twitching. But in the end, shouldn't it be obvious that one can have respect without romance, proximity without infatuation, a sort of paradoxical love-without-love? We're all humans here, no matter what gender; whoever says that there's no such thing as a mixed-gender friendship also implies the nonexistence of mixed-race friendships, mixed-age frienships, mixed-orientation friendhips... mixed-human friendships. They say that no two different humans can just be friends, that there must be some awkwardness, some barrier, some unimpeachable boundary...
There are no boundaries friendship cannot cross.
And as long as I live, I want a guy by my side--
not a husband,
not a boyfriend,
not a lover--
just a guy who is a guy
who I can trust and who trusts me.
These orders aren't together, waiter--
but we'll be eating side by side.
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