Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Just friends
Am I brilliant or what? With this photo, I can (A) do some Random Flickr Blogging, (B) segue into my Smart Bitches Day post, and (C) show three hot Asian babes and one Asian guy who is even more sexually non-threatening than yours truly. Booyah!
Back to SBD in a moment. I had a great writing day yesterday: nearly 4000 words, well over that if you count blog posts and my Tangent Online review of Helix SF Issue #1. (I’ll post a link to the review once Eugie puts it up on site.) And the words they did flow. Among other things, I wrote a scene that had been percolating in my mind since the first conception of this novel, namely, Barb teaching Lori how to give the world’s best blow job. Y’all are gonna love it, I hope I hope I hope.
On to the subject of today’s Smart Bitches Day post: opposite-sex-best-buddies in romance.
See? I told you that flickr photo was apropos.
Yesterday, I had a yen to watch When Harry Met Sally. Maybe it’s just that scene where Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm in a crowded restaurant. Maybe it’s the fact that Ryan and Crystal are so damned cute in that picture (not to mention Carrie Fisher, a real hottie). Or maybe it’s because When Harry Met Sally is one fabulous romance and I wanted to study it a bit.
Anyway, as most of you already know, Harry and Sally spend most of the movie as good friends who don’t have sex. The sexual tension is never far from the surface, however, thanks to the fact that Harry announces in one of the movie’s first scenes that men and women can never be “just friends,” and that the man will always have sex on the brain. Also, it’s a romance, so DUH, you know they’re going to do it eventually no matter what the two of them say. Romances are gloriously predictable.
Over the years (the movie came out in ’89), I’ve wondered about the truth of Harry’s theory. Can a hetero male have a hetero female friend without even a teensy bit of lust seeping in? Won’t the thought always be there — if not bouncing off the cranial walls, then nestled and smoldering deep in the limbic system?
MANDATORY REFERENCE TO ROMANCE WRITING TO KEEP BETH HAPPY
If it isn’t possible, than you had damned well better not write your story as if it were possible. In other words, your male love interest should not have a female “best friend” with whom he can confide anything and everything, and vice versa. If such a best friend does appear, he or she had better be a disembodied brain in a bottle. Even then, you’re not entirely safe.
There is a way to handle this, of course. Be honest about it. Have guy-and-best-fem-friend think about it, tease each other about it, flirt with the idea (and with each other).
Does any of this go on in romances? You would know a lot better than I would.
***
Back to my favorite subject, me.
It helps to be married. Those thoughts are still there, but they’re not nearly as insistent as they used to be. Of course, the fact that I’m forty-ahememhemem and not twenty-one must help. The hormones, they still rage, but I no longer feel like putting my head in a hydraulic press to make it all stop. Thank God for aging.
Nevertheless, I can remember a time when I was single when I had a female friend whom I was not attracted to. Honest! We were in the College of Chemistry together, studied together often, and even shared a meal or two. She was (and still is, I imagine) tall, beautiful, brilliant, and funny, and I never made a pass at her, nor did I even think about it.
At the time, I told myself I felt this way (or didn’t feel this way) because she had a boyfriend and I had a weird sense of honor about such things. You didn’t go after another guy’s girl. It had happened to me, I was still burned up about it, and I wasn’t about to do that to someone else. Not to mention the fact that the guy was some kind of body-builder and I didn’t want to get my ass kicked.
I doubt anything would have happened if I had made a pass at her. If she’d had any interest in me, she would have let me know, right? I wonder about that from time to time.
We’re still friends, but of the ’email each other once a year’ variety.
. . . And if she had made a pass at me, what would I have done? Was it just a funky sense of honor that kept me at bay, or was the chemistry all wrong? After all, chemistry is important. As we used to say back in the College of Chemistry, “Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible.”
D.
I think that, even if it were possible (and I’m not sure that it is) for men and women to be friends without those thoughts creeping in once in a while, it is probably uncommon enough that you should put such things in.
I’ve been reading your romance, and it seems to me that it is too sharp-witted, too funny, too hip to be a formula romance, of which I have read exactly one. So I wouldn’t worry too much about following the formula.
Formula – chemistry… hah.
Just looking at the picture again: the girl second from the right has something yellow and orange in her left hand. I hypothesize that it is some form of evil sex juju, and she has created three stoned and obedient sexbots which she will use later for her depraved pleasure.
Thanks, Dean. Glad you’re enjoying the romance. Since I haven’t read that many (six, I think?) I don’t think I have it in me to fall into any formulae.
That girl does seem to be the brains of the whole operation. She’s the only one of the three I find remotely appealing. That look of calculation, perhaps 😉
re: Flickrblogging:
I’m kind of surprised you didn’t go with this photo, though I suppose it’s not really labeled correctly (needs an IMG_ before the 2816). But since when have you been a stickler for the rules?
I had 2 male friends in university with whom I hung out almost constantly for 4 years. Neither one of them ever made even the slightest pass at me, even when falling-down drunk. They’re both married now, with kids, so I’m pretty sure they liked girls back then.
I can’t say for certain that they never thought about me naked, but if they did, it was well hidden.
I thought I had an opposite sex best buddy, then one night he ‘declared his feelings’ for me. Things have been rather odd for me in regards to him since then…
Nothing is more pathetic in a romance than the heroine’s best guy friend denying, then revealing, his feelings for her right before her engagement/wedding/move-in with the hero. She feels horrible, he looks like a loser, and the friendship is never the same. I’ve read that scenario so many times I want to stick pencils through my eyeballs. Even if you change the sexes (ala My Best Friend’s Wedding) it still doesn’t work.
I prefer men as friends over women, because women are touchy and moody and men can take a harsh word here and there with a laugh. Not that I’m harsh….I’m really a great big mallow, but I can say that all of the men who I had been very close to did at some point cross over the line and waggled an eyebrow at me while leaning in. I never reciprocated. I’d never make out with a girlfriend, and I’d not make out with a male-friend – there are rules here, ya know!
My current best male-friend is also my Husband’s best friend, so we fight over him. Even though he tells me many stories of his throbbing ten incher (yeah right) I know I can trust him not to lean in for anything.
There should be no declarations of inner feeling other than indigestion.
Robyn: thanks for the warning. I don’t think I’d try that, but it’s good to know just the same.
Noxcat: Nothing’s ever the same, is it? And the only thing that changed was the lifting of a veil.
sxKitten: it is an odd thing, isn’t it? It would be fun to ask them what was going through their heads back then.
Pat: I think I need her to check my inguinal hernia.
Lyvvie, sounds like a good rule.
When the feelings are intense, however, it’s not unusual for a guy to convince himself, “She simply MUST know!”
I agree with Robyn. “My Best Friend’s Wedding” = worst movie I ever saw at a drive-in (and I saw Johnny Mnemonic at a drive-in).
What you’re writing sounds a lotlike ‘lad lit’ (and yes the term is still applicable, even today, unless of course there’s lots of sex, which makes it ‘dick lit’)…and you may have even blurred the lines, but…all that to say go with what you do…who you are. I’m sure your personality will shine through and that the honesty you bring to the project will help it sell.
And I really am not an advocate of run-on, incoherent sentences, despite the above.
‘Lad lit’? Yeesh. I hate that. Who’s to say a guy can’t write chick lit? Lad lit.
Let’s make it guy garbage. I could live with that.
Pat, I never saw it. Have to agree about the heinousness of Johnny Mnemonic (but I didn’t think much of Gibson’s short story, either. Feh).
I had a friendship turn into interest from the side of the guy, and I so didn’t think him sexually attractive, nor was he someone I’d have wanted to live with (and sex for me only works in a relationship). I ended it because I was tired of his subtle and not so subtle hints.
No means NO, get it? 😉
Best bud in school, who always had a girlfriend, declared himself in a very vague way. Vaguely enough for me to pretend I didn’t get it or I thought he was talking about someone else. I ignored it, despite the fact that the idea of dating him was sort of appealing — he was dating someone and I don’t cheat. It all turned out for the best as we’re still friends, and he’s married to the girl he offered to chuck for me.
All right already, Gabriele. You don’t have to keep rubbing it in!
Nice story, jmc 😉
I think you get it. 🙂
But as an ENT, have you never seen those tiny wee filters in the ears of some men that block words like: no, take out the trash, you never say ‘I love you’ ….. Kids have filters, too, the most prominent being: clean up the mess in your room.
My nephew never hears that one.
Hey, maybe I should start charging for foreign body removals!
I like Lyvvie’s line about no declarations about inner feelings other than indigestion. It’s beautiful.
I bitch about my husband with my male friend across the street because he does AIM (Accurate Interpreted Male) for me. Huh? I say. What the hell? And the pal tells me what I missed in the interaction.
See, you need to read Cosmo more often. They teach you important stuff like that.
Cosmo doesn’t share a bottle of wine with me. The male pal across the street does. (His wife and my husband both don’t drink.)
Actually the great part of hitting the 40s is there is such a lessening of sexual tension in interactions with the opposite sex. Or maybe that’s the rotten part. Depends on the moment, I guess.
Here’s one thing I’ve learned: To the men of the world, there is nothing more invisible than a middle-aged woman.
Oh good, then I’m not yet middle aged. Because sometimes a man will still get those Basedow eyes on seing me. Must be the fact that it’s summer, I prefer to wear tops, and I do have two nice friends up there. 😀
I keep thinking about this, Kate, and I really think you’re wrong. At least from my POV. I find myself a lot more attracted to gals who are age-appropriate (e.g., Catherine Kenner — did I remember that correctly? — from 40-Year-Old Virgin). It’s not that I don’t think the young ones are hot. They are. But they also seem off limits. They’re children, some of them, for heaven’s sake.
Gabriele, do you mean these kind of eyes?
I prefer to wear tops
If you didn’t wear any tops, you’d get even more lustful looks. I guarantee it.
I avoided the problem in my current WIP by making the heroine’s [male] best friend gay. Heh.
Easy-peasy, no unnecessary sexual tension, no wrestling with the “can they just be friends?” question.
Chicken!
There is no such thing as unnecessary sexual tension 😉