Boys be all, but girls be like …
Last night, hanging out with some new work friends, we got into discussing what is a fairly common topic in mixed company, particularly when you’re all new to each other: the idea that women have, as one guy put it, “platonic orbiters” who are secretly pining for them - that there is not even a single guy friend a lady can have who wouldn’t classify as such.
We all, predictably, hard-lined with our respective genders. The ladies exclaimed, “Not true!” The boys both countered with, “Yes, it is so fucking true.”
We went around like this for about 10 minutes, with me and another girl trying to assert that it’s just as likely that they’ve had female friends who were secretly pining for them and that we both have many male friends who are not angling to get in our pants. And then we got into whether or not a simple willingness to sleep with their female friends can really count as a “secret desire” for them.
My point is, for the first time, I hit on something that satisfactorily ended the discussion for the first time in the history of my getting into this with male friends. And it was this - that all we were really doing was seeing who could yell the loudest about having been hurt in the past, because, in fact, every single one of us has held an unrequited love for a friend and it had nothing to do with whether they were a guy or a girl. And not a single one of us was going to be able to convince the other that our story is somehow typical of the other one’s gender, because it isn’t gender typical. It’s just human.
So if you find yourself in a similar discussion with people, just start yelling, “My pain is more painful than your pain!” That seems to settle the issue nicely.
