Friday, December 5, 2008

Intermezzo

XKCD. Speaking truth since, um, whenever it started. You know, that one time, back in the day. Seriously, if I've learned anything in my life it's, "Let's just be friends," doesn't mean, "Let's just be friends and see where it goes." It means, "It's never going anywhere." You can't make someone fall in love with you and if you do, chances are they won't be happy. Oh, and hedging your bets with the, "No, I'm not asking you on a date, I'm just asking you to hang out," thing is stupid. You're only setting yourself up for pain, maybe with a little anguish on the side. Just thought I'd toss that out there. It's my little life lesson for the day.

3 comments:

Fiat Lex said...

That comic makes my soul bleed.

No, seriously. I would need more than the fingers of one hand to count the friendships I have ended where that series of events lurked in the other person's unconscious mind and struck fear into my belly for reasons I could not (then) articulate.

And the forum seems deeply populous. And they play Mafia. Tempting.

Anonymous said...

If you aren't willing to accept the results, it's not really much of a hedge, is it?

Anonymous said...

In my youth I tried that angle a couple times. Truth be told, I think most men who aren't selfish jerks have. It's one of those extremes you tend to experiment with before coming to the necessary realization that the ideal way of establishing a relationship is somewhere between being a chauvinistic douchebag and a selfless, semi-invisible doormat. (As an aside, the fact that it seems to work fairly often on TV only exacerbates this condition.)

At any rate, it sucks and rarely works out even as well as this XKCD "comic" (if you can call XKCD a comic, rather than a periodic manifesto with crude picture accompaniment) postulates.

That said, I find it ironic that the Christian subculture seems to try to reinforce this way of doing things by telling you that the only way to acheive a "proper relationship" is by establishing it on a "friendship foundation" first. Which, as far as I can tell, is a fantastic mechanism to keep Christian youth in a constant state of codependent angst while finding a way to pawn of all rejection (and closure) on "God's will".

I was gonna follow that thought more deeply, but honestly, I'm friggen tired.