Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe. Maxine Shaw and Kyle Barker. Kathleen Kelly and Joe Fox. Sydney Shaw and Dre Ellis.
Growing up, these were the images of love to shape my view that friends, and even frienemies, make the best lovers. Whether sitting on the couch with my mother, religiously watching the Anne of Green Gables marathon every summer on PBS or You've Got Mail with tissues in hand, rooting for Max & Kyle's top secret relationship on the short lived series, Living Single, or eagerly awaiting Dre to profess my favorite line in Brown Sugar, "You are the perfect verse, over a tight beat," I have always aspired to have a friendship that evolves into a relationship.
And this ideal did not just stem from the media. It is something I have repeatedly seen and experienced in real life. I know and look up to many couples who have been married for decades, all of whom have a close bond of friendship with their spouse. Also, while attending my conservative Christian college where actively dating was an unspoken taboo, I watched many of my girl friends eventually court and marry guys they had been longtime friends with. So, I assumed this too would be the path I would take.
I'll never forget the first time I deceitfully uttered those horrible four words, "oh, we're just friends." As an undergraduate education major, most of my classes were filled with young women, so my interactions with males during school were few and far between. But one semester, a young man that I sat near in one of my general studies core classes asked me to study with him a couple of times. And that's when sistas started giving me the side-eye in public and whispering to me, "What's up with you and so-and-so?" With a smirk I'd coyly answer, "Oh, we're just friends," as if I were speaking some sort of code language. Translated in Evangelical Christian girl-speak, "oh, we're just friends" really meant, "we hang out a lot, he calls me, sometimes he pays for me, but we haven't defined or talked about our relationship."
Nothing ever panned out from that friendship; it eventually deteriorated once the young man began courting a young lady that he wanted to be more than just friends with and eventually married. Unfortunately for me, I began to lead a life of constant "friendlationships" and found myself repeating the phrase "oh, we're just friends" effortlessly. Time and time again, due to my own delusions and insecurities, I would develop friendships with young Christian men, devoting my time, energy and emotions into something that seemingly went nowhere. Each time, for months I would wait around, making them a priority while I was merely an option. This could mean taking phone calls at any time of day or night, late night platonic home visits (with nothing sexual occurring), running errands at the drop of the hat, and the like. In my private time and prayer journals you could find me fervently petitioning God to open their eyes to see me as more than a friend, yet I continued to find myself sitting in the dust when they would seriously pursue and marry someone else.
After years of going around the same mountain and getting the same result, I changed my tune and wrote in my prayer journal, "I want to be with someone who claims me in public." I was ready to give up the lifestyle of a Christian side-chick. Shortly after, I found myself in a disastrous monogamous relationship with someone who was very clear with his intentions. However, due to the rocky nature of the relationship I could not bring myself to publicly claim him and eventually dumped him. It took me awhile to heal and trust again after that relationship, but the greatest thing I learned from that experience is that if a man is truly interested, there will be no waiting around or second guessing. HE. WILL. PURSUE.
So now, here I am in my early-thirties, unmarried, yet whole, after learning from the Christian side-chick mistakes of my twenties. I can count on one hand the number of guy friends I have in my life, some of whom are married and others, single. Unlike past friendships, the boundaries of these relationships have been clearly defined and these godly men are like brothers that I've never had, seeing that I'm an only child.
Do I still think that I will marry my best friend? Most definitely. Do I still wait around for men to make up their mind about me/we/us? Definitely not.
If anything, thirty has taught me that friendships can be developed while dating and that life is not always what you see in the movies. I have learned that my aloof and standoffish behavior does not always cause a man to become intrigued by me, as many fictional tales allude. In fact, I have learned that the best real life love stories often come in unexpected packages. I believe in friendship. I believe in love. I believe in being pursued. I believe in unexpected packages. And I believe that one day, it will happen for me. My Christian side-chick days are over.
