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Originally Posted by cdn2wheeler  What I see is yet-another stab at the age-old question, "What do women want?"
Even Freud couldn't figure it out. Not surprising, maybe, because women - like men - are individuals. What they want changes, sometimes minute to minute, based on their own personalities, the things that drive them, their environment and all the rest. |
It's also not surprising because Freud got a hell of a lot wrong
Quote:
Originally Posted by Soul Vibe However, I think any man can agree with me when I say that it is very difficult to go from friend to lover. Not because we are unwilling or lose interest, but because now we only arouse platonic feelings like comfort and trust for the woman we have become friends with, instead of exciting feelings like passion and romance. |
You know what. I think it's time we challenge this belief.
I've only had three serious relationships, and two of them were with girls who I was friends with first, for a while. Definitely more than long enough to be in the 'friend zone'. Likewise many of my friends have had relationships with other friends, often from the same friendship group. Another friend has a sister who married someone who she was previously friends with.
Now you might say that there are always exceptions. Well, as far as I can see the exceptions aren't much less frequent than the norm.
So I have to ask, is it really all that difficult to go from friend to lover? Or is it that we tend to remember the rejections more than the successes? Besides, rejections are more frequent
in general, right? So being rejected by a friend is just a special case of rejection, but not necessarily more likely.
I wonder how much of a contribution that preconception makes to those cases where it doesn't work out? Is it possible that we're influenced by the stories of lost friendships (or even personal experience), without taking into account the dynamics of our own situation? If we believe that it's going to end in trouble, then we're setting ourselves up for failure. I'm pretty sure that most of us don't really know how a relationship is going to turn out before it has started. And for those who think they
did know, I'd ask if you're absolutely certain you might not have been wrong.
Tying this back into the main topic, I also suspect that most of the time that a guy tries to turn a friend into a lover, if he's a 'nice guy' (the needy kind), his friend will know it. "I don't want to ruin the friendship," could very well be the same as, "I don't want to tell you you're too needy, because that could ruin the friendship." But if that's not the case then if he and the friend he wants as a lover are both mature people, I see no reason why their chances of forming a romantic relationship
should be any less than if they weren't friends.