I was talking to my friend S last night who, after reading some of my posts here, wondered why I didn't talk more about some of my women friends who have been so ridiculously important to me. "Well," I thought, "what does friendship have to do with dating?" Then I remembered the two hours I had spent on the phone with S one afternoon, desperately begging for help because I was seconds from sending a woman I had just met a wedding proposal in a text message. I'm not normally prone to such desperate impulses, but without S's patient ear I might have engineered a small catastrophe, like a puppy dog run amok during high tea.

 

I don't know what separates an intimate friend from a lover. S has seen all of my nasty, ugly bits: the weakness, the pettiness, the callousness, the immaturity. With people I'm seeing there's always a pressure to keep myself together. I always feel particularly attenuated to how I'm being perceived by the other person. It's absurd, admittedly. I have no idea what I really look like and feel like to the person looking back at me, but I'm always conscious of their look and want to do what I can to impart it with attraction and affection. With S, I don't feel any pressure to be anything other than myself. I probably respond by over-compensating with my more crass and vulgar side (the number of times she must have heard the term "bukake" in our phone conversations, sigh).

S was recently married and told me something astounding about knowing she was ready to commit the rest of her life to her husband. "I've not wanted to have sex with that man," she sad. "If he were ever in a position where he became physically incapable, I would literally wipe his butt for him. I would be okay with that." I always tend to become fatalistic and irrationally swept away in romance. Hearing S talk about love in such blunt terms, acknowledging the transient nature of all of those cues of attraction and infatuation we so easily mistake for love was totally stunning to me. Perhaps those observations might be obvious to the average person, but to my self-involved ego, I was agog that the true measure of love might be fecal in some way.

I remember one Thanksgiving my father had to excuse himself from the dinner table because my grandmother had shit herself while we were eating. She was old and mostly senile, living in a nursing home. He took her to the bathroom and helped her clean herself and changed her into new underwear. I had never seen love in such a literal state before. When you love someone things shift. My grandfather was engaged to another woman when he met my grandmother. He had to break off the engagement and go against the wishes of his whole family and risk alienating most people in the tiny town where he lived to follow after the woman he loved.

 

Those two experiences have become the bookends of love for me. You begin with something so overwhelmingly life-affirming and beautiful that you risk everything you have to make it work. And in the end, you're left with someone who can't remember their name and shits their pants when there's too much butter in the gravy.

I love S, but I don't know if I would clean up her shit. I probably would, but I would be angry about it and I would hold it over her for the rest of her life. Maybe that's the difference, finally. We don't resent our friends for not being willing to wipe up our shit after we've lost control. But in love, there is an unspoken expectation that the other person be ready to put up with your everything, from the cute quips to the tragic incontinence, and still look you in the eye and say that you're charming and lovable. Love is cruel and unfair in that way. It's a harrowing thing, and would probably be fatal were it not for friendship.

Here’s to you S. I love you. May you never have to wipe my butt.

 

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met 

Sex Machine: Why Women Are Great In Bed 

Sex Machine: Why Women Suck in Bed 

Date Night: All By Myself on a Saturday Night 

Sex Machine: Spank My Ass 

Love Machine: Infidelity or How Long Can You Go Without Cheating? 

Date Night: The 45-Minute Walkout 

Date Night Redux: H's Version of Our Night Out 

Celebrity Confession: Who is Lauren Cohan and Why is She Hitting on Me?

Sex Machine: My First Muff Dive 

Crying in Public: Remember the Cheerleaders 

Sex Machine: Masturbating Upside Down 

Date Night: Two Women in One Night 

Hooksexup Confessions: Rate My Penis Size 

Crying In Public: The Sichuan Night Train

Love machine: How I Date On The Internet

Sex Machine: Rate My Blowjobs

Crying in Public: My Cubicle