When I lived in LA, I was hooking up with a woman to whom my friend P had introduced me. They had dated the previous summer. She had just moved to LA and he thought she might need a friend in town.
During the few months that we were hooking up, I used to torture myself with the idea of her meeting my roommate. We were a bad match romantically, but I had never met anyone like her and I swept myself away on a stream of admiration. She was as smart as anyone I’ve ever known with an advanced math degree from a renowned university. Her fingers were always moving when she talked, opening and closing around some unseen shape.
She had droopy eyes that made her look perpetually drunk, and she drank heavily. She was cheerful and always welcoming; she had a habit of bringing random people from the street back to her house for parties or after the bars closed. Her living room was a patchwork cantina of Ivy League wine snobs, debauched beach bums, and whoever happened to be passing by on the street outside. In the middle of that she could still turn and look me in the eye and say something alarmingly direct and unflinching.
The first night we met, she hosted a small dinner party, then we went out to a bar in Santa Monica. She spent half the night in the bathroom crying over an ex-boyfriend. I watched her and her roommate go in and out of the bathroom for 2 hours with my friend and some other guy who she had slept with a week earlier. He had an exaggerated afro poof of hair and a strong jaw line with a dimple at the end. He quoted the lyrics to Peaches’ songs for the group and then would wait for us to share in his delight. “Suckin’ on my titties…”
I imagined her looking at us three leaning against the bar in the gawdy pinky light and bursting into tears, wishing her real man was there with her. Her private disappointments and public outbursts of joy made her seem reckless. Needy and self-sufficient. I was smitten.
She remained elusive the whole time we were hooking up. I liked her more than she liked me. It was never going to work, it would never be more than a series of drunken interludes. My roommate was my opposite in all the ways that made me weakest and most prone to failure with her. He was loud and arrogant and full of caveman bravura. I secretly worried about bringing her around for fear that he would fecklessly seduce her and then throw her out the next morning like an empty beer bottle.
A year later I was in San Francisco and they met in a group outing at a baseball game. They hooked up that night and they’re still seeing each other. I’m excited that they’re seeing each other now that my wet emotions have been taken out of the equation. They’re a good match and I hope that they’ll continue to find ways to be good to each other.
I’ve met a lot of the women that I’ve wound up dating or sleeping with through friends. It makes sense that there would be a natural crossover for friends and girlfriends in a group of people with an already strong affinity for one another. But we’re not supposed to date people our friends have dated. It’s off-limits; we’re supposed to ignore innate attractions out of deference and loyalty.
I’ve slept with four women who had dated friends either before or after. Sex makes people vulnerable. You can’t hide yourself when your totally naked with someone, and it can feel like a betrayal when someone you’ve been naked with leaves you and gets naked with one of your best friends. Bro’s before ho’s.
My ho’s are my bro’s too, and neither deserves a place above the other. And I wouldn’t care about either if they asked me to avoid having new experiences, following my gut and my heart, to protect their ego’s and insecurities.
I’d rather just sleep with their ex-girlfriends. And I’m sure one day they’ll be sleeping with some of mine.
Previous Posts:
Love Machine: Dating Someone with a Handicap
Date Machine: How to Pick Up a Nurse at the HIV Clinic
Date Machine: Full Disclosure
Sex Machine: The Bare Minimum
Date Machine: The Seductive Art of Dancing
Sex Machine: Becoming A Virgin Again
Sex Machine: Come On My Face
Sex Machine: Because I Can
Love Machine: Am I Romantic Enough?
Sex Machine: Picking Up Women in Gay Bars
Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor
Date Machine: Long Distance Lovers
Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores
Date Machine: Moving to New York in Pictures
Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move
Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents
Love Machine: Willing to Relocate