quizzical pussy

I’ve lost a lot of friends over the years. It’s an inevitable side-effect of being more anxious not to bother people than you are not to lose them.

When I was a kid I was nothing but an annoyance. I knew this like I knew each careful syllable of The Lord’s Prayer. I felt it from my parents, who had too many children, from my older sisters, who despised me as older, stronger, more popular kids naturally will. I came to feel it from everyone around me eventually. I don’t know how much of this I was imagining versus how much I was/am naturally bothersome, or if it became a self-fulfilling belief.  But it was very real to me.

Whatever the reason, I still get snagged on that feeling. Every time I initiate contact with someone instead of waiting for them to approach me is a struggle. I want to connect with them, but I worry I’m intruding. There they were, in the significantly more comfortable state of not having to deal with me, until I went and fucked that up.

Even now, I usually don’t even email a friend unless I have a specific reason to. I’m not so good about checking in on someone, or planning excuses to hang out, or other things that normal people who want to make and keep friends tend to do.

If you’re thinking right now that I must be a shitty excuse for a friend, I’m tempted to agree with you. The problem, of course, is that if I’m respecting the sanctity of someone not having to deal with me, that pretty much puts all the work on them. If there’s going to be a friendship, they’re going to be making it happen. I remain a grateful, passive party. That’s why I’ve lost so many friends. It’s my own damn fault.

I’m working on it.

In the past, quite a few male friends have stopped talking to me when it became clear we probably weren’t going to fuck each other. Either I started a relationship with someone else, or they did, or advances were made and rebuffed, or they just got tired of waiting for me to pick up on all the none-too-subtle hints that I would later realize, in astonishment, meant they actually wanted to have sex. And then they would just disappear. These situations felt different from my typical experience of losing friends. In these cases, it wasn’t as simple as drifting apart. I knew I’d disappointed these guys, and after that there was no more friendship, so it was easy to assume that all along they’d never had any interest in actually being my friend. Now that the something more was no longer there as a lure, they had no use for me.

A feeling like that tends to bleed backward, tarnishing all past interactions with someone. Every word I said, was it just so much noise to wait through until he could make a snatch at my pussy? Was every kind word and favor just down payment on what he really wanted? Was he ever really my friend, or was this just a very long, aborted pickup?

Out a friendship and none too happy about it, it was easy to suspect that I’d been dealing with a victim of Nice Guy Syndrome all along.

You know what, though? There’s no way I’ll ever know that. If I’d made a good faith effort to keep the friendship going, this time without the sex thing sitting there, glittering yet unreachable, I might have succeeded. But I didn’t try.

It isn’t easy to fight to hold onto a friend who just rejected you. It isn’t easy to stay in touch when you’re in the throes of New Relationship Energy. It isn’t hard to read someone’s lack of communication as a sign that they’re pretty much done with you. I would. Hell, I did. Maybe they did too.

I couldn’t possibly be the only person to have jumped to similar conclusions. Nice Guy Syndrome is a real thing, sure, but I can believe it gets over-diagnosed. Isn’t it worthwhile to give someone you’ve considered a friend the benefit of a doubt before assuming he’s an entitled creep just biding his time until he can get into your pants?

Sorry, guys. Maybe you really were nice. It would’ve been nice if I’d at least given you the chance to prove it.

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