Subcutaneous power for humanity 4 Not crossing borders of friendship

Friend-zone

Fadi Afram asks:

Is friendship possible between a man and a woman? Can a heterosexual have a best friend from the opposite-sex? What is the definition of “friend-zone”? These are questions that have been asked throughout the ages but without ever having a concrete explanation. {Why Men And Women Can Never Be “Just” Friends}

The ‘Co-Founder of FruityLicious. Music & Guitar addicted. Tech holic. Caffeine based life form. Computer Engineer by day, Blogger by night’ considers

Neither a man nor a woman think about the friend-zone the way the other does. This is because the brain is comprised primarily of two different types of tissue, called gray matter (representing information processing centers) and white matter (working to network these processing centers). {Why Men And Women Can Never Be “Just” Friends}

Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Sexual Fantasies (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

He looks at the situation from a male’s perspective and comes to the conclusion that he can fairly say

that no man can ever be okay with his partner spending a vast amount of time with an opposite-sex friend discussing personal secrets, sexuality and daily problems. {Why Men And Women Can Never Be “Just” Friends}

Simplicity of relationship

English: A couple performing sexual intercourse from a seated position. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Julian Sagan is convinced that the saying “a friendship between a man and a woman sooner or later ends up with sex” has not always to be true, but often enough it does according to him.

Sex without limitations has its advantages of which the most obvious advantage is the simplicity of the relationship. I would agree with him that in such a relationship when no questions should be asked and the person has not to to look elsewhere, having a relationship built on the lack of pressure and limitations.

No strings

For Sagan this is only possible in case both parties clearly understand that such sexual relationship does not bind either one of them to any obligations.

Both partners are honest with each other about having sex and nothing more, or in other words they just pleasure each other without any thoughts about being used by the other person, since in all actuality, a sexual relationship like this is based on the mutual using of each other. {Friendship Or Sex?}

Honesty

I am happy he sees what many do seem to have forgotten these days, that honesty plays a role in the relationship. Today we do find lots of people who are not honest any more. In the end that will undermine the relationship.

If you do not want your sexual relationship to ruin your friendship, you should be honest with each other. If one of you (this especially concerns the females) starts to nourish hope for something more, you can consider it the beginning of the end of your friendship. In 9 out of 10 cases such friendly-sexual relationship does not grow into a serious stage, therefore, women, do not attempt to turn your male friend into a serious partner for life and do not enter into sexual relationship with him with some far-reaching calculations, do it only if both of you want sexual pleasure and it is only limited to sex. {Friendship Or Sex?}

There is also a factor of convenience and comfort. Such situation is convenient since this way you are skipping over the flirting stage. You do not need to go on dates, buy gifts, ask her out for dinner, and try to guess what she likes and what she does not. Everything is already simple and known. You do not need to worry about how the evening is going to go, you feel comfortable with each other both physically and emotionally, you both know each other’s shortcomings. Men do not have to worry whether the sexual intercourse will be successful since either way you will remain on good terms and may even laugh together over minor setbacks. A relationship like this suits people who do not have time for romance, but need to fulfill their physical needs. {Friendship Or Sex?}

Remember that you should be honest with each other, cross the t’s and dot the i’s. Moreover you should not share about your relationship with your friends, relatives, or acquaintances. You also should not parade your relationship in public. If you both have a mutual understanding when it comes to this, it is usually enough to just make a call. But if for some reason your partner is saying no to meeting up, do not insist or take offense, since you don’t owe anything to each other, this is the basis of such a relationship. {Friendship Or Sex?}

Not lasting friendships

Original caption: Ne ties a friendship bracelet on me, Sapa. (Photo credit: Wikipedia

According to me friendship which are based on sex or not going to last. For a long lasting friendship people need to have a spiritual connection. The spiritual is more important than the physical.
It is just that spiritual connection today is missing so much. People do not work enough on their minds bringing in communication and in unison.

Lucy Wong Moi  writes:

The secret as to keep a good relationship between working partners or business partners is to apply the right concept of thoughts, speech and deeds. One should stay not to cross the border of partnership into becoming too familiar or too personal. Due respect will be a both win/win situation. A strong partnership will be destroyed especially when it comes to uncontrolled physical attraction that leads to forbidden sex between married spouses. Thus, it is of great importance that business partners earn each other’s respect through remaining and maintaining at the level of ‘partner-friendship’ in business only. {Love? Sex? Oh! That is Just 5% of What Love Might Represent! What About the Other 95%? [part 3 of 3]}

Those who want to be and stay friends should build their relation on trust and honesty, respecting each other for what they have and can do or want to do, willing to take the good and bad things of a person and no putting them on chains.

Trying to be in balance with nature

Human being part of nature should be aware that he or she should also be in balance and in unity with that nature.

Mother Nature is at its best when there is balance of yin and yang. Mother Nature is best tapped when there is clear, clean, fresh air, water and unpolluted environment. Mother Nature should be kept as natural as possible. {Love? Sex? Oh! That is Just 5% of What Love Might Represent! What About the Other 95%? [part 3 of 3]}

Friendships should be a natural thing and they should be ‘clean’, not infected by false thoughts nor by false intentions. The same as we should try to respect nature, our surroundings we should have an eye for the people around us. With those who live close around us we should try to build up a human understanding and work to come to a friendship which exceeds necessary contacts. Real friendship has to go beyond the superfluous internet connections.

Self centre of the world

One of the problems many friendships today do not last long is that the ‘Self‘ has become the centre of the personal world. The Creator did not make man to be self-indulgent. the love for oneself is not meant to just pamper oneself by feeding the own body and mind or getting oneself nicely dressed up. Love for oneself is not to be self-centered.

Given to have no boredom

At the beginning of humankind man felt on his own. It looked as if the man was bored being on his own, not having a partner. The Creator provided a mannin of woman to be the wife of that man. Together they were created to become partners and to work with each other, together building up their world. They were ordered to give names to thing and to create new things. On their way to construct their world Guidance was given for them, which was later written down in the book of books.

The “I” or “Me” opposite the “We” and the Dweller

From that Guidance they could learn that they should focus on the awakening of the true self which is not selfish and acknowledging the feelings of ‘I’ and ‘Mine’ into ‘God‘ and ‘God’s’.

When one’s attention is directed to the inner-self where the indwelling God dwells, one will perceive that we are all brothers and sisters in our human forms. The presence of God in all will thus make one be filled with reverence and thus sanctifies every act of us. That is the true love for oneself.  {Love? Sex? Oh! That is Just 5% of What Love Might Represent! What About the Other 95%? [part 3 of 3]}

Having respect for the ‘self’ and ‘the other’ man or woman can come to live in symbioses with nature and can see relationships around him or her grow in something nice to last. when there is no yin-yang balanced relation, matters soon will go wrong and friendships shall wither.

Yin Yang and complementing forces

People may be very different but they can complement each other in their uniqueness. Opposite or contrary forces are actually complementary, interconnected and interdependent in the natural world. In our connections with others it is important to build up such a connection that can give rise to each other, interrelating to one another with full respect for each other.

The female may be considered the yin, but that does not mean she has to be passive or to be the negative principle in the relationship.  The positive/active/male principle in nature may be called the male genitals. When everything turns around those genitals there is absolutely no balance at all. they may belong to this world (yang) and may be sinister and treacherous (ying). Even when covert, concealed or hidden (yin), when the mind is still wondering about them, the penis (yin) and vagina (yin) this will not bring quiescent or tranquillity to the mind of the human being.

In our relationships we must try to get a yin and yang, physical manifestation like we can see light and dark, high and low, hot and cold, fire and water, life and death, male and female, sun and moon, and so on.

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Preceding posts:

Friendship and Offer for the cause of democracy

Invasion of Normandy a day never to forget

Blood soaking the water at democracy’s beachhead

Subcutaneous power for humanity 1 1940-1960 Influenced by horrors of the century

Subcutaneous power for humanity 2 1950-2010

Subcutaneous power for humanity 3 Facing changing attitudes

To be continued: Subcutaneous power for humanity 5 Loneliness, Virtual and real friends

In reply to Lonely in the crowd

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Please do find additional reading:

1. Alone in the cold and dark
2. Within despair
3. The Person Who Cannot Despair
4. Soar
5. What kind of attitude do you have?
6. Misleading world, stress, technique, superficiality, past, future and positivism
7. What IF you’re only driven by stress?
8. Consider your own journey in life
9. If you have integrity
10. Who are the honest ones?
11. Be Honest
12. Honesty beginning of holiness
13. 30 things to start doing for yourself – #6 is vital.
14. Contentment: The five senses
15. Denis Wright looking at the world of human beings
16. If there is bitterness in the heart
17. A Glory followed by Despair
18. Cancerous Black Holes
19. Cancer and Life Lessons
20. Youngster all over the world with the same dream
21. Welfare state and Poverty in Flanders #4 The Family pact
22. Truth never plays false roles of any kind, which is why people are so surprised when meeting it
23. Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness
24. Gender roles and Multitasking parents
25. Back in the day
26. No time for immorality
27. Fear of God reason to return to Holy Scriptures
28. Welfare state and Poverty in Flanders #4 The Family pact
29. Aim High: Examples of Godly Characters to follow
30. More-Letter-Words
31. You’re so used to
32. Lonely in the crowd
33. Lonely Life
34. So Lonely
35. Lonely so lonely
36. A Story of the Soldier and a Spider
37. A Cranky Old Man
38. Love and forgive this Friday
39. Falling in Love’ as Temporary Insanity
40. Overcoming Hurt Feelings
41. Moving forward
42. Not following the tradition of man
43. Self-development, self-control, meditation, beliefs and spirituality
44. Getting fate in your change to positiveness
45. In Defense of the truth
46. Commit your self to the trustworthy creator
47. God should be your hope
48. God, my father, my closest friend
49. Our relationship with God, Jesus and eachother
50. Nuturing a close relationship with God
51. God’s design in the creation of the world
52. God’s instruction about joy and suffering
53. God His measure not our measure
54. Incomplete without the mind of God
55. Importuning for suffering hearts
56. A person is limited only by the thoughts that he chooses
57. See the conquest and believe that we can gain the victory
58. Begin your day by, Living your positive attitude
59. Praying and thinking positively
60. Benefits of Positive Thinking
61. Helping to create a Positive Attitude
62. With Positive Attitude
63. Attitude of Unstopable Success
64. You Matter
65. 2014 Bucket List Update
66. Built on or Belonging to Jewish tradition #4 Mozaic and Noachide laws

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Other articles of interest:

1. Living at the verge: You matter
2. Benefits of Positive Thinking by Motivation & Inspiration
3. If you’re afraid to do it, do it afraid
4. Surrendering to positivism
5. What IF you’re only driven by stress? by Eman Kawas
6. 12 Ways to Simplify Your Life and Get Focused on What Really Matters
7. 7 Things You Need to Stop Doing Every Day
8. 26 Steps to Living a Life You Love
9. Let Me Love You
10. Just the beginning of a longer story..
11. I Look So Good Without You
12. Hi Beautiful!
13. The Beauty that is a Woman’s Body
14. Every Female is Someone’s Daughter!
15. Marriage and Womanhood Part 2…..Let them be Women before wives!
16. Ooops, I didn’t know I couldn’t talk about sex…
17. Fair Sex
18. I’m Sexy and I know it…
19. How To Avoid The Biggest Mistake
    You Always Make
20. 7 “Before the Wedding” Steps that Initiate a Successful Marriage
21. “In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin.”
22. LGBT, Otherkin and intolerance!
23. Piers Morgan, Janet Mock and transgender issues!

 

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Related articles

• I Don’t Want to Hear About His Love Life (boston.com)
  If you’re going to keep being friends with a guy you had feelings for, where do you draw the line in regards to how much he can tell you about his love life?
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  It’s difficult to maintain a close platonic relationship with someone when you want more and the feelings aren’t reciprocated. You don’t want to turn the friendship into a lie, pretending you’re OK when you’re really struggling. It would be better to let the relationship evolve into whatever it’s supposed to be. If it feels bad to be the kind of friends who tell each other everything, change your terms. Let him know that you need time and space to sort things out.
• In love with my (almost) divorced friend (boston.com)
  A few months ago, her husband told her he wanted a divorce and walked out on her. Since then he has been insulting, demeaning, and emotionally abusive towards her. He insists there is no hope for reconciliation, and we both suspect he has another woman. She is emotionally devastated, and plagued with self-doubt. I have tried my best to be a good, supportive friend, and have not crossed the line or expressed my feelings for her. I only want what is best for her, even if that means getting back with her ex. However, this whole experience has made me realize how much I really love her. I can’t help thinking that I would be so much better for her. I would be a loving, devoted husband who always supported her and made her my highest priority.
• He’s asking what-ifs (boston.com)
  Do you have romantic feelings that you compartmentalize because of distance? Or do you really just want him as a friend? There are no wrong answers here. It would just be good to know how you feel so you can make smart decisions about how to move forward.If your answer is, “We’re friends, but if he lived down the street I might want more,” maybe this relationship too confusing for him to continue. Maybe having you around — even just on the phone — is making it difficult for him to connect with other women.
• Deep Attraction in Friendship: Conservative Gay Christians Ponder Sexuality & Friendship (danjbrennan.com)
  You know, in the seven plus years I’ve been writing about intimate cross-sex friendships in this blog and in my book the biggest fear I have encounterred among conservative evangelicals has been the sexual attraction issue. I’ve experienced sexual attraction in friendship. The conservative ethic of wisdom has been that if you experienced sexual attraction in any kind of close friendship, you are playing with fire. Today you’re friends, tomorrow, you’re lovers. Conservatives not only fear sexual attraction in friendship, they fear deep attraction in friendship. That’s why for example, author Haylee Gray Scott could describe me as a “daredevil.” Or, why Anna Peterson could propose that intense friendship between men and women can be a form of “emotional dating.”
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  the term “same sex attraction,” whose champions introduce it as a way of distinguishing between orientation and activity, end up blurring a critical distinction. There is nothing in the Bible, or in the Christian tradition, which says it is bad for a man to be attracted to another man, or for a woman to be attracted to another woman. Both the Bible and Christian tradition commend the sort of healthy and holy same-sex friendship experienced by David and Jonathan or Ruth and Naomi. On the other hand, the Bible and tradition both condemn same-sex lust and relationships that include homosexual activity.
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• Still Looking to Desire
  Homosexuality as defined by the Catechism refers solely to same-sex lust. But gayness is not the same thing. Being gay is not reduceable to having, or desiring to have, homosexual sex. It is a way of relating to other people, a way of appreciating human beauty, and a way of relating to one’s own gender. Most people who identify as chaste, gay Christians, are referring to involuntary currents of homoeroticism and gender-queerness that run through the personality. Some Christians appear to believe that these currents are so fundamentally disordered that the only proper response to them is one of outright warfare, that the personality must have surgery performed on it in order to eliminate every vestige of queerness in order that it might be rendered fit for salvation.

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  The Canadian Council of Catholic Bishops, in their recent document on Youth with Same-Sex Attractions, were very careful to explicitly spell out the fact that homosexual inclinations are objectively disordered in so far as they concern the desire to have same-sex genital relations. That is, in so far as same-sex attractions are concupiscent, they are objectively disordered: a nice little tautology which only stands in need of clarification because it is counterintuitive to contemporary secular culture. What this means is that same-sex attractions, in so far as they are not concupiscent, are not disordered: another tautology, but one that is equally counterintuitive to many moral conservatives.

• Friendship as Spiritual Formation (danjbrennan.com)
  In church, we are taught a lot about believing, knowing, and worshiping certain things and acting certain ways. Grace, intention, vulnerability and risk are espoused but when the rubber meets the road, we often don’t have very tangible ways to practice them together. Even now, with a lot of focus on missional living emerging in many churches, which I think is a good thing, a crucial ingredient is usually often missing– how to just be a friend.
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  Sometimes we are scared to be fully known because if people really knew us we’re quite sure they wouldn’t want to be friends anymore.  We give part of us but not all of us because full honesty is too risky. But honest sharing with a friend who can honor it brings one of the greatest rewards of friendship–the experience of grace. Also, some people feel embarrassed that they never learned how to develop healthy friendships and it feels weird and awkward to be trying now. (It’s never too late).
• The Feels of Friendship (lareviewofbooks.org)
  Michel Foucault proposed that gay male friendship represented the apotheosis of homosexuality’s capacity to challenge the regimes of normativity. “How is it possible for men to be together?” was the question Foucault unfurled at the heart of the gay experience beyond sex, “[How] to live together, to share their time, their meals, their room, their leisure, their grief, their knowledge, their confidences?” When normative culture reduces homosexuality to just sex, Foucault argued, it forecloses the possibility of a new way of life already emergent in gay friendship, in the trenches of brutal military conflict, in the locker room.
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  This tidal wave of feels and the sodium rich vapors of a date to a local ramen shop soon restore the boys’ friendship, and just in time for them to resolve School 2013’s other male crisis.
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  The stumbling block isn’t so much about the global culture getting over or getting used to the reality of homosexuality (though that would no doubt help). Rather, it’s a matter of expanding and valorizing relationships of care beyond the sexual and the filial. Rather than contain our emotional selves within the confines of a sexual relationship or a family relationship, K-dramas show me the possibility of distributing that freight over a broader range of attachments. That I can be vulnerable, that I can be proud, that I can be raw and limitless before men to whom I have no codified social obligation — and vice versa — is an exceptional gift in this life. That possibility seems especially important to foster at a time when life feels more precarious than in previous decades, when economic stratification and the velocity of technological change are shaping a world that demands more adaptable resources for self-care, security, and flourishing.
• An Aromantic Approach to Love (thethinkingasexual.wordpress.com)
  I could harp about the amatonormativity of this comment and how ridiculous or shitty it is that alloromantic allosexuals assume everyone is like them and wants to be in normative romantic-sexual relationships, that they can’t even imagine any other lifestyle than one in which a romantic-sexual relationship is the center of your universe and your primary relationship, that romantic love and sex are not only essential to happiness and fulfillment but definitive of them.
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  I do want very physically sensual/intimate relationships that include stuff like cuddling and kissing bare skin and co-sleeping and holding hands and caresses. I do want loyalty and love and total emotional intimacy in my important relationships. I do want to feel passionate about the significant people in my life, and I want to be loved and desired and valued equally. I do want to create homes with people I love, who love me. I want to create a family, out of the people I love. I feel love deeply, passionately, with my whole heart and soul, and there are no words adequate to describe how emotional the experience of love is for me. How strong desire is for me, when I want someone.
• Friendship and Individuality (astridswords.ca)
  At the age of 15 I met my first boyfriend and I shared with him my desire for us to have an honest friendship and for us to maintain our individuality. He was very pleased to hear that friendship would be a focus and that he was free to be his own person. Together we discovered things that we had in common and we learned the things we needed to do separately. We built our strong relationship and together we decided to enter the journey of our lives as a married couple. Hand in hand, we are a happy couple who strongly believe in friendship and our individuality. We continue to learn and discover together the many gifts of life.
• Understanding the Friend Zone (williamsgood.wordpress.com)
  The “Friend Zone”. If you are male, you have experienced it, and are embittered towards it. If you are female, chances are you are offended by the term, seeing it as an example of sexism, and male entitlement over women’s bodies. Indeed, the friend zone is a controversial topic, especially in the realm of hyper-politicization that we inhabit today. But this is a phenomenon that definitely exists, at least in the minds of men, and probably in some women as well. It also is a phenomenon that can cause suffering and is certainly unfair to many people. Recently, I have experienced and witnessed the friend zone, a realm I thought was reserved for the emotionally immature, not for people in their 20s. It made me think that people may find use in a blog post that explains the friend zone, and why it isn’t okay. So, in this post, I would like to elucidate on the friend zone, why men and women can’t be friends, and why it isn’t a matter of sexism or male entitlement.
• Can men and women ever just be ‘friends’? (lipsticksmash.wordpress.com)
  It is a taboo topic and seems to be hot on the agenda these days with lots of debate. And I wasn’t surprised to find views were varied. For the majority they said there has to be an ulterior motive when it comes down to the opposite sex being friends, whether you are single or not. They also shared that for a new friendship to start there must be feelings involved else, why would you think twice about extending your friends roster if there’s nothing in it?