Lets just Be Friends

Irony, irony, everywhere and not a drop to drink
Lets just be friends. The words every single wants never to hear. In our hearts we want to respond, “I have enough friends thank you!” yet Christian morality and social taboos see that as less than gracious response to the side step of what is really being said. “Your not valuable enough for me to want to make a commitment of time.” Truer still are the words, “I’m just not attracted to you.” Harsh but like a Band-Aid being ripped off the pain soon fades. The weak ones that try to take them up on there offer of judo-friendship often become slaves to the emotional health of the rejecter. The foolish ones that choose to just walk away live to ask another day. But tragically, slowly, they loose the light of hope till selfishness, like Gollum, is all that lucks in the dark poverty of there souls. Yet in all this Smokey carbora of sexual tension I find irony. The type irony that makes me smile with the bitter warmth of being burned alive, naked, in Antarctica!

When one is asked to “Just be friends” it is a request to enter in to a platonic relationship and experience Platonic love. In modern times Not one poet has written on the out of body ecstasy of "Platonic love" because that would be stupid! Yet there is one who wrote of it this way: Plato.

What's platonic love got to do with it?
So what is platonic love? Platonic love in its modern popular sense is a non-sexual affectionate relationship. Characterized by the fact on lookers might easily assume otherwise. At the same time, this interpretation is a misunderstanding of the nature of the Platonic ideal of love. Plato definition of love origanally was of a chasted but passionate love. It was not based on lack of interest but rooted in the reality of human identity and spiritual transmutation of the sex force. (A concept explained further by Freudian psychoanalysis theory). it was interaction on a spiritual level which would allow for a deeper enjoyment of another self as a self. thus it is a way that transcends just a sexual knowing. In its original Platonic form, this love was meant to bring the lovers closer to wisdom and the Platonic Form of Beauty.

Two works on Love
In Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium many discussion of this relational knowing by way of deep loving is found. In the Symposium, the method by which love takes one to the form of beauty and wisdom is detailed. A journey deeper than sex and a reality truer than sense experience can perceive. It is this concept of love and it’s influence on Augustine that lead him to believe friendship to be of greater value than almost every types of love.

Men want sex women want friendship.
A lie that drives many people in there idea of how to relationally exist is Men want sex women want friendship. Then the truth is all people want to connect on a platonic level. Women use sex to get to platonic love. Men do not connect the two into a pattern of a causal relationship. She is trained by culture to seek it at all cost. He is train to think it matters little. The way it plays out on the stages of our lives is much like a Greek tragedy, in the end all players die and all your left with is a hollow emotion much akin to the felling of stilly floating underwater. Sadly, the Platonic relationship of today is not Plato’s idea. It is a non-sexual friendship often where the girl gets all the befits of an intimate relationship like a sense of being wanted and all the emotional support she wants and the man gets blue balls. Both left with sizeable broken lives and still we float.

The Yes that makes friends
What Irony to know the word we use come back to slap us in the face. Odd how today platonic love looks more like rejection into slavery than the freedom of friendship. We live in an age of walls. Women walled in by fear and its active sibling control and manipulation. Men by pride and its active conjoined twin sisters arrogance and insecurity.

Wall, walls everywhere
in all I see and think.
Wall walls everywhere
the chain binds at every link.

The key to break out of your self-imposed exile, the way to free yourself from the slavery of fear and loathing, is a yes. It is interaction, appropriate and clear. The key is a date my dear. So the next time you say, let’s just be friends, realized that a deeper commitment is being made than if you were to commit to go out on a date. So just say yes, You get a meal he gets a memory and maybe even a friend.