Become friends before you become lovers

Boy meets girl, girl meets boy and they fall in love; simple as that.

Falling in love is a fairly easy thing to do, but falling in love with the right person, well, that’s a whole different story. See, when thinking of love we don’t picture our lovers as our friends. We think of them as anything BUT friends and that’s our first mistake. Our lovers are the people we want to share our most personal moments with, but for some reason, we don’t want them to be part of our friend zone.

Really?

Your partner is the person you will spend most of your time with and if things go well the one you will spend the rest of your life with, yet you refuse them the right to be your friend. You prefer to discuss everything with your besties and leave your partner, your so-called other half, out of it.

So, to get things straight: your partner hurts your feelings or does something that bothers you and you choose to talk about it and solve the problem with your friends. Um, yeah. No, that’s not how a relationship works dear.

Make them your friends if you want them to be your lovers. They hurt you, you confront them and you discuss the issue with them, not your friends. After all, it’s the relationship between the two of you are trying to save. It’s something they did that made you snap.

You meet new people every day, some of them lucky enough to become your friends, but I have never quite understood why being friends means you can’t be lovers. Is there some sort of unwritten rule? If that’s the case, then it’s a rather stupid rule.

Being friends with someone means you have a lot of things in common and you get along pretty well most of the time. It means you let them see every side of you, you let them take a glance at the ugliest corners of your mind and the things you are ashamed of. But they still love you and all of your imperfections.

It’s the exact same thing we expect our lovers to do; love us unconditionally no matter what. Love and romance are not all about happy moments and walks under the moonlight. It’s about being messy and grumpy and having that someone cheer you up with a chocolate bar and a hilarious movie.

Finding your perfect other half means finding the male or female version of yourself; the guy who will get your nerdy jokes or the girl who’s willing to spend a whole day playing video games with you. It’s the sort of connection that you feel from the very first moment, but you are so psyched that you found someone so much like you that you send them straight into the friend zone.

Choosing your lover is just like choosing a friend, so it might be hard to tell the difference at first. But then, the sexual attraction comes in and you know for sure, as long and you don’t freak out and keep them at a distance because you are afraid of ruining the whole friendship thing.

You are willing to let your partner see you naked, yet you are afraid of getting into deeper conversations with them to really get to know them. The thought of confessing dirty little truths about yourself makes your whole body go numb. A lover is not entitled to insights regarding your life. It’s none of their business why you can’t stand cats or why you cry every time you listen to a certain song on the radio.

If you can’t trust them with your deepest and darkest secrets why trust them with your heart?

You need to let them see you weak to know if they can handle you and deal with the crisis the way you want them too. You must fool around with them if you wonder if you have the same notion of what fun is. Spend a day doing nothing with them and see if you can stand each other.

Love isn’t about saying and doing the right thing. There is no right or wrong in love. It’s about being spontaneous and true and still be the right person.

I, too, had someone like that in my life once, good looking too, but I let him slip away. See, we were just friends.