Recipe for disaster, or "Why friends shouldn't date"

Remember I told you about EB? She was the good friend who inadvertently sniffed me out for my "role-playing" in the early days of the internet back in 1992. In that earlier blog, I told of the shame that I felt, and even the violation of having someone catch me in my covert activities. She didn't mean any harm. Though it is, was, and always has been in her nature to be a bit more of a detective than her own good would dictate she should be.

EB and I had been good friends since around the time I'd been 24 years old. During that time, I'd dated a few different people, and she'd moved to Colorado and back again. For some reason, around 1997, we were both single, and the idea suddenly struck us that maybe we should be in a relationship. We were great friends, enjoyed one anothers' company, and she sort of needed a place to live. We'd been hanging out more and more. We got along great. Why not? Well, there were a lot of good reasons why not, which included a complete lack of chemistry, along with some inherent character traits that were destined to make neither of us ever feel fully safe with the other. Alas, we went into it anyway. Of course, I did not need to tell EB about the fetish, because she knew about it from the years past. Furthermore, she'd been a sideline observer of the relationship with SH, and she therefore knew that SH was a smoker, and there was no shortage of "observations" she would make. She would say things like "I'm not sure why you're interested in her, but I guess she does smoke, so that must be the allure for you". These comments could have been amusing, and probably were true. If I had been more accepting of myself, or more open-minded, I would have realized that EB was just "telling it like it is". But those observations invariably made me defensive. I didn't want to be cast in such a light.

When EB and I became involved, there had been at least some discussion around the fetish. This stemmed, if I am not mistaken, from some sharing on my part, and some snooping on her part. The sharing involved me reading excerpts to her from my personal diary that I had been keeping on my computer. There had been an archive of some of these matters, dating back to around 1992. I was focused on sharing relationship and self-exploration details but, in there, along with that, was some of the stuff around the fetish. But the bigger reason that the fetish had come to light was because of this thing we all know about called the cache of Internet Explorer. Yep. You all know about it. And it's a fair bet that many of you, like myself, had a period in your lives where you, perhaps, neglected to clear your cache, resulting in people finding things you'd rather they didn't find. And then, perhaps, you had a period in your lives where you were obsessively clearing said cache, to cover such trails. And then, hopefully, you finally came to a period in your lives where you no longer felt the need to clear your cache, because you and whomever else was in your life were okay with this trail of breadcrumbs. Or maybe not.

EB had discovered via my cache that I'd been viewing a lot of pictures of people smoking. Actresses, models, complete strangers who had posted their pictures on the internet. This, of course, was "intriguing" to her. And the manner in which it was brought to my attention, of course, aroused much defensiveness in me.

When we first started dating, EB decided, probably as some sort of honest effort in bonding, that she needed to get to the bottom of this fetish. She wanted to understand it. She probably was not inherently thrilled with it but, because she was open-minded, she was willing to explore. When she'd been a teenager, she was apparently a regular smoker, but had stopped around age 18 or 19 and never gone back to it. But she was not strongly opposed to it, other than having made a choice against doing it. At one point, in the first few months of our relationship, in what she had probably considered to be an effort to be generous, she actually bought a pack of Marlboro Reds and gift-wrapped them, giving them to me as a partial fulfillment of my birthday present. It was entirely her idea. She said something like "These are for your discretion, and can be used whenever you wish". She was trying to be a part of the fetish. It was an honest effort. But it made me very uneasy. I didn't like the fact that it was out in the open. Like a gift. It was all on the table. It probably made me feel like I wasn't in control, but I wasn't enlightened enough to see it that way at the time. And because of what she'd known about the fetish, and the deep private knowledge she'd gleaned without my permission, I really didn't feel safe letting her into my world. There were only a few occasions where we partook of that gift. The smoking part itself and the fetish part itself were not a problem, but the personalities and dynamics behind it were such that I felt subtly judged, evaluated, or patronized. Especially because in non-romantic moments, she would embarrass me about the topic. She didn't fully understand what made me tick, and I was completely unwilling and unable to let her all the way in to that ticking machine.

I will provide you one example.

There had been one occasion where something resembling romance had taken place (and I should note that was a very rare occurrence). Afterwards, as a "surprise", she had grabbed a cigarette and immediately lit it. The intention of this had been to satisfy my fetish. But, unfortunately, it had the exact opposite effect. It made me incredibly uncomfortable, and turned off. What she didn't know was that, at least at that time, because of my extreme bipolar feelings about the fetish, smoking had this effect of going from a massive turn on while aroused, to a massive turn off afterwards. All the feelings of arousal would crash into guilt, shame, and even disgust. My response to her effort was perceived by her as a lack of interest in her. And I was not willing or able to communicate these details to her. I just didn't want to, or feel comfortable doing it. In fact, at the time, I had a paranoid feeling that she was doing it that way specifically to make me uncomfortable! It was truly paranoid, and completely inaccurate. But I believed that she was more omniscient than she actually was.

So, her efforts to explore the fetish hit a brick wall. It became a taboo in our relationship, quite quickly. And the lack of romantic compatibility was exacerbated by this barrier that was formed. We explored it no more. Instead, she began expressing judgmental, hostile feelings about my private internet indulgence, whose tracks I always tried to cover, but about which she always found out anyway. She likened it to a previous boyfriend's hardcore pornography addiction. She had said the issue was not about what the pornographic material was, but about the secrecy and deception. Sadly, she was right. I didn't feel safe, and I kept it from her, and excluded her. The fetish did not need to be indulged in the relationship. That is not a requirement for a healthy relationship, and could even be a detriment if too much focus is put on it (as discussed in other entries). But the completely segregation of the relationship from the fetish was equally, if not more damaging.

The subject of the fetish came up subversively with snide, passive-aggressive remarks, even in public settings; remarks that she knew that only I would understand: "PF (author) has a crush on Drew Barrymore". That was my favorite remark. She had once found many pictures of Drew Barrymore in my internet cache. Smoking pictures. And she had claimed from then on that I had "the hots" for Drew Barrymore. The fact is, I didn't. I don't think Drew Barrymore is attractive, and I actually didn't even think she was a sexy smoker! But she'd seen those things in the cache, and she believed I was either lying or being defensive, and she also knew it got a rise out of me. So it was quite an effective assertion. If we saw an attractive woman, or even an average looking woman, smoking somewhere, she'd always give me this "knowing" smile, that would make me squirm. Or if I said that I liked a certain movie (e.g. "Fight Club"), she'd say, "I know why you like that movie!" The fetish had become bigger in her mind than it actually was in my mind, and probably understandably so, because of her exclusion from it.

Furthermore, the complete lack of intimacy in the relationship meant that I turned fully and privately to the fetish for all of my sexual gratification. I never cheated on her, and thus my only respite from complete celibacy was the fetish.

Instead of breaking up, we kept going for eight years. Because we were best friends. And when we finally broke up, we stayed very close friends. And if there's an attractive woman smoking when we're out someplace, she still gives me that knowing smile.

Such is life.