I was pissed. It took me a couple of days to wrestle through why, because I could tell that my outrage was unrelated to the gender thing. I wasn't mad that they were surprise bisexual; I could tell it was something else that bothered me.
It's that I detest the best-friends-to-lovers trope. Like I cannot overstate to you how much I HATE that.
I had (misguidedly) assumed that I didn't have to worry about that trope with female best friends, so I felt blindsided/betrayed/bummed by the show. Like now I can't even safely enjoy best friendships between females in media.
Here's why I think I hate BFTL so much.
1) Best-friends-to-lovers devalues friendship. The trope makes it seem like the ULTIMATE stage of any relationship is romance. It makes relationships a hierarchy of strangers > acquaintances > friends > best friends > dating. Being best friends with someone is just the last stage before it "elevates" to also being romantic.
The AUDACITY. Lovers is a DIFFERENT type of relationship. It's not necessarily "BETTER." My relationship with Cassidy is no less meaningful, vital, healthy because it's not sexual. I didn't date anyone until I was eighteen years old, and I can tell you that every non-romantic relationship I had before that was better and more important than the romantic one, especially in the long run.
I resent fiction for conditioning the world to think that best-friendship is a lower category than romance, which leads me to Reason #2.
2) The relentless portrayal of BFTL in media distorts expectations in friendships, especially in opposite-sex friendships. For me, there was nothing worse than becoming close friends with a guy only to have him confess that he had romantic feelings for me*. As a Christian girl, I was taught to expect this; it's why opposite-sex friendships can be so "dangerous." As a thinking human, that offended me, and still does.
Telling a guy that I didn't want to become romantic with him was not an INSULT. In fact, it was usually the opposite. I've always felt that romance is temporary, whereas deep friendship is eternal. By declining to become romantic with guy friends, I felt like I was saying, "No, I'd rather love and trust you forever, rather than until we grow apart." For me, friendship and familyship (looking at my brothers: Aaron, Daniel, David) was so much more important, even intimate.
This kind of sounds like Reason #1b, so let me anchor it back into Reason #2: I feel like the relentless media portrayal of best-friends-to-lovers gave my guy friends unrealistic expectations about where our friendship was "going." The trope set them up for disappointment, and me for disillusionment. Guess they only cared about me until they found out they were never gonna kiss me. Cool.
3) BFTL is just cliché at this point. It is NEVER** the case that girl-guy best friendships stay that way in fiction. Even KIM POSSIBLE and LIZZIE McGUIRE went there in the end. STOP IT. Stop devaluing best-friendships by portraying them as the dissatisfying level before things get good. Stop writing predictable plots.
Here's my new philosophy: I think romance should be thought of as an add-on. Romance not a type of relationship; it's a quality of some relationships. If ALL you have is romance, you don't actually have a relationship of any type. You have to add romance to some type of relationship, and you get different things based on that equation. You can be strangers + romance (one-night stand), acquaintances + romance (friends with benefits), friends + romance (friends with benefits or dating), and best friends + romance (dating/engaged/married). Romance is not the highest type of relationship because it isn't a relationship at all; it's a quality.
Now, do I recommend being friends with someone before dating them? Yeah. Do I recommend dating your best friend? Maybe—but not NECESSARILY, and neither of you should be in a friendship or best-friendship only because maybe one day you'll get to sleep with each other. Gross.
So yeah. Glad I got this off my chest XD
~ Stephanie
* I know that for every one of these stories, there's the opposite side too: the poor guy who really liked a girl, got up the nerve to tell her, and got rejected. That is also really hard, and I'm sorry.
** I mean, I haven't seen everything in the world, so maybe not NEVER, but—okay wait, Little Women. And that goes over like a ton of bricks*** due to all the social conditioning. Sigh.
*** Okay tbh, I kinda do prefer Laurie to Professor Bhaer. Have I fallen victim to the very thing I want to destroy? Hm.
P.S. You may be wondering why this post has a crocodile as its photo. Well, I went to the free images site I use and typed in "mouth," because I was trying to get something related to kissing without getting something romantic. I saw this crocodile and I liked it, and it also fits with the blog's color scheme, so here we are.
You may remember me writing about striving for healthier boundaries XD In June, I read Boundaries, Gabe and I had a life-planning weekend trip, and I committed to holding several specific boundaries for the next six months, June to January.
Well, boundaries are difficult to adhere to, and I haven't been doing a great job. I think the main reason is that I have an unhealthy relationship with other peoples' feelings and opinions.
As a kid I was labeled "lazy." I was also labeled "selfish." As a kid, neither label bothered me. People could label me all day long and I'd continue being/doing largely what I wanted. However, somewhere along the line I became interested in self-improvement, and all the labels started mattering to me. I leaned into my ENFJ, away from my Eight, and decided to make other people the most important thing, to overcompensate for naturally being "so selfish."
My MBTI type is an "extroverted Feeling type." The primary way I see the world is by registering other peoples' feelings. (How *I* feel is so far down the list of factors that I often can't figure it out even when I'm trying. It feels like the absolute least important factor of any scenario, because I know I can handle feeling whatever/anything*.)
For me, this means that during dance class, I'm consumed with the fact that one person in the group isn't getting the choreography and is feeling embarrassed about it. At church, I can't hear what the speaker is saying over the roar of how he accidentally made someone in the second row feel silly. At movie nights, I can't focus on the film because of how much the person on my left dislikes someone across the room. When I accidentally take someone's seat, I feel how awkward THEY feel having to deal with it. When Person A recommends a book to Person B and Person B doesn't care, all I can worry about is how Person A must be feeling.
Now, before this starts sounding selfless and angelic, I need you to know that it's not XD Just because I'm in tune with other peoples' feelings doesn't necessarily mean I'm sympathetic. It might mean I'm annoyed because it's distracting. It might mean I feel like I'm being manipulated when I'm absolutely not.
And being others-focused can also be a form of self-focus: how are others feeling about ME? Do they think I look bad in this outfit? Did they expect me to be more interesting than I am? Do they think my shifting priorities as a Christian are a sign of succumbing to "the world"? Some things don't get factored in—like I'll never care that you think I shouldn't have tattoos or listen to metal—but other things are impossible to ignore.
Recently on a trip, I found myself so wrapped up in what others were thinking and feeling that I couldn't focus on anything else. I tried to stop, wanted to see how long I could go before I was consumed by the wants/needs/opinions/feelings of others. I literally couldn't go, like, a couple of minutes. It was all I could focus on.
One of the things I committed to doing until January was not going to church while I heal from "shoulding," unless I felt specifically called to go one week. Well, I've been doing a horrible job of that.
I skipped a couple of weeks, people would ask Gabe where I was or text me saying they missed me, but then there would be a church function I needed to be at, or Gabe wouldn't be able to attend one week and I felt like at least one of us should be there, or blah blab blah and I'd end up going. Then I'd go another week in a row. And I could imagine the people around me thinking, "Okay good, I'm glad she's gotten whatever it was out of her system and she's back now."
Well, I shouldn't be. I still need to be gone. My boundaries and my feelings are too messed up for me to return in a healthy manner right now. I know that. God knows that. Gabe knows that. My therapist knows that.
But other people don't, and their thoughts/feelings/opinions are all. I. Can. Register.
It's not other peoples' fault. They aren't manipulating me or guilting me or projecting onto me. No, *I* am the one taking on other peoples' stuff when I shouldn't. Other peoples' opinions of me are none of my business. Other peoples' feelings about me are not within my boundaries to control. They can think/do/say/feel whatever is natural for them and that doesn't have to affect me.
In theory.
This is really hard for me. I don't want people to walk on eggshells around me or worry about me**. I don't want other people to DO anything; they don't even have to be understanding or kind. They can be whatever, and I can be whatever, and we'll all work on our own stuff, the stuff that's within our own boundary lines.
I still believe in community and accountability and not making a brother stumble and a bunch of other stuff that probably feels contradictory to some of this, but that's another post (or five).
I dunno. All this to say: boundary work is hard, I guess.
~Stephanie
* Emotionally. Physically, a hangnail will take me out.
** So why am I vomiting this onto the internet? Partly because writing is the best way I can access my own thoughts and feelings, partly because these posts seem to be helping other people wrestle through their own stuff, partly because I'm a validation-seeking millennial. You can assign the percentages however you want.
