Friend, Lover, Other

I was recently musing on the only opportunity I’ve ever had to make a lover out of a friend, back in high school’s dark ages, a girl who to this day I somewhat regret never having the experience of dating. Only ‘somewhat regret’ because certainly I don’t want to be anywhere other than where I am now – with who I am with now, but I liked this girl in high school, had fun with her and – and I always dated someone else.

It is commonly said one should marry their best friend, and I have alluded to this motif in thinking about the intimacy of symbols between two people in a relationship. Of course, there’s then also the ‘falling in love’ trope and the ever present theme of ‘love at first sight’. Yet I think all these guidelines exist to help assure people of some long term intimacy, viability and love symbol compatibility. And while on one hand it’s perhaps easy for me to make a straw man of the ‘marry your best friend’ idea because my wife is only my best friend now (we did not start this way) and I think we turned out wonderfully, on the other hand, neither was it love at first sight for us or any other ‘traditional’ version of ‘falling in love’.

So I wonder if what ‘guideline’ (did) work for me (and why) and what ‘guidelines’ didn’t work for me (and why) might somehow be indicative of the nature of my love, my relationship (and) or of human love in general.

For instance I know now several lesser reasons why I never dated my friend in high school: we were neither very popular and, high school dating often being about status than ‘romantic feeling’, I usually opted to try dating a more popular girl. I felt guilty and shallow about it even then, but even now, when I am constantly trying to be a better person than I am, I don’t think I would have well handled the opprobrium back then of two unpopular teenagers dating each other; children can be cruel.

Another easy reason was that I think I had difficulty (as perhaps nearly all teenagers do but also as often even adults do) separating friendship’s fun from romance’s love from lust’s simplicity, differences that then seemed very important (this was before the category of ‘friends with benefits’). But in retrospect I realize I really just had a friend who happened to be a girl; none of the available standard compatibility guidelines were functional enough (as love symbols) to say ‘I’m in love with her‘.

And this leads me back to my wife because neither did any established guideline work for me with my wife either. Fact is, when I think about it, the biggest reason I don’t really regret never dating my old high school friend is that she and I never had the fitted-ness of the numinous relationship experience that my wife and I had from very early on in our relationship. But of course, this isn’t an ‘established‘ compatibility guideline or love symbol: 

[W]hen I feel perfectly at peace with my wife, perfectly one with my wife, when I feel I was born to love her (c.f. Love’s Fate, Love’s Destiny), when I feel I am 100% there for the purpose of participating in her happiness process. And, well, I want that frame of mind for me, for my sake. It is a beautiful passionate moment, it is like getting to safely stand on the sun, it’s a powerful and numinous thing, and I want to feel this way all the time – because it’s when I most feel as if I am fulfilling my purpose in life, doing what I am supposed to be doing here on earth, learning the thing I am supposed learn here on this earth.
~OH, An Uxorious Frame of Mind

However, as sure as I am of this love symbol as a guideline for me, since it’s absent for the majority of other people I’m lost as to any significance for ‘human love in general’.