The F Word

JUST FRIENDS: bachelor males, take note, this is an international female code for a condition that, once set in motion, is generally set in concrete.

If you want a woman to be romantically interested in you, you'd better gain some intimacy with her quick—at least get her to kiss you. Otherwise you'll look up one day with your big witless puppy-dog eyes and see that something terrible has happened. You'll panic and say something enormously stupid above love, sex, or attraction and she'll look injured and issue this horrible pronouncement:

"Oh, but I thought we were friends!"

Am I completely naïve to say that I've never known a man who said that?

Years ago I saw a very inconsequential movie made for teenage audiences where the girl was telling the boy that she thought of him as a friend.

"Oh, no, not the "F" word!" the boy exclaimed in mock horror.

The rest of the movie was purely prurient and juvenile, but that was a clever bit. An excellent boiling down of a convoluted concept to a very few words in a very bad movie. Every man's heard it at some point, and was lucky if it only made him want to beat his head against a steel door. They might as well say, "Oh, but I thought you were gay or a devotee of Plato or a modern-day stoic or a dashboard plastic saint—I sure didn't know you liked women!"

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