Just a recap for those who haven’t been following my multi-year dating saga. The Motivator was my long-time friends with benefit who I was at one point crushing really hard on, which is probably an understatement if you’ve read past posts. Well, he’s a few years younger than me, very physically active both at his job and at the gym and he got hit with a cancer diagnosis.
I’ve been struggling with my friendship with him and how he fits in my life now that I have a boyfriend and our friendship seems more and more out of place. His cancer diagnosis made me think about what would happen if he just disappeared from my life – like if he were to just die. Oh I definitely realize how wrong it is to have that kind of thought, but at the same time it’s worth asking as a hypothetical.
Well, firstly, it’s not like it would just happen overnight. What I started to question was my continued friendship with The Motivator for the time being actually. His cancer diagnosis actually has more of an immediate impact as well. Like, could you really unfriend a friend that was recently diagnosed with cancer? That just seems wrong. For a short period of time, I felt like I was actually in an even more sticky situation with our friendship like I couldn’t leave even if I wanted to.
Okay, so real-time processing this thought as I am writing this post because, on one side, I do feel like the relationship/friendship has played itself out. Now that I have the perspective of having a boyfriend, I kind of want to balance myself out and actually have more girlfriends in my life. I’ve always had the idea of having a few girlfriends who live nearby and who I can lean on for emotional support and should I want to start a family, maybe these girlfriends would be in the same life stages as me. Or, maybe as a couple my boyfriend and I can invest in some couple friends at the same relationship stage as us. It’s not like there’s no opportunity cost, I do think that there are opportunity costs.
Even now, I think that The Motivator has taught me so much in life, but is that reason enough to remain friends? I don’t know. I also feel like I held onto the relationship because I wanted to continue to have sex with him and enjoyed that type of company, and that part of me now is now wholly being fulfilled by my boyfriend. Not just that, but The Motivator has hurt me, although I’m over it now, it’s not like these acts didn’t happen at all. If I had to pinpoint it down to something, it would be the lack of communication that caused the most hurt for me. I wished that he was more open about what our relationship was, I wished that he was more open about the time that started crushing on another girl in our group of friends that he would disclose things things to me. I remember being so humiliated by him a few times such as when he just showed up with the girl he crushed on without warning, how when we were on vacation together he told this stranger that we weren’t together, and how on many occasions he seemed ashamed that others would insinuate that we might be together. And to that, I guess I could have brought it up too but I didn’t because it didn’t feel welcomed at the time.
So now when the tone has changed in our relationship because I have a boyfriend, he would ask me to essentially spend his birthday together – when we never did birthdays in the past unless it was with a large group. I always knew that he knew when my birthday was, but he would let it pass without a word. It’s these kind of things that I think about. We can never really be close friends in that way because of that.
If this relationship could be simplified, it was that we were friends with benefits mostly because he didn’t want to be more serious. And now that I’m with someone our dynamic has changed and it almost, just almost feels like he is pulling in harder now that I have a partner. I realize that in today’s society, people would say to leave this relationship aside, it’s just that it feels like he just keeps on holding on tighter – and now the cancer diagnosis.
I guess I am more so the type to let friendships fizzle rather than cutting things off, which I consider unnecessary.
Separate thought I had the other day – I kind of wonder if The Motivator is kind of jealous now that I have a partner. I don’t mean it in a way that I hope he was jealous, no, not at all… rather the opposite. I actually have a fear that he might be jealous and because he doesn’t know how to communicate this properly and he has this jealousy pent up inside that he might be capable of doing something bad. Not to say that he’s had a history of this or shows any signs of this at all logically – but it was a really scary fleeting thought that I had the other day. And the only way I was able to shake it off was to remind myself how vehemently he shook me off before.
And then much more recently, I considered the other side of the coin. What if we remain friends, and to be fair he’s been one of the most consistent friends that I’ve had in the last few years… I mean I guess that’s partially because our sex lives intertwined but it has been consistent. Some might say that it’s pretty chill that we’re able to move fluidly from being friends with benefits to just being friends.
I want to be clear that I’m mostly debating if we should be friends or not based on our complicated background with each other. If I were to only consider just the friendship alone – like do I even enjoy the friendship enough to keep it going? I think the answer is still no… at least for the current time being. He comes over every other week or so and we have dinner together – I cook dinner, and while I enjoyed that before I would much rather be cooking dinner for my boyfriend now. I enjoy the chats, but I don’t enjoy it that much that I couldn’t live without it. A big point too is that he doesn’t share his friends, his friendships with me are solely with me and that is it. He almost never brings me out with his friends, he never invites me to concerts even though he knows we have very overlapping taste in music, even when he hangs out with our mutual friends he doesn’t think to call me out sometimes. I was going to say that maybe on my side it’s like that too – but it actually isn’t. I stopped bringing him out when we first met each other, because he was simply just not into my friends at the slightest. And I can even think of a very recent time when I invited him out to a concert and it’s like he doesn’t even consider it.
So yes, I guess maybe I’m a bit of a coward. I don’t want to be blatant that I don’t really care to be the kind of friends that meet up even every other week, at least not at this time. So I think about what if situations where he is no longer here… I realize that isn’t nice but it really was just a thought exercise. I’m non-confrontational, not all the time, but in cases like this I am yes. Usually it’s really easy to just create distance in a relationship, but in this case I do feel like he’s holding on. And I think it’s okay for now. Maybe he needs me? If he needed me, I’d be there for him. But my worry is that it’s not that… it’s that he doesn’t care all that much and is really actually motivated by his own jealousy or ego now that he’s not with me in that way anymore and he’s just acting on that ego. I think nobody really wins in that situation, not him, not me.