Friends and Lovers
This past week, my therapist told me that her current relationship, a committed, long-term relationship, feels a lot more solid and sustainable than most of the relationships she’s had in the past, and she said that that’s because it feels more like a friendship than those relationships did.
And I’ve only ever been able to understand the idea of a partner as someone who is as much or more a friend as they are anything else. Which isn’t at all the same as saying that I can see any of my friends as a partner. But I can only be real with someone if I feel like we’re true friends, and what’s the point of a partnership if you can’t be real with each other? When I’ve had a lousy day, if the person I’m coming home to isn’t a friend, how is their presence going to be a comfort to me? And how can I feel like my presence is valuable to someone in any real way if they can’t trust and rely on me? The absence I feel day in and day out in my life is an absence of closeness and connection that, if it existed, would be rooted in respect, admiration and trust.
I’ve watched this movie Manhattan Romance on Netflix twice now, just because–well, because I miss New York, for one. Also because I like the way these two characters, these friends Danny and Carla, talk to each other. There’s an honesty to it and a way in which they gently push against each other and challenge each other.

































It sure is.
But I also like it because Danny, who historically keeps friendship and romance/sex very separate and doesn’t want to get too close or attached to the women he’s involved with…





…realizes that Carla, his friend, the one person who he feels can really see him, who is a real person in the way that the other women in his life just aren’t, is also the person he wants to be with.



















And how are we meant to navigate these connections and respect each other and be there for each other when we care about each other so much and want to be close to each other but that connection feels completely different and means something different to each of us?


Notes
mashatupitsyn said: This was basically me and D. And you know the point of movies was to offer structures for realization–only in life it doesn’t happen anymore because structures for realization and truth procedure have been eroded and derailed. As my friend used to say, “In real life, men don’t have epiphanies”! In my real-life D didn’t have his epiphany. But he said and did the same things as Danny. Want to watch this series! Send me a link.
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