something sort of struck me today, a difference between friendships and relationships. for better or for worse (and the answer is for worse), i almost never start dating my friends. the reason for this is very simple: when i meet a girl, the things i look for in a friend are the same things as the things i look for in a relationship (good conversation, dynamism, perception, intelligence, etc..) so when i meet a girl i'm interested in as a friend, i'm also interested in her as something more. (the only exceptions are when i'm in a relationship -- but i would argue that even in these cases, the interest is the same, i am just less likely to be interested in girls period, and of course don't pursue avenue b -- and when i'm not attracted to her, which is rare, because i'm attracted to most people for their personality, which this girl a priori has.)
so the natural progression is that i'm romantically interested in this girl, which means that either we will date or she will reject me. or, alternatively, i will become no longer romantically interested in this girl, but when this typically happens i'm no longer interested in her as a friend either (and this option is very rare.)
this means that all of my female friends either have rejected me romantically or are people i've dated, with very few exceptions. so i don't start dating them. the funny thing, of course, is that this is an exceptionally poor strategy -- relationships usually work much better when you're friends first, for various reasons (e.g. you already know each other's happiness functions, and so you're much better at bringing happiness and not bringing unhappiness to each others' lives), and mine in particular certainly have (well -- it's more like i've only had one relationship where we were friends first, albeit not close friends, and that went super super well.)
but this is just the way i operate. it's impossible for me to be interested in a girl as 100% only friends, and if i were i would never come around to "wanting to date her." for that matter, even when i'm in a relationship, if i form the impression that i don't "want to date her" (even if it would be productive if i weren't in a relationship), it tends to be enduring, on top of which it seems that almost always when i become close friends with a girl, it is via relationship or proto-relationship (i.e. it's hard both socially and logistically to spend a lot of time with a girl when you're dating someone else.)
the reason i find this interesting is that i do manage to occasionally form close friendships with guys. not frequently -- probably about 2/3 of my close friends are female -- but it does happen occasionally. the funny thing, the thing that struck me, is that these friendships are a lot like relationships in some ways, but they don't cause me strife. i don't get anxious when they don't call; i don't read any secondary cues into anything they do or don't do. i guess part of this, the specific thing that struck me, is that a lot of relationship terminology, and especially negative relationship terminology, is inapplicable to friendships.
for instance, no one would ever ask you questions of the form "how are things going with [friend]?", and it wouldn't make sense for you to answer "we're having problems" if they did. you don't really gripe about your close friends the way you might about your significant other if you were having problems. "breaking up" has little if any meaning; you might drift apart, but it's never one dramatic moment the way it usually is with relationships. even though you would think that there would be analogues of these things in friendship, there really aren't, at least in my experience (i guess others have dramatic fights with friends, but this has only happened once in my life, 9 (god i'm old) years ago.)
it almost seems to me that a close friendship has all the benefits of a relationship (save one) without any of the stress that relationships evidently cause me, and little if any risk of fallout-type emotional breakdowns. or, to put it another way, maybe a profound realization is that i should try to pattern my relationships after my friendships. that i should try to treat it as a friendship, except that some day it will lead to marriage (and it includes sex.) it seems to me that i treat the person i'm dating very, very differently than i treat my friends (for some reason i never realized this before), both in terms of actions and in terms of the role they play in my mind, and maybe this is not so healthy (which ties in with emotional dependence and all that.) maybe the existence of the future forever makes things unavoidably different; i don't know. but i feel like conceivably i have just made a major psychological breakthrough. thank you for listening.