That awkward feeling when…

… you think you might be starting to have feelings for someone who has always just been a friend.

This has happened to me so many times and has never ended well. But isn’t it inevitable, when you’re really good friends with someone? (I was going to say ‘with someone of the opposite sex’ but didn’t want to be prescriptive – although in my case, I am referring to guy friends.)

It’s quite exciting – suddenly being hyper-aware of someone you’ve until that point been very comfortable around. The person who’s always supportive, who you speak to often on the phone, who others say ‘Oooh he’s lovely’ and you respond with ‘Isn’t he? He’s like my big brother.’ The person your concerned relatives as you about, with thinly veiled hope that perhaps the scales will someday fall from both your eyes and a big fat white wedding will result.

But it’s also awful. Suddenly you’re awkward around your best buddy. You wonder if he can sense that something has changed for you. Then the despair that it’s one-sided… or the double-edged exciting possibility that maybe he feels it too – but what if taking things to a new level blow up in your face, and you end up losing a friend you adore.

Do you think a man and a woman, both single, can be ‘just friends’? And here I mean someone you’ve been friends with for years and years, not a new friend. Does attraction always come into play – from one side, or the other? Is it possible to have been friends with someone for a long time and suddenly see them differently? And can we really be truly platonic?

I can’t talk now – my husband just got home

OK so perhaps, in my independent-single-chick mode, I am overreacting to this a little so I look forward to your comments on this one.

I have a long-standing, good friend who I don’t see or speak to very often, despite us living in the same city. In the past her work has been all-consuming and although it has improved recently, I still don’t hear from her very often. She married last year and is now one of my 7 pregnant friends.

I called her last week for no particular reason than to have a catch-up chat. I could hear she was eating and when I asked if she’d prefer me to call back after she’d finished her dinner, she said no, she’d prefer to talk now because her husband was due home soon and she feels it’s not right for her to have long conversations with her friends when he is there.

What?!

Let me get this right: hubby comes home and wifey must give him her undivided attention.

Oh heavens, if that’s how a marriage is supposed to be, then I am SO staying single.

I don’t know if this is something SHE has decided is appropriate, or whether HE has requested (dictated??). But frankly, if it was me, I would be quite happy for my husband to catch up on the phone with a friend he doesn’t see often – and I’d expect him to understand if I did the same. I’m not talking about 3 hour phone conversations to friends every evening (we are out of high school, after all!). Just the occasional great chat with someone you haven’t seen in a while.

Canvassing my other friends, the single girls reacted with horror but some of my married friends said that in the early days of their marriages, their worlds did revolve around their new spouses (spice? hee hee).

What do you think? Should a husband and wife give each other all their attention in the evenings? Or is having some separate interests healthier? (OK, so I have phrased that with a little bias…!).