The ‘Boyfriend’

Ask any woman and she'll tell you, there's nothing that can get between two women faster than a guy. After adolescence, pretty much all female friendships are shot because of the opposite sex. Either your best friend has a new boyfriend and she doesn't have time for you. Or, she has a boyfriend and she complains about him constantly. Or — even worse — she has a new boyfriend, and all she can do is talk about how great he is. Or, she's broken up with her boyfriend and all she can do is talk about getting back together with him. And so on and so on. You know how the story goes.

Case in point: Last week, I was supposed to get together with a friend of mine in Fresno, and she calls to tell me that she can't go because her ex-boyfriend who she swore off for good just called her. “My ex is back in town and he called me and said he was going to stop by my house this afternoon.”

“But wait a minute,” I said. “I thought you were through with that guy?”

“I am,” she said. “I just want to be home for when he gets here this afternoon so that I can tell him not to come over. That way I don't have to worry about him coming over anymore.”

Here's another example: A different friend of mine was graduating from school with her Master's degree and she asked her new boyfriend to come along to the graduation ceremony. “But you don't have to go if you don't want to,” she said, which in women-speak really means, “you do have to go whether you want to or not.” The new boyfriend who obviously didn't understand this, didn't show up at the ceremony and my friend spent the whole night steaming mad, checking her cell phone every five minutes to see if he called.

“I'm never going to talk to him again,” she said.

“Then, why are you checking your cell phone?” I said.

“I'm going to let him call me about three or four times and not answer the phone. Then, I'm going to wait a week to call him back to tell him not to call me again,” she said.

I thought to myself that she certainly had a lot of confidence in him — and in herself — all based on a phone call that the new boyfriend hadn't even made yet.

Despite all her threats she made to swear him off, my friend was, of course, back with her boyfriend a week later and just as much in love as ever before. And herein lies the problem: Whenever your friend calls you up to complain about her boyfriend, you can commiserate with and say, “yeah, what a jerk”. You want to make her feel better by agreeing with her that her boyfriend is a jerk. But you can't say he's too much of a jerk, because ultimately when she gets back together with him — and she will — she won't want to hang out with you as much anymore because she'll think you think her boyfriend is a jerk.

I have to admit that I'm not any more logical than the next person when it comes to this kind of thing. I've had times in the past when I've called a guy I knew I shouldn't be calling and thought to myself afterward when he didn't answer the phone“damn, I shouldn't have called.” Then, I'll call up a trusted female friend to confirm with her that the guy I'm calling is in fact a jerk and that I shouldn't be calling. So, I'll call the guy up a second time to tell him to just forget that I called. Then, I'll think to myself, I'll call back one more time and tell him that I didn't even mean to call him in the first place — that I completely misdialed his number and I had no intention of calling him. This all sounds like a good plan, until I realize that the third call might explain the second call, but how am I going to explain the first call? At some point, right in the middle of all this, my female friend will call me up and say, “Well, how'd it go?” and I'll have to admit that it's not going well and I don't have time to talk to her because I'm too busy waiting for the guy to call me back so I can tell him I don't want to talk to him. Of course, this makes perfect sense to my female friend, but certainly not to the person I keep calling who I say I don't want to talk to.

(Readers can e-mail Lisa at lisal@thegrid.net.)