How to navigate friends with benefits
People love to connect. We are social animals and have an overriding desire to be connected with others on so many levels not just intimate ones. In most of these interactions we never truly position each other with specific questions until we are already in the cycle of relating with them. This doesn’t mean that these conversations are too late, but they are different when started once in a relational cycle.
When it comes to friends with benefits, there is a general consensus that we all have the capacity to play in this space, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. We are all susceptible to emotions and creating emotional cords with others. This doesn’t have to be purely on the basis of a sexual encounter, but it is the depth of intimacy that we experience with the other that triggers oxytocin deep within us to connect. This hormone not only prompts us to bond, but when we add fantasy into the mix, our minds are forecasting on many wonderful future events and what is actually happening is more of an imprinting onto the fantasy than the actual reality of the situation.
The moment we come together and connect with someone and begin to experience the relational game, we have a deep desire to deepen a bond and ultimately build a family. Most men are terrified of this reality, but because it is so deeply engrained in our genetic code even if it is through conditioning, we cannot deny that deep down inside we all want to feel a sense of belonging and connection. No one likes to remain in a state of loneliness and solitude.
If we take the prison system into account, the worst thing that could be done to someone in prison (there are many) is place them in solitary confinement. It is the meeting of oneself, alone and not connected that has an immense ability to terrify us. But what is more apparent is that we face a dead end in isolation, we do not face growth and flow states. Instead we connect this dead end with death and ending, and we ultimately fear death because it highlights that we are not actually living.
Now when we look at friends with benefits, you have a situation where it is our core soul desire not to live a life half lived so we want to make as many connections as possible. The feeling of falling in love is an experience that only happens once, in the same way that death only happens once. So this magical experience feeds into our existential crisis where we question ourselves constantly “is this person the one I am meant to be journeying with through life”, rather than understanding that love is meant to be experienced in depth and in so many ways not simply through the initial act of falling in love.
When we are on the path of falling into friend with benefits, we get so deeply attached to this feeling of falling in love that it has the capacity of becoming an addiction, and there are many love addicts out there in the world. The question is whether you are able to recognise this in yourself and realise that you are connecting to the wrong feeling of love and need to dismantle this into a better understanding.
I say dismantle, because there are many layers to this. One of the layers is the novelty of falling in love. It is a dopamine, adrenaline, oxytocin cocktail and the more and more we condition our bodies to connect with this much like the swipe of a finger on a dating app we are always projecting our hopes into what will be and rest our hopes on a fantasy rather than actually understanding what it means to truly love.
We all have a unique and personal view of what it means to love. We can read every book under the sun about our love languages and how we communicate our love, but we cannot be boxed into 5 types of love languages when we are so profound as a human race and how dare we box such a beautiful and complex emotion as love is.
Just like speaking the same language, our language of love is filled with nuances and different dialiects and it is our sole responsibility to not only learn how to express our version of what love is and means and feels to the world, but more so to become curious as to how the other expresses, displays, emotes and is in their love.
This brings me back to the importance of knowing how to navigate friends with benefits and there is no easy task at hand here. The problem is that this type of dynamic is that there is always someone that falls in love while the other is purely sexualising and blocking themselves from experiencing the loving feelings because they know all too well that there is nothing about this person that is prompting them to commit and meet the depth of what love truly means.
This is a reality that everyone entering into a friends with benefits relationship needs to understand. We ned to understand that the person we are engaging with has the potential to not meet our fantasy. They have the potential to not journey with us into the depth of what love really is. They have the potential to not live up to our expectations. They have the potential to disappoint. They have the potential to hurt us because we have opened ourselves up and re potentially vulnerable to being hurt because we are not being received in the way that we want to be. They have the potential to trigger a side of us that becomes obsessive and controlling and demanding of being met with love and compassion.
But…
By going through an experience like this also has its benefits. What I have learnt is that when we are on the receiving end of not being received in the way that we want to in a friends with benefits relationship we get shown many parts to us which we overlook. We get shown that we are actually ready to meet our forever person. We are shown that we have a real resilience in navigating difficulties in relationships. We are shown that we want to love entirely and build with a person. We are shown huge capacity for forgiveness and acceptance even when we don’t want to. We are shown that we can accept minimal amounts of affection and love when in actual fact we deserve immensity and fullness. We are shown how our shadow side comes out to play when we are triggered by the wrong person. We are shown that the person we choose to imprint on has an immense amount of influence over our suffering, pleasure, and outlook on life.
So the navigation part comes in 6 easy steps:
- Be clear on each others relationship status
- Be crystal clear on what you desire from one another and be as specific as possible
- Revisit where your boundaries are and always remember that a maybe is a no.
- Have the sexual status conversation early on, you’ll thank me later.
- Always express what the meaning will be for you by engaging in this kind of interaction
- ALWAYS always express how you want the other to care for you once your experience is complete. Your aftercare is in your hands and just needs to be asked for.
Vaya Con Dios
