BEING IN LOVE WITH YOUR BEST FRIEND
IS OKAY
He picked me up in a strange city at an ungodly hour when my shabby red contraption, in the form of an old Fiat Punto, wouldn't start. I shared a room with him in a Center Parks cabin because it simply had the most square meters and a comfortable bed. He helped my mother hang the Christmas lights in the biggest oak tree in the garden. And I planted my legs every Wednesday evening under the kitchen table at his mom's to eat the best steak on earth from Frankie the butcher. My male best friend, my buddy. And then after five years of being friend-zoned, I suddenly found myself kissing him...
Panic, but the nail-biting kind. I had lost my best friend, forever, because I just had to kiss him. And that really shouldn't have happened, but I did it anyway. This can't be happening. This can't be happening. This can't be happening. Talking solves things, right? Yes, we were going to have a serious talk about it. No idea why I had to shave my legs when he came to my student palace in Amsterdam, but anyways. The conversation lasted twelve hours. Forty-nine days later, I was sitting at the familiar dining table, but now with Rudolf's red nose on the napkin. It was Christmas, it was on, and he is the love of my life ever since.
“This can't be happening. This can't be happening. This can't be happening.”
Oh yes, I received epistles of comments from this (truly well-meaning) and that (somewhat less well-meaning), I found it thrillingly exciting and everything changed.
But these are the reasons why dating your best friend is a particularly good idea.
- You are in love. With your best friend. In love! And the whole tropical garden goes adrift in your stomach and that is just very pleasant.
- You know he drinks his coffee with two sweeteners and an absurd amount of milk (this is colloquially called child coffee). He can tell by your raised eyebrow that you completely disagree with the color of the eggs he is tossing into the shopping cart (based on a true story). But everything else feels new. How he looks at you, the way he holds you, that you are lounging in the window sill while you know he is still a long way off. Everything, sigh.
- But you already know those in-laws. It’s a little bit crazy when you give your first kiss in their presence, but you’re not sweating in your palms when you ring the doorbell. You plant three smacking kisses on the cheeks, giggle a bit, and that's it.
- You have a collection of remember-when material. And because you have been best friends forever for years, you were present at that drunken state from five years ago. Or you know the story so well that you almost think you were there.
- He doesn't just run away. In the beginning, it makes it a bit tricky to argue with a brand new specimen, because you never know how quickly he might leave. Well, with the best friend aka the lover, you really have to flip out mercilessly to scare him. And even though that seems annoying in the heat of the moment, it’s actually just nice.
- Even though that friend feels new, you know each other's quirks and big secrets. So if you hide away for one weekend a year to indulge in a hefty party of LARPing (this is live action role play and I would never do such a thing), you don’t need to add subtitles.
- Your lives fit together, with each other, to each other, and so on. This is demonstrable in friendship years. And as a bonus, you don’t have to explain to your new lover how close you are with your best friend. Ha!
So if there’s some rumbling and rolling when you see each other, just go for it. You’re eight and a half years in, believe me.
