How to navigate to friends with privileges
People love to connect. We are social animals and have a primal desire to connect with others on so many levels and not just the intimate. In most of these interactions, we never really ask each other specific questions until we’re already in the relationship circle with them. This is not to say that these conversations are too late, but they are different when they start once in a relationship cycle.
When it comes to friends with benefits, there’s a general consensus that we all have the ability to play in this space, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. We are all sensitive to emotions and to forming emotional cords with others. This doesn’t have to be based solely on a sexual encounter, but it is the depth of intimacy we experience with the other that triggers the oxytocin deep within us to connect. Not only does this hormone urge us to bond, but when we add imagination to the mix, our mind predicts many wonderful future events and what actually happens is more of a reflection of the imagination than the actual reality of the situation.
The moment we come together and connect with someone and begin to experience relationship play, we have a deep desire to deepen a bond and eventually build a family. Most men are horrified by this reality, but because it’s so deeply ingrained in our genetic code, even if it’s through conditioning, we can’t deny that deep down 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 consider the prison system, the worst that could happen to someone in prison (there are many) is to be put in solitary confinement. It is the encounter of ourselves, alone and unconnected that has a tremendous capacity to terrify us. But what is most apparent is that we face a dead end in isolation, we do not face states of growth and flux. Instead, we associate this impasse with death and the end, and 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’s our soul’s basic desire not to live a half-lived life, so we want to make as many connections as possible. The feeling of falling in love is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, in the same way that death is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. So this magical experience fuels our existential crisis where we constantly ask ourselves “is this the person I should be traveling through life with”, instead of understanding that love is meant to be experienced deeply and in many ways, not just through the initial act of falling in love.
When we are on the path of becoming friends with benefits, we become so deeply attached to this feeling of love that it has the ability to become an addiction, and there are many love addicts out there in the world. The question is whether you can recognize this in yourself and realize that you are connected to the wrong feeling of love and the need to dissolve it into a better understanding.
I say disassemble, because there are many layers to it. One of the levels is the novelty of falling in love. It’s a cocktail of dopamine, adrenaline, oxytocin, and the more we condition our bodies to connect with it, like swiping a finger on a dating app, we’re always projecting our hopes on what will be and basing our hopes on a fantasy instead of truly understand 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 can’t be locked into 5 types of love languages when we are so deep as a human race and how dare we accumulate such a beautiful and complex emotion such as love.
Just like speaking the same language, our love language is full of nuances and different dialects, and it is solely our responsibility to not only learn how to express our version of what love is, means and feels like to the world, but more to become curious about how the other expresses, shows, moves and is in love.
This brings me back to the importance of knowing how to navigate friends with benefits, and there is no easy job here. The problem is that this type of dynamic is that there is always someone who falls in love while the other person is having purely sexual intercourse and prevents himself from experiencing the feelings of love because he knows very well that there is nothing in that person that makes him want to commit and know the depth of what love really means.
This is a reality that everyone entering into a friends with benefits relationship should understand. We must understand that the person we are dealing with has the potential not to live up to our imagination. They have the potential to not journey with us into the depth of what love really is. They have the potential to fall short of our expectations. They have the potential to disappoint. They have the potential to hurt us because we have opened up about ourselves and we are potentially vulnerable to being hurt because we are not received the way we would like. They have the potential to trigger a side of us that becomes obsessive and controlling and demanding to be treated with love and compassion.
But…
Experiencing such an experience also has its advantages. What I’ve learned is that when we’re ready to not be accepted the way we’d like in a friends-with-benefits relationship, they show us a lot of places we overlook. It proves to us that we are truly ready to meet our forever person. It shows us that we have a real resilience in navigating relationship difficulties. It is shown to us that we want to love completely and build with a person. They show us a tremendous capacity for forgiveness and acceptance even when we don’t want to. We are shown that we can accept small amounts of affection and love when in reality we deserve immensity and completeness. It shows us 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 a huge influence on our suffering, pleasure and outlook on life.
So the navigation part comes in 6 easy steps:
– Be clear about the relationship status with each other
– Be clear about what you want from each other and be as specific as possible
– Revisit where your limits are and always remember that maybe is no.
– Do the sexual situation early, you’ll thank me later.
– Always express what the meaning will be for you by engaging in this type of interaction
– ALWAYS always express how you want the other person to care about you once your experience is complete. Your aftercare is in your hands and just needs to be asked.
Vaya Con Dios
