Platonic Girl Friends Are Just Girls You Haven’t Closed With Yet

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Are you one of those people who thinks men and women can be friends without any semblance of sexual tension existing between them? If you are, you’re a moron and you probably have at least one “platonic” female friend. Let me offer you this piece of advice: You need to bail on that chick. Get out now before you do something really stupid like decide to date her, or even worse, end up drunk and sloppily intertwined over your coffee table using a special Polyurethane condom because she’s allergic to latex. Females are food, not friends, and you, for the love of God, need to make sure they stay that way.

During my freshman year of college, I had the misfortune of meeting an awesome girl named Kayla. Kayla was sexy as hell and could actually quote relevant football statistics. For a while, I attempted to snare Kayla in my web of seduction, offering to drive her and her friends out to the bars back when you could still do that as a pledge, inviting her to gamedays we didn’t share with her sorority, and even committing to study “dates” well in advance. Completely pathetic, I know, but I was 18 and had less game than the ’08 Lions. Kayla always responded to these gestures by flirting and some experimental kissing, but she was the kind of girl who only unlocked the more fun stuff for guys she was in a relationship with, something that I was totally against.

Dating in college is a bad idea. Don’t do that shit. I had a buddy who, for two precious collegiate years, hung onto his girlfriend, even though she went to a rival school and was the personification of a tapeworm. One time he broke his nose hammered drunk and she drove the two hours down from her school to chew him out in front of half the fraternity for being careless. He dropped her a month later and then ended up with the clap because him “making up for lost time” apparently meant having sex with the creatures from the black lagoon. He used to call himself our Raw Dog Chair. Don’t think he does that anymore.

Anyway, I settled into a comfortable friendship with Kayla. We shared the same major, so we had multiple classes together each year moving forward. We became so close that she used to help me grade the girls I hooked up with, got to the point where it wasn’t exceptionally weird for me to tell her how my “dates” had gone over the course of the week. I stopped thinking of her as a hot girl and grew more accustomed to including her as one of the guys. What I didn’t know then is that a situation like the one I had with Kayla is not sustainable. It’s like a season where the Cleveland Browns start on a hot streak — it’s nice and there’s hope for the future, but in the end, it’s doomed to fail.

The beginning of our friendship’s dissolution started with the homecoming week of our junior year. My fraternity was matched up with her sorority and we had spent the first couple days of the week destroying 24 packs of Natty in preparation for the game. The date of our homecoming Woodser approached and Kayla and I had agreed, like we had many times before, to go together so we could split the liquor cost for the event. From the advent of Woodser day, something was off with how it was going down. Kayla told me she wanted a bottle of gin for the night. She had never selected gin before. After all, who in their right mind picks gin to get drunk with? I wasn’t especially fired up about sucking down stuff my mother enjoyed drinking, but I complied and got my hands on a huge bottle of Bombay Sapphire. So, in my bubba keg I swirled together the Sapphire and tonic water (she shot down my suggestion of gin and juice – I failed Snoop) and we got on the bus to take us out into the wilderness.

There is one thing I haven’t yet mentioned about Kayla: The girl could pack alcohol away like an Irishman. From the second the bus pulled out of the parking lot, she was crushing the gin and tonic like an AA member with a free bar tab. I luckily had the foresight to bring two bubba kegs worth of alcohol because we were almost finished with the first one by the time we made it out into the woods. We spent the night having fun and playing beer pong on someone’s inflatable table. Nothing out of the ordinary. No, the craziness didn’t start until it was time to get back on the bus to head home.

Kayla decided that it was right around the moment we should be loading up that she needed to completely evacuate the gin from her stomach (seriously, what kind of serial killer picks fucking gin?). As she’s vomiting up a night’s worth of Queen’s Victoria’s finest supply, I was trying to convince the bus driver to let her on board so we could leave. The bus driver refused to allow us on the bus until Kayla had finished puking, so I waited for a lull in the waves of stomach matter, declared she was done, and ran her to the bathroom at the back of the bus before the driver could argue otherwise.

Luckily, the bus was extremely full with drunk college kids because the second we made it to the bathroom, Kayla started spewing like a faucet again. Even if the bus driver could somehow hear her continuing to blow chunks, he must have decided it wasn’t worth the hassle to make us get off because the bus started moving. In-between retching like a plague victim, Kayla demanded I hold her hair back so it wouldn’t get caught in the explosions erupting from her mouth. I grabbed a handful, hammer grip-style, and held it back while I drunkenly conversed with some of the people standing around the back of the bus. Every once in a while, Kayla would gurgle something that sounded like an attempt at English and I would tell her she was doing great or something along those lines.

After an hour, the bus pulled up in front of the house. I only lived a few blocks down the street so I figured I could get us both home safely by myself. Even though Kayla had stopped puking, she was now standing with her arms clasped around my neck and was leaning all her weight on me and in no shape to walk; I decided I would carry her to my place. I tossed her over my shoulder and fireman lugged her down the street and into the elevator up to my apartment. After an extremely interesting conversation with one of my neighbors, I opened my door and dropped her onto the couch. I fell into my bed and figured I could pass out in peace.

I had just started to fall asleep when a voice akin to the girl from the Evil Dead started shouting my name. Kayla, with drunken strength, had somehow gone from lying on my couch to lying on the wooden coffee table in the middle of the room. I walked over to her and she zeroed in on my face. She sat up and said, “Kiss me, kiss me right now.” Without really thinking it through, I responded, “Fuck no” entirely too quickly. I had just spent an hour studying the contents of her stomach as it flew out of her and had no intention of touching the portal through which said contents had exited her body. Kayla got really upset at my answer and started shouting at the top of her lungs. I was absolutely terrified someone was going to call the police, and I was entirely too intoxicated to explain what the hell was going on to law enforcement.

So I caved.

It was one of the sloppiest kisses I have ever taken part in, but goddamn was it hot. I kept kissing her, knowing what an absolutely disgusting individual I was. We started going further, clothes were torn off, and I found myself on my IKEA coffee table, deep inside a girl that I was supposed to be really good friends with. Until that moment, I had forgotten how badly I wanted to fuck this girl. My freshman self cheered me on from somewhere in my head as we banged. This was the culmination of the events set in motion that day in class so very long ago. At that moment, I stood alone at the top of Sex Mountain — victorious.

The morning after was an entirely different story. I don’t think either one of us really wanted to acknowledge what had happened between us during the prior night. We knew that our friendship could never go back to the way it was, as the sex cast a huge shadow over us. From then on, we slowly went our separate ways. We spoke less often and saw each other sparingly. Finally, we halted all forms of communication entirely, as the weight of that night was too much for our friendship to handle. I couldn’t see her as “one of the guys” anymore, funny how that seems to correlate with me having been inside her. The days of Kayla being my platonic friend were over.

Platonic friends of the opposite sex are powder kegs waiting to explode. The end game is always the same; eventually you will hook up and you will see how it is impossible to maintain your friendship. These friends are either girls you’re trying to have sex with, or girls you have forgotten how much you’re trying to have sex with. I thought I lost a friend that night of junior homecoming, but I see now that it was just Kayla and I reaching the pinnacle of our relationship with one another, that apex materializing in sloppy coffee table sex. Sometimes I wish Kayla and I were still on good terms, that she could come over and watch the game instead of this other girl who asked which team is wearing which color. But then I remember that one Wednesday in November, and think to myself: “Holy hell, it was worth it.”

  1. RollPiTX

    Honestly man, should’ve just kept smashing as long as you could. Never walk away from an opportunity

    9 years ago at 9:23 pm
  2. WilmaWildSrat

    I don’t intend this as an attack on the author, but I’ve been a fan of TFM since it first started when I was a senior in college. If you do the math, then you would find that I’m about 5 years out of college. Every now and then, I will click on an article that pops up in my newsfeed, and for the most part, I think the content is entertaining. Some of it I can’t relate to (I pledged a sorority almost 9 years ago #old), but that’s probably a good thing. However, I couldn’t ignore this one after reading it. I’m still involved with my sorority as an advisor, and since I’ve graduated, there has been a significant increase in efforts to address sexual assault on college campuses. Unfortunately, Greek Life – mainly fraternities – has been made the scapegoat, and no one has figured out a solution that will make everyone safer. Sure, there’s the watered-down solution that we hear a lot: Teach men not to rape. I can’t argue with that, but it oversimplifies the problem and ignores the fact that a lot of men (and women) do not fully realize when their conduct amounts to sexual assault. And most of the people talking about sexual assault are really angry and forget that you can’t effectively teach people anything while simultaneously vilifying them. So, my response to this column is not intended as an accusation or an attack. Instead, I’d like to point out and explain some problems with what the author is describing in this column.

    To the author: Maybe she didn’t want to be your friend anymore because you had sex with her even though you knew how drunk she was? You described her as a “lifeless body.” Legally speaking, that means she was incapacitated rendering her unable to consent to sex. Sure, you had been drinking, too, but that doesn’t really help you out because you were in a mental state where you remember your decision making process. (See: “I kept kissing her, knowing what an absolutely disgusting individual I was”). Basically, you’re admitting to sexually assaulting your friend in this column. What’s alarming is that when you look back on that night you think, “Holy hell, it was worth it.” Based on your admission in this column it is clear that you did not intend to sexually assault your friend. But you should know that sexual assault is a crime of general intent, meaning that sexual assault does not have to be your purpose (i.e., your purpose in bringing her home was to sexually assault her). Instead, you only needed an awareness of your conduct, which can be proven by this column.

    Your friend asked you to kiss her, and you said no, but changed your mind because you were worried the police would be called. If you didn’t want to kiss her, then you shouldn’t have, but I can understand that you felt pressure to do so. (Side note: this is an example of how women are also capable of making unwanted sexual contact). However, your friend was intoxicated (arguably more so than you), so she lacked the ability to give effective consent. Even if we concede that she did have the capacity to consent, it looks like she only asked you to kiss her.

    Sex is not what ruined your friendship. Plenty of people have sex and remain friends. What ruined your friendship is that the two of you had sex, and your friend was unable to effectively communicate whether this was something she wanted. And you were unable to use your best judgment in deciding whether or not to have sex with her. You guys did not have sex under the best circumstances, so no wonder neither of you wanted to talk about it the next morning. It doesn’t sound like you’ve experienced any legal consequences from this. I’m guessing because your friend didn’t complain or did not perceive the interaction as sexual assault. Or it could be because she felt somewhat responsible because she had been drinking. You and your friend may not call what happened a sexual assault, but how you’ve described it shows that all of the factors constituting sexual assault occurred on “that one Wednesday in November.” I acknowledge that this is your retelling of the situation and that you may have left some facts out for editorial reasons that would make what happened sound a lot less like sexual assault. The fact of the matter is, though, that you wrote the column and, as it appears on the site, this column implicates you. This is why I couldn’t ignore it – you wrote this without fully appreciating that you were admitting to a crime. That’s a problem and it shouldn’t be ignored. You’re not the first person or the only person to be mistaken when it comes to sexual assault. A lot of men and women don’t fully understand it, but we can’t deny that it’s a problem. The solution isn’t to vilify you or anyone like you, but instead to provide greater understanding.

    To TFM (if you’re even still reading): This is the kind of content that gives fuel to the anti-Greek Life fire. Believe me when I say that I love fraternities. I got stupid drunk in college and had a lot of harmless fun because of fraternities. But your company’s existence is dependent on the existence of fraternities. You don’t have to take any particular stance or action relating to sexual assault, but you could try to make sure that the content presented on your site is not ignorant to a real problem directly impacting the target audience of your sister site TSM. I’m also not sure advertisers would be excited to have their product displayed next to content that perpetuates rape culture. I know the irreverent tone present in the columns posted on this site is what makes the TFM brand appealing and entertaining for your readers (myself included). But even a website that got its start as a place for bros to debate whether or not they would pee in a girl’s butt should be able to acknowledge that there are some things we shouldn’t be irreverent about. So maybe it’s time we stop being TFTC/TSTC about sexual assault?

    TL;DR? The author is admitting to sexual assault but doesn’t seem to be aware of it. This doesn’t make him a bad person because there’s probably more to the story, but he (and TFM) should at least know and maybe acknowledge why his column is problematic.

    9 years ago at 2:42 pm