Easy Drawings Meaning Friendship Friendships Between a Girl and Boy
The Beauty of Boy-Girl Friendships
Let's stop treating them as less than
As a self-declared 'tomboy' growing up, I had plenty of male friends. In fact, I often surrounded myself with boys, so eager was I to play rough and tumble games or to do the messy, outdoors things that we so often associate with our male children. With hobbies that included dinosaurs, martial arts, sports, Star Wars, play fighting, and doing-stupid-things-that-could-get-me-injured, I naturally gravitated towards the guys at school, and outside of school a lot of our family friends had children who were also, you guessed it, male. It seemed I couldn't avoid them.
This meant I often had sleep overs with boys, went camping with boys, shared the deep, dark secrets of my ten-year-old self with boys, made my first (tone deaf, cardboard-guitar-wielding) band with boys, and I even ran away with a group of boys once (being found and brought back within a few hours, which turned out to be more than enough time to have get up to all the silly mischief our nine-year-old hearts desired.)
However, as much as these friendships meant to me, to the adults in my life they were seen as nothing more than fleeting fancies; a strange phase that would end abruptly with the onset of puberty. If I had developed such friendships with girls, I imagine our parents would have planned our maid of honour dresses, yet for friendships of the opposite gender a used-by-date was assumed, an attitude which honestly insulted me as a child — and, looking back as an adult, angers me as it cheapens what were some beautiful, innocent childhood friendships.
"Are you going to marry Jim* one day?" one well-meaning adult asked many times, always shocked when I answered "No" — as if the only way to maintain the level of closeness we had would be for it to develop down the romantic route.
"Are you in love with Ali*?" another would ask, never convinced by my vehement "No," because, of course, no affection between un-related children of opposite gender could possibly be platonic.
"Is Stuart* your boyfriend?" family friends would whisper conspiratorially, just within his hearing range, mortifying me and making me blush with shame — a reaction which no doubt only served to strengthen their suspicions.
Maintaining these friendships during the teenage years was, I admit, not as easy as I would have hoped, and I blame this on these very attitudes. The fact that once we reached a certain age our friendship stopped being "cute" in other peoples' eyes and became an oddity meant we were constantly having to defend or justify what we had.
"Boys and girls can't be just friends," the world proclaimed.
Yet where did that leave me, and my experiences to the contrary?
Usually it wouldn't matter to me what others thought of my relationships. Yet, when it came to my closest guy friends, there were so many times these outside opinions refused to be kept at bay.
As we grew older, they affected us more and more, and I will always resent that. Gone were the days we could shrug off the "Are you getting married?" comments that flew our way as children. These attitudes began to directly impact how we could — or couldn't — spend time together.
For my closest friend and I, it started with splitting us into separate rooms for sleepovers once we reached high school (aged eleven). Of course, this sounds reasonable, however for reference, this never happened to any girl-girl sleepovers. When I had sleepovers with him we never shared beds, my friend had bunk beds so there was always a physical division between us. Yet I was allowed to share not just rooms but beds all through my teenage years with any other girl, no questions asked — such was the fun double standard of a hetero-normative upbringing.
For us, this signalled the fact that any benefit of the doubt we had been given as children disappeared. No one seemed to believe us any more when it came to our friendship being what we had always said it was; purely platonic. No more than. No less than. They couldn't see that this state of friendship didn't change just because I was born with one set of genitals and he another.
Now, to be very clear here, I am in no way stating that we should push for children of opposite genders to have sleepovers together. I really just used the sleepover example as a way to highlight that to me — the child who had never thought of this boy she grew up with as anything more than the skinny, gangly extension of herself, her partner in crime when it came to mischief and adventures — this ban served less as a safeguard and more of a shocking wake up call. It was the moment a huge sign flashed, labelling our relationship as inappropriate.
For others who shared close friendships with the opposite gender during childhood, there could have been a whole range of different occasions that were the moment when the innocence of what you had slipped away.
For me, this was my moment. This new rule drew a line in the sand, highlighting the difference in my friendship with him and my friendships with other girls, which seemed ludicrous to me at the time.
Right or wrong, it changed things.
It made our friendship somehow seem wrong, dirty, something of which we should be ashamed. Why no one could accept us for what we were, instead of assuming the worst, was beyond me, but this horrible feeling gnawed away at us both. Was there something wrong with us?
And things didn't stop here. Gradually, we were made to adjust many things about our behaviour, our ways of expressing affection, and our habits.
Those hours of after-six phone calls that were adorable when we were younger? No longer appropriate.
Sharing and swapping desserts when out for meals with our families? It was time to keep to our own.
These and countless other adjustments had to be made, and all because society didn't seem to be able to fit the square peg, that was our friendship, into the round hole of its pre-determined mould; a mould to which opposite gender relationships had to conform. And by conform I mean cease to exist.
There is a well known saying in Japanese, 出る釘は打たれる, which translates to "The nail which sticks up will be hammered down." My close, affectionate and care-free relationships with boys, who just happened to make up most of my closest friends, quickly became the nail sticking up, and it suddenly felt we in danger of being hammered down.
Worse than restraints on these friendships from parents, though, was when our bonds were shaken from the inside. This was especially the case through our teenage years.
I'll never forget the heartbreak when one of my other close guy friends, who was like a brother to me (in that we had been brought up side by side from infancy) distanced himself for a while due to his new girlfriend feeling jealous of our closeness.
Looking back, I get it. The kind of relationship we had wasn't understood or embraced by society, by popular culture, by many people in life, and so it no doubt appeared alien to those around us. I can see how our dynamic would have felt threatening to any significant other, in fairness to the girl, however that doesn't mean I was ever ready to be cast aside.
Worse, I felt absolutely helpless to do anything about it. Any attempt by me to explain, to reach out, to fight for this friendship that was so precious, would have been seen as an act of aggression by the girlfriend and so I had no choice but to back off, for that period of time, until everything blew over.
Luckily, things worked out in the end and that friendship once more became as close as ever. However, it left a lingering aftertaste as it was a horrible glimpse of what we had to face as friends who happened to be boy and girl in this society. Going forward, we both learned something from the experience: about transparency in explaining our friendship to any prospective partners and about being as open and friendly as possible to put them at ease. So it proved to be a vital life lesson, one that would serve us in any kind of relationship. Still, knowing how easy a target our friendship was for any prospective partners made me feel uneasy for a long while.
Nowadays, this isn't an issue as I have a fantastic relationship with his current girlfriend, and I'm so grateful that she's the kind of person who was happy to embrace me as a part of her boyfriend's life, not demand I'm cut out. But knowing our friendship could theoretically cause strife in the relationship of someone who meant so much to me always had me slightly on edge. No one wants to cause hassle for their loved ones, least of all because of something they cannot change.
Society doesn't make friendships between people of opposite genders easy, and I'm past passively accepting that. Why can't we demand more, expect more? It's nearly 2020 for heaven's sake. Friendships between two souls should never fall casualty to gender, or to any other dividing line we place between people.
I was extremely lucky. Most of my friendships with guys survived those rocky teenage years, and we are all the stronger for it. However, I do wonder how many other wonderful opposite gender friendships faded out once they passed the point of being cute in society's eyes, just because of the attitudes surrounding these relationships.
If society treated friendships between women and men the same way they treated friendships between women and women — that is, without suspicion, without reducing them down to romance-in-waiting, without the attitude that they are somehow less than — imagine how many such friendships would have survived past childhood.
Most children play with many kids of other genders, sexualities, colours and religions, and if we encourage these relationships between children from all sorts of backgrounds to blossom into adulthood imagine what they could become. These friendships would open doors for understanding and empathy, they would teach us all to value the voices of those to whom we may not otherwise be exposed, they may even bring people from all walks of life together and serve to break down man-made walls of division.
Of the men I have counted among my closest friends since childhood, I can say one thing; they all treat women better than most guys I know. They see women as autonomous human beings with internal thoughts and goals and passions. They encourage and support women without any sexual agenda. They form genuine connections with the women around them, and they take time to listen to what we say.
Maybe, just maybe, there is a connection between the fact they nourished a lifelong close — but never romantic — friendship with a girl, and the fact that they treat the women in their life so well. Who knows? Yet, I have the sneaking suspicion that the more we encourage our boys in their friendships with girls, the more we could grow men who treat women as people.
How novel would that be?
So please, let's open our eyes to the beauty that is boy-girl friendships. Let's nourish and celebrate these kinds of bonds, because our future is crying out for men and women who have learned what it means to forge deep friendships with the other: whether that's other genders, other ethnicities, or other sexualities.
Let's not reduce them to nothing more than some underhanded grasp at romance. Instead let's accept that purely platonic friendships can and do exist, and it is in all our best interests to nurture them.
"Men and women can't be friends," they say.
Allow me to respectfully disagree.
*Names changed for privacy
Source: https://psiloveyou.xyz/the-beauty-of-boy-girl-friendships-a1e65543a86f
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