A while ago, I hooked up with a guy (who was identifying as a girl at that time). Let’s call him Ty. A week later, Ty started hanging out with an ex of mine, Jenn. They cuddled and had sleepovers, though I never really asked for details about what all went on during said sleepovers (for reasons you’ll soon see). Before that, Jenn dated a different ex of mine, Andrea – the first serious girlfriend I ever had. I introduced them. Later, I witnessed Andrea get publicly flogged and dominated by Chante. Now Chante is dating Ty, which I found out about on fucking Twitter. Twitter is also fucking Jenn, I’m pretty sure.
This is one small sliver of the incestuous anarchy that is being queer. Somehow, it still surprises me. It’s happened countless times with countless people and will continue ad nauseum, no doubt. I mean, The L Word devoted like 3 seasons to this very concept. But I don’t know why it’s been bothering me, especially since I’ve left every conceivable sex partner in the midwest (except for Ellie, natch) and am happily attached. I’m certainly not blameless either. I’ve contributed to my fair share of incestuousness and have turned perfectly good friendships into ridiculous flings that ended horribly for everyone. Maybe I resent the fact that the love lives of queer women resemble the smallest, stupidest game of spin the bottle ever, where the bottle doesn’t even spin, it just rocks back and forth a little because everyone has stopped playing and are fucking each other already.
Urban Dictionary has a better name for it: Friendcest
One of the great phrases to describe the fuck-upity-ness of cross-boundry, inter-friendship ‘relating’
FRIENDCEST – Dating friends, dating your friends friends. You already like them… your friends already like them, so why not……. fuck it all up?”
Of course, I don’t exclude straight people from friendcesting their lives away, but typically their fun stops once college ends. Unless you’re polyamorous, but I’m not gonna go there…again. At this juncture.
Grace the Spot thinks the reason friendcest is so prevalent is to due our emotional nature:
Lesbians are by nature highly emotional people. Chalk it up to the overwhelming abundance of estrogen. More often than not, “dating” doesn’t just mean movies, dinner, and hopefully a full body workout between the sheets. It’s a bare one’s soul level of connection which renders both parties unable to just cut their losses and walk away once the relationship heads south of the border. And this, of course, leads to an entourage full of exes.
While I don’t buy into any argument that hinges on estrogen, I can’t deny that as I’ve gotten gayer, the more exes I’ve kept around for friendships. This is partially due to the aforementioned habit of sleeping with all my friends. After a while, I ran out and was forced to throw some water on the burning bridges of yesterfuck. This mostly works, as long as a lot of time has passed since you dated/slept together, and in my case, if they are very, very forgiving. Also, the queer “community” is essentially the population-size of a crowded bar. So of course there’s going to be overlap, but at some point down the road, the inter-connectivity and over-sharing ceases to be amusing. The tweet from Ty was one of those straw-that-broke-the-dildo-strap moments where typing in all-caps seemed to be THE ONLY WAY TO EMOTE! But then I think, why? Why do I care? All my basic needs are being met: food, shelter, sex, prescription drugs, IKEA furniture. So why does it matter that a random hook up of mine is now dating someone who has a minuscule connection to myself and people I care about?
It doesn’t. The end.
This post doesn’t have a point or conclusion. I’ve just been reading about CSS for like eight hours a day for the past week and then I watched the season finale of The Bachelor and therefore needed to make sure I could still form sentences. I can…haz sentencez?
In conclusion, if anyone has tips on the best resources for learning how to build websites, plz 2 halp me. Dreamweaver is a constant battle, but I do have the software. Books? Classes? Great websites? Any recommendations would be helpful. I’ve been learning a lot from CSS-Tricks and Smashing Magazine, but those are kind of advanced-ish and some of it reads like, well, code, aka what balancing your checkbook would look like if typed by a flock of rabid pigeons.
Related:
I don’t have any advice for your website dilemmas.
BUT, I do think the world of the queer and the world of the polyamorous have very similar problems…uh, I mean situations. I agree though, this friendcest stuff gets so ridiculous and causes a lot of unnecessary drama- much of which I’ve worked hard to catapult from my life these past few months. I think it does have to do with difficulty in meeting people of the same orientation and lifestyle- but also, we just like to get into everyone’s business and try it out. Or not let go of people because “they’re still good people!”…just not necessarily good for us. Hard lesson learned.
i agree. there are a lot of overlaps in the queer/poly community, even more so if you’re queer AND poly, which is why probably why I went monog 🙂
You have to admit though, moving across the country helps…for awhile at least 😉
I think that the friendcest situation is mostly one of convenience, especially if its all about sex and Not necessarily relationships. Are you really all that close to your gay friends? In that respect, it is probably the same for all types of people who want to gt laid. It is usually not much deeper than that.
moving across the country definitely helps…for a while