"You are too important to allow the unstable variable of lust to enter the equation"

"I know. I know. I don't give into it, or allow it to ruin what we have."

"But why would you want those shallow things, the things that would push you farther away from me than the physical distance between us now?"

I wanted to tell her what I meant, what my heart cried out to tell her.
But it wasn't the thing to say, not now, maybe not ever. Silence ensues.

"What we have is important to me... it is such a rare thing. Upsetting this is not worth it, no matter what good may come of it."

more silence

"You have a life there. I belong here."

Xochitl: i've never understood how anyone can use physical distance as an excuse from love

"If you love me, then love me."

She kissed me gently, just once, then walked away crying.

Unfortunately, I'm familiar with this. I know the rest of you are as well, but bear with me here. I've found, in my numerous but usually abortive attempts at relationships, that women tend to sort men into three major categories based on level of sexual interest or desirability. Let's call them fuckspace, friendspace, and freakspace, for lack of other similarly cute terms. (recently, I've discovered in myself evidence that men do this as well, but that's a different writeup. I'm also told that married men fall into another category entirely, but, being a college student, I don't have too much contact with such things) Fuckspace is defined as a state in which intercourse with the man in question is considered to be at least an interesting possibility, friendspace is more or less self-explanatory, and freakspace is defined as "creepy" or some variant thereof.

Anyway.

A man can start out in any one of these categories, based on first impression. Fuckspace and friendspace appear to be the most common for our hypothetical, randomly generated man, although it's certainly possible for him to appear completely unappealing to a woman immediately after meeting her. It's very easy for him to slide downward from fuckspace to friendspace, or down from friendspace to freakspace, based on his actions or shifts in his habits. It's nearly impossible for him to climb upwards from friendspace to fuckspace, and once he gets into freakspace he's just plain screwed. Not in a good way.

Here's the ass-kicker. Strong non-sexual relationships tend to drag relationships into friendspace. Even if our man started out in fuckspace, after a few months of non-sexual social interaction, he's doomed to be just friends with the associated woman for all eternity. This has happened in more of my relationships than I care to count.

Why does this happen? I basically have no idea, although my running hypothesis is that strong nonsexual friendship creates sisterly associations in the woman that make sexual ones impossible. Men's minds, or at least mine, don't seem to work the same way, for some reason. Maybe they do, and I'm just not perceptive enough to notice. I honestly don't know.

The moral? Don't get in a platonic relationship with a woman you're sexually interested in. It's just not a good idea. Female noders, feel free to explain the other side of this equation.