The Non-Gay Man Chain of Friendship

I once had a friend tell me that if he was a woman he would marry me. At first I found this "compliment" a bit disturbing for a few reasons which I won't bore you with.

It was not long after that revelation that he was telling me about a good friend of his who was going to visit. He described how they were a great complement to each other's personalities and that if he (the visiting friend) was a woman, he would marry him.

After I heard this, I started to wonder why in one friendship he was the woman and in the other he was the man. I didn't bother to ask, but still I wondered.

All the facts having been considered, I believe that it was just a way of defining each friends status in the relationship where gender was taking the place of a more socially acceptable ranking system. It was sort of like when I called another guy "Jennifer" because he didn't know how to string ethernet cable through a suspended ceiling. I was indicating his "little girliness" at stringing cable. Just a note to everyone who wonders, you don't push it, you roll it in a loose ball and throw it.

Some people have a family structure that they assign friends to, a mother, father, children and sometimes even extended family members. They relate to these people as having these same family roles in their friendships.

Personally, I've often found it a bit disconcerting when when someone would call me "friend" and then even more so when I was referred to as "best friend", so when "husband" was implied I was quite a bit taken aback. But I'm not really *too* disturbed by people making overtures of friendship anymore. I've gone from being fed-Up with People, to being tolerant of their seemingly haphazard methods of defining relationships.

So, I do have friends, and I am married to an actual woman, so hopefully that will preclude any possibility of marriage to a non-gay man-wife.

If we were equals

What’s in a name if we’re all the same and we don’t know the good from the bad? And why should we care who they fry in the chair? If everyone’s evil, should any feel sad? But if it’s really true that I’m better than you, and smarter and much better bred, then even your own validation of my superior creation would be yet another occasion for dispensing unto you my heartiest mockeries.