The Nebulous Phase
by the Dating Diva
March 9, 2001

Saturday was to be the night. After six months of torture I was finally going to demand that Jason tell me what he wanted from me. Six months of his being my friend. Six months of constant phone calls and e-mails. Six months of regular visits to each other. Visits where we would share a bed. A single bed. Not as in "one bed," but as in "one-quarter the size of a King." As in, it was hard not to touch. And yet, somehow, we didn't.

Six months of his steadfastly refusing to make any move on me whatsoever.

I was twenty and he was coming for the weekend to be my date at a dance. After consulting with 50 of my closest girlfriends, we came up with a plan of action. Friday night he was off the hook--accosting him mere hours after his arrival would be too abrupt. But Saturday, after a glass of champagne at the dance, Saturday I would pounce. Saturday was to be the night.

Jason, perhaps with some boy's sixth-sense of an impending Evil Discussion, managed to save himself from the pouncing. At the eleventh hour--Saturday morning--he finally took action and kissed me.

And thank God. I couldn't have survived another minute of that torment.

Two years into the relationship (and unaware that he was going to break my heart into elentybillion pieces within weeks--but that's another story) I was talking to someone about the misery he had put me through and realized we would never have made it so far if we hadn't put in that time as friends first.

I had a crush on him from moment one. First sight. One of those really intense crushes that leave you nervous, stammering, and trying to figure out how it is that you were an interesting person not just 15 minutes ago before he entered the room while now you are the stupidest clod on the face of the earth. But six months later, it was better. I didn't have a clue what the nature of our relationship was, but I did know one thing--he liked me. Whatever else we were, we were genuinely friends. And that made me confident enough to not be nervous around him.

It turns out that his finally making a move was directly related to the fact that II had stopped acting like a skittish school girl. He told me this that night. Denied of my planned Discussion, I had at least demanded to know what he'd been thinking. Ok, I didn't demand. After working up my nerve for hours, I finally managed to say in the softest, least aggressive voice possible, "um, what changed?" So, maybe I wasn't as confident as I'm pretending. . .

The point is that after that first friends-into-lots-more transition, I learned to value that interim phase. Somehow when you have a crush on a friend, you want to know right now, this second, exactly what your status is. You just get so impatient. You want to force the relationship into a box, any box. (Choose one: 1.We will start dating. 2. We will not start dating. 3. We will not start dating and I have now forever wrecked the friendship.) Somehow you believe that if only you knew what your status was it would all be ok. But that's not true.

If you can learn to relax a little--enough so that being in a nebulous hmm-are-we-friends-or-heading-for-something-bigger phase doesn't make you totally miserable--that phase is worth stretching out. For one thing, it's actually fun--you're flirting and you're excited. That stage of a relationship always ends far too soon, and it's nice to prolong it as much as possible. Second, you're cementing the friendship. Once you do start dating you've got a rock hard foundation to build on. And lastly, going slowly improves your chances of even getting to the dating part. If I'd cornered Jason when we first met he would have told me he wasn't interested in me for reasons I couldn't control. (Her name was Beatrice. She was from France. She had a little French accent. How could I compete with that? But that's also another story.) Once we got to know each other, though, everything started to click.

Basically, your best shot at turning a friendship into something more is always going to be patience. Don't wait forever, mind you--witness my oh-so-bold six-month stand with Jason--but getting to know each other before you get into the pressures of bonafide coupledom can often be the best thing that happened to a relationship.

A year after the great Jason heartbreaking episode, I was sitting in a bar with T.J., a guy I'd been friends with for quite some time. Our relationship had recently gotten increasingly flirtatious. I loved being around him and was definitely attracted to him, but I was enjoying the giddiness so much I wasn't quite ready to move on to the next step. He asked me what I thought was going on between us. I said we seemed precariously poised on a knife edge where we would eventually have to fall off on one side or the other: friends or beaux.

We looked at each other and almost simultaneously said, "You know what? Let's keep it that way for awhile."

When we started dating several months later, he left Jason in the dust.