My best friend is a boy

Image by the brilliant Stuart F Taylor

My best friend is a boy. We sit together in pub gardens in the freezing cold, fishing weird white bits out of cold pints of cheap scrumpy. We laugh at each other, and ourselves. We fight over whose round it is because we always think the other is more skint than they’re letting on.

And when people find out that he’s a boy they ask some version of this: ‘so have you fucked?’

My best friend is a bloke. I sit beside him in the front seat of his clapped-out car and we sing along to bands that he’s seen live fifty-six times. Sometimes I light cigarettes for him, or open cans of Coke. Sometimes he lets me use the pump when we stop at a petrol station. His car is filled with crisp packets, fag ash, empty bottles and the smell of Glastonbury, and gently teasing him about it is one of the best bits of the journey.

We have fun, the two of us. We have a lot of fun.

And people say ‘so have you fucked?’

My best friend wasn’t always my best friend. I used to avoid him, because I was cruel and self-absorbed and shallow and seventeen. And though we never had a conversation about being friends – a formal one, where one of us issued a gold-lettered invitation to the other that said ‘will you be my bestie?’ – I can tell you exactly when I first realised I wanted to be his.

It was a rainy weekday in 2002 and I was chain-smoking to mark the time. Not pass – mark. I was between classes at college, and I didn’t have a watch or a phone. I didn’t have a coat either. Or friends. Or anywhere to be for two hours. A double free period during which all I could do was sit and read and stare at the rain. I sat on a bench under a tree near my college, getting dripped on, and waiting for time to pass.

I am not going to go into why I was so lonely – that isn’t a story I want to tell. All you need to know, really, is that I was achingly, horribly lonely. This time – around eighteen months of it – all looks the same in my memories. Me, sitting on a bench, reading and smoking to mark the passage of time. Endless hours of it. Wrapped in hoodies, getting drizzled on or windswept or shivering and gritting my teeth. Eating Greggs pasties and sometimes crying but mostly trying to put a defiant look on my face as I sat on my bench and pretended it was where I wanted to be.

Lonely. Cold. Lonely. Wet. Lonely.

And one day, by chance, he rode past me on his bike – did a double-take and made a beeline straight for me. I didn’t even notice him until he announced:

“Hey!”

I looked him up and down, pulled my face into a defiant expression and replied:

“Hey.”

“What are you doing here in the rain?”

I didn’t go into detail. Didn’t tell him how lonely I was. Just explained that I had nowhere else to go, then made a face that said ‘leave me alone.’

He didn’t. Instead, he sat down and started chatting. Telling me silly stories from his day, and the crappy job he was holding down while I was busy chain-smoking on a bench. By the end of our conversation I knew him a little better, and I managed to crack a smile.

“Why did you come and sit with me?” I asked him. “You don’t know me that well – you could have just left.”

He shrugged. Stared at the rain that was by now dripping on both of us and just said:

“You looked like you needed a friend.”

My best friend is a guy, and he has always been there for me. When we’ve been thousands of miles apart he’s emailed me gossip and jokes and pictures. When we’ve lived in the same house he’s come barreling in from work with a crate of cider and a story to crack me up.

When I mention him in passing or relate funny things ‘my best mate’ has said, people often reply with ‘she sounds cool.’ And I don’t always bother to correct them, because if I do I know what they will ask:

Have you fucked?

He’s been my best friend through countless trials and traumas: advised me on relationships and ribbed me for one-night stands. He’s meted out the same style of cheerful, geeky kindness to all my boyfriends and lovers: the ones who didn’t like him as well as the ones who did.

And every guy I’ve known has asked me: so have you fucked?

My best friend is a dude. He is kind and caring and loving and selfless. He has teased, encouraged, and inspired me to be a better person than I was when we first knew each other. He’s irritatingly chirpy, bad at admitting when he’s sad, reckless and argumentative and usually incredibly drunk. He’s funny, and generous, and when I’m hungover he brings me double-cheeseburgers, and when you ask how he takes his coffee he’ll respond with ‘surprise me!’ He makes me laugh and he makes me feel seventeen and he tries to make me come out dancing on a weekday and I love him I love him I love him.

But how and why I love him doesn’t matter. Nor does the loneliness and the bench and the grim, rainy weekday. Nor all the times he’s held me while I cried or helped me when I’m struggling or made me laugh or driven me up the wall. The nights we’ve spent together sharing a bed or a bottle of vodka or a screaming row about politics: they don’t really matter either.

Because my best friend is a boy.

So have we fucked?

 

 

This blog post was inspired by a massive discussion on Twitter today sparked by this tweet from Oloni. There is a tonne of stuff I want to talk about surrounding friendship, gender and sex, so this blog post will likely be the first of a few on this topic. I have many, many thoughts on straight female/male close friendships, because mine is so important to me. It will always be important to me, and that importance has little to do with whether or not we’ve fucked.

16 Comments

  • SweetTheSting says:

    That’s lovely.

  • This is a superb piece of writing – makes me kinda jealous I didn’t write it

  • Tom F says:

    Probably the biggest thing I miss is having platonic female friends.

  • Hell's Belle says:

    This is awesome. I have lots of male friends, probably something to do with being bullied by girls when I was a kid so I played football with the boys instead. All of them are great and I couldn’t be without them. Big thanks to one of them especially who kept me sane through a few difficult years recently and got me into reading this site! :)

  • CK says:

    My best friend is a boy. I love the very bones of him and he knows everything about me. He loves me right back in a beautiful way. But have we fucked? Not even with yours mate :)

  • Sgt. Shadwell says:

    Long time reader, first time poster. Felt compelled to comment:

    Absolutely lovely. Smiled all the way through this.

  • SpaceCaptainSmith says:

    Wow, that sounds like some friendship!

    I think the only friends I’ve got who are that close are my siblings. Er… we have not fucked.

  • Jo says:

    My best friend is a guy as well; I’ve never gotten the “Have you fucked?” question because he’s married… but I have been told by people that our friendship is “inappropriate” because a married man shouldn’t be that close to an unmarried woman, which I find equally aggravating and ridiculous!

  • Chee says:

    What a lovely read.
    I could see that the text on my screen ended at “So Have we fucked?”, and all the while reading, I was thinking about the comment I knew I wanted to write, something to the tone of “it would have been an amazing, moving post even if you hadn’t answered the question”. Then as I reached the bottom of my screen, seconds before I scrolled down, I thought “How awesome would it be if she didn’t answer at all?”
    I’m glad I scrolled.

  • Vida says:

    What a lucky (and clearly loveable) woman you are, to be so loved.

  • Paul says:

    My best friend is a girl and people often make the same kind of comments, I was accused of having an affair with her, and someone even said to me that I was looking to have sex with her. We love each other but as friends nothing more.
    Men and women can be friends but it takes the right kind of man and woman to make it work.

  • Oh, I hear you. I tend to have more male friends than female and I always get that ‘knowing’ look, the ‘ooooh, one of you fancies the other one’ look. Urgh. My bestie is a guy. He lives on the other side of the Atlantic and we’ve met in reality but once. And as I told the boarder control dude at Fort Worth that I was there for the weekend to see my best friend for the first time ever and he didn’t even know he asked ‘And your husband’s okay with that?’
    So yeah, I hear you.

    Oh and my heart melted a little when I read about the rainy ‘needed a friend’ moment. What an awesome bestie you have. :)

  • Phillip says:

    I don’t have a lot of friends and if they think about it most people don’t. I have always liked women much more than men. Sometimes I ask myself why, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. When I started High School I was lost. I mean really lost. It was so foreign. Everyone was physically larger and I didn’t know many of them. Maybe I knew two or three. There was also Hazing. I was very depressed and lonely. We had guns there and I found myself on very thin ice. Then I ran into the girl who lived next door and she and about six of her female friends SAVED MY LIFE. This may sound odd to you, but they said that they were adopting me. Sort of like a puppy. They became the family that I never really had. They would never judge me or tell me that I was going in the wrong direction. They helped me with school. I never had a sexual bonding with almost any of them. The one who became my girlfriend when I was a junior. I loved them all and still do. Especially Dianne. Especially. I don’t know where they are and I haven’t seen them since High School ended and I left for California. Lately I am thinking that was a mistake and that I should have stayed home with my friends.

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