E-Friends

I have this friend. Well, maybe "friend" is an exaggeration of the relationship. Let's say he's this guy I know. Sort of. (I mean, he's definately a guy. The "sort of" applied to the "I know" part of that sentence) For the last few months, we have been having an e-flirty sort of email and msn "thing". It started with emails from him about innocuous subjects and these would go back and forth for a while, with the flirtation building up slowly. For about a month the back-and-forth emailing went on all day long at work (shh... ). Then, after the flirtation had sort of escalated, he started to cut back on the emailing. There are still times when we have back-and-forth days, but not very often anymore.

The funny thing is, when he comes on msn in the evening or weekends, if I say anything to him he answers once or twice and then quickly goes offline.

It's like having a friendship (a real face-to-face friendship) with a guy tank after there has been flirtation. Except that it's all virtual. I don't know if he's worried that I thought there was more to it than what it was (which is often what is going on when guys are that way about a real face-to-face situation), but the complete unwillingness to communicate with me outside of the workday hours kind of makes me laugh.

I enjoyed the email conversations, it gave me something to do at work while wading through ever building mountains of paper, but I never for one minute thought there was more there. Boys. Dumb. Really.

This experience has really magnified something in my life, however. It has been a long time since I have had good guy friends in my life. Or any guy friends. Or guys for that matter. Most of my co-workers are guys, but I don't think that counts, since we have no contact aside from work. The last time I had a good guy friend, the friendship sort of ended when he announced one day that he didn't think we could ever be anything more than just friends. Which came as an enormous surprise to me, since I didn't realize he was considering the issue. Also, ironically it was HIM who scaled back the actual friendship and eventually dropped out of my life. Good thing we WERE "just friends". haha. hmm.

So, what am I trying to say? Not much. Just that I miss having guy friends. I tend to find it easier and more comfortable to be friends with guys: none of the competitive, snarky type of stuff that can happen with women friends. Plus, they don't roll their eyes if I want to watch the game rather than go out shopping.