Healthy Sex Support Group
This community is dedicated to an open discussion about healthy sex and sharing thoughts and feelings about sexuality and improving one's sex life. Most active adults desire to have an active and fulfilling sex life, both for themselves and also their partner. Here we discuss common sexual challenges faced by both men and women.
sex with a best friend who wasn't your SO. Would that change the relationship you have with him/her?
Would they still be your best friend?
Would they still be your best friend?
>chuckle<
seriously Bob --
I've had lots of FWBs. There are many criteria for FWB that have to be present for FWB relationships to work and not make the friendship awkward or leave someone hurt.
In my experience at least, I couldn't have sex with a "best" friend, because that implies that person is pretty involved in my life. So if you take that and combine it with changing expectations that often accompany sexualizing a relationship, it can alter the way you respond to that person. For example, conversations you would normally have can take on a different significance. This can be compounded if it's someone you talk to often. I would avoid sexualizing "best friends" since to me, especially considering that my family of origin relationships were lacking in many ways, a best friend IS family. That would feel incestuous.
My successful FWB's were people who were friends but who were not deeply involved in my life. Some of them started as friends and we would start fooling around if any chemistry arose, but it didn't create discomfort because we had a mutual sense that we weren't one another's dating "types".
With others, it started out as a sexual or even dating relationship, but as it developed we realized that there was no love connection or desire to be romantic. Although we liked each other and enjoyed one another's company, we realized that the relationship was basically already friends having sex. This was often followed by a period of not having sex but remaining friends, although we would find that sometimes there was still chemistry there, and if we were in the mood, we would occasionally have sex.
In both cases, these were people I didn't see too often. We would keep in touch but our lives were pretty separate, and when we did get together socially, sometimes it was just to chat and catch up. In other words we felt no pressure to connect sexually every time we saw each other. When we would have sex, it was generally out of boredom or horniness. I stress again the point though of not feeling pressure to be sexual with one another. There is a level of comfort we have in this understanding, and I have never really run into any problems with it.
Actually, I'd say we've gotten alot closer as friends since we ended that phase of our relationship (in the "seeing other people" sense, not the "never sleep together again" sense). We've occasionally played around since then, but I wouldn't say it's had any real effect on our relationship. I love her, and she loves me, and we like having fun occasionally, but all the same, our relationship is more like platonic than romantic love.