Don’t let them tell you love and friendship are different. “Love is different from friendship” is one of the biggest social lies. “Lust is different from friendship” is certainly true. But love is just a deeper form of friendship.
It seems an engrained part of the American psyche that sexual desire invariably creates trouble between differently gendered friends. (When Harry met Sally, etc.) There’s this talk of being “friendzoned.” How there has to be an air of “mystery” in love, and how that’s different from friendship.
There seems something adversarial about the way that people talk about relationships vs. the way people talk about friendships. No one calls someone an “ex-friend.”1 As if a friendship is about openness, and a relationship about manipulation.
The category “ex” always bothered me. Why does a former boy/girlfriend become a “ex” rather than a “friend”? Why not “lovers to friends”? Was Nelly Furtado being charitable with her lyrics? “Ex” has a connotation reeking of antagonism, a permanent wrong, a permanent scar. Would it take a special understanding for two people, after they’ve broken up, to call each other “friends”, rather than “ex’s”? What percentage of ex’s are connotatively ex’s?↩