Whatcha doin?  This is the quintessential text message that is present in every single ‘Friends With Benefits’ relationship.  It’s casual, and usually comes after 9pm to my phone.  I had one of those, early on in 2019.  He was chauvinistic and macho, the type of person you look back on and say hmmm. that was interesting.  Whatcha doin feels very different than Happy Tuesday! Hope your day is going great so far 🙂 . Ryan knew how to give The Boyfriend Experience.

I met Ryan in July of 2019.  He was quite different than Mark in a lot of ways. He wasn’t chauvinistic, he was polite and gentle and kind and I was never left feeling like he was working on a self-serving mission.

The Boyfriend Experience. It’s kind of like the sophisticated big-brother of Friends with Benefits.  Instead of the low-class meet-ups after dark, it was dinners and cute phone messages and hugs. It was lots of talking and sharing memories. It was picnics and hikes. It was all during prime time.  Ultimately, though, it was a long term arrangement, not a long term commitment.

Ryan, just like Mark, didn’t have any real intentions of inserting me into his actual life. I was never going to be introduced to friends or family.  It’s almost like having a hobby.  I was his “me time”.  Ryan was certainly next level sophisticated when it came to The Boyfriend Experience though because he would always cook us great meals, he could set a table like a champ and he even used cloth napkins….although he was just a cloth napkin kind of guy.

I spent over three months dating Ryan and one cool day in October, I ended up breaking it off with him.  We had scheduled a date for that evening and I realized that I just didn’t have it in me.  I didn’t actually care enough to arrange for a sitter and drive out to Bolton. We had a couple of conversations in the past about relationships and what we are looking for and we knew we weren’t quite looking for the same thing and I decided at this point that anything that benefited either of us had been exhausted in those three months.  It wasn’t going to grow or go anywhere, so why invest further time?

‘How do you know it’s not going to go anywhere if you don’t stick around????’ my friend looked at me like I was crazy.  I seemed so content.  Guess what? Content isn’t the same as happy.