Women Are Too Emotional To Handle Friends With Benefits Relationships: Fact vs. Fiction

 This article was written by an anonymous guest blogger:

Lately I was doing some research involving relationships and I kept coming across articles where it talks of how women ALWAYS expect relationships from men, especially if the relationship began casually, and many articles of women asking how they can make a guy want to be in a relationship with them. While I absolutely abhor articles like these that paint women to be manipulative and emotionally needy, I came across a few articles that took the cake. I actually consider myself to be a woman who thinks and behaves outside the manipulative and emotionally needy box, which have actually caused a lot of my close male friends over the years to say that I approach dating like a guy. I actually don't believe that to be the case, but I do believe that I handle dating seriously if someone introduces themselves as a possible love interest, but if I have a friend or associate that I have chemistry with, I will treat that more care-free and may partake in a friends with benefits relationship. Now I wrote that to state that the articles I had a problem with the most were about why women get involved in friend with benefits relationships, and what it must mean about the women.

First off, I would like to debunk the myth that casual relationships cannot become serious. In fact, the only relationship I've ever been in stemmed from a friends with benefits situation. BUT I must state that  the difference between that relationship and other friend with benefits relationships is that in building my friendship with my now ex boyfriend, he realized there were a lot of things he liked about me, and he had decided in the back of his mind, before we had ever had sex, that he was going to try and win me over, AND he did just that. So when I say this, I am not saying women should hold out to hope that a guy will one day want to be more than friends who just sleep together, I am pointing out that if a casual relationship is to progress, the decision to do so will most likely be made by the man, and probably right before or after sex has been introduced into the relationship. So if you're into the friends with benefits relationship for longer than a month (2 at the most) and the guy hasn't even hinted at a relationship, just know that it is going nowhere. The moral of this story: as a woman, do not go into a friends with benefits relationship hoping for more, because the decision to upgrade is not made by you.

The second myth I would like to debunk is that women who enter friend with benefits relationships must be easy or trying to overcompensate for their emotional neediness. Now I cannot speak for all women but I know that for some women who are like me, the reason we enter friend with benefits relationships is because of......SEX. It really is not that complicated. Women have physical needs just like men. Just because we haven't found prince charming or our soul mate, or our one true love, or whatever society and Disney told us women we need to seek from a young age to feel complete in life does not mean that our sexual organs and hormones that stimulate sexual arousal are hibernating until we find the guy of our dreams. NO! They are still fully awake and want to be used. That is the allure of friends with benefits. You haven't found the person you want to be with, but yet you have someone that you're comfortable with who can fulfill your sexual needs. Women tend to involve themselves with one friends with benefits relationship at a time, and usually if they're a rational woman, it's with someone they've probably friend zoned long time ago so that the guy knows she doesn't really think of him in that way. These guys know you. They know what you like. And you're comfortable to the point where you can openly express what you like and don't like sexually in an open and blunt way that doesn't cause weird complications. So women who do this, aren't just going around sleeping with any and everybody, its someone they know and trust, and these relationships can last for quite some time if it remains casual, as in once in a while over an everyday thing. And to debunk the part that women engage in these relationships to overcompensate their emotional neediness, I am not going to lie and say that many women do not enter these relationships hoping for more, but what I will say is that there are some women who look to friend with benefits relationships not because they are lonely, but because they want to be intimate, but yet not have to deal with all of the responsibilities of a relationship. For instance, if you are the high powered woman of today's society, you may not have all the time in the world to dote on a guy, stroke his ego, stay up half the night to deal with his emotional baggage that he's suppressed since childhood because society tells men to suck up their feelings, and all that jazz. But that does not mean we as women don't still like to cuddle and have sex. We just also like the freedom of getting up and leaving after. Not all of us want to stay and try to get you to open up to us, and fix you breakfast in bed, and leave clothing at your house so that we have an excuse to come back. Not all of us are emotionally needy and are lying about being cool with being casual.

The third and last myth that I would like to debunk is that all friends with benefits relationships tend to end because women cannot separate emotions from sex, and so she will always want to get a relationship out of it. From my experiences this is a false perception. The reason I state so is because while women are more emotional than men, that does not mean that they are the only ones who have emotions. Many men may not want to commit, but a lot of men involved with friend with benefits relationships tend to blur the lines between just friends and relationship. A lot of guys like to do all the relationship activities, get jealous easily, and make ambiguous statements about their feelings toward the woman they're involved with, then later wonder why she wanted to be a girlfriend. I feel like many friend with benefits relationships should be casual, and if they start to be more than casual well then the two parties involved need to have a conversation about the rules and guidelines they need set up so that unintentional feelings fail to grow from the women involved. Now that's one side to the puzzle.

The other side to the puzzle are men's emotions. Men get involved with many casual relationships and usually in doing so, they come across  a lot of women who are yearning for a relationship. Men know how to prepare for this and evade this. What men fail to handle well though, are women who got into the friend with benefits relationship for the same reason that they did and are less prone to take their actions filled with mixed signals into serious consideration. I'm not sure why but men's feelings then begin to grow. Usually not to point where they will commit (though still some do) but usually to a point where they expect to be the only special person in your life and want you two to act like a couple but without actually being committed to each other through a relationship. And many times they will deeply consider the relationship (multiple times), but for some reason they'll look at the fact that the woman has not once mentioned the idea of being in a relationship with them as a sign that she would reject them (which if you're a girl who got into this kind  of  relationship for the right reasons you most likely will; he was not boyfriend material in your eyes). And so at times, guys can do little things out of harbored anger and resentment from not feeling good enough to either try to make you jealous, or to get back at you in some weird way. When this happens, or they actually do ask for a relationship and you deny their request, the friendship is basically over. If you try to maintain it, it may very well turn into a competition of who can piss the other one off more each time you meet and exchange rude remarks. In most of my friends with benefits relationship, it usually ended because the guy ended up catching feelings, which left him either heartbroken or full of anger and resentment. So no it is not always women's faults friends with benefits relationships can end horribly. It can also be the guy's.

So those are my thoughts on women and friends with benefits relationships. What are your thoughts and experiences?