Page 68 of For You & No One Else (Say Everything 3)

Seventeen

Untitled Book Because Titles Are Hard

By Eliza Catalano

Chapter 4

TheWhen Harry Met SallyDilemma

We all know the premise of the movieWhen Harry Met Sally. Harry believes that (straight) men and women can’t be friends without the sex stuff getting in the way. Sally believes that’s ridiculous and that, of course, they can be friends.

I’ve always been a Sally in this debate. I’ve had guy friends throughout my life. I could be friends with them, think they were objectively attractive, and not have any interest in sleeping with them or making the relationship into something more. Honestly, it didn’t even seem like a debate to me. However, a few weeks into this off-line dating experiment, I find myself considering this issue from a different angle.

What of the friends-with-benefits setup?

This dynamic has been around forever. It’s not something new or a concept I’d never heard of. I hadn’t personally gone down the friends-with-benefits road with anyone—hadn’t ever been tempted to, honestly. But I’ve had friends who have, and clients as well. I thought I had no judgment about it. However, recently, when I started to look more closely at this idea, I realized I had some preconceived notions.

Maybe because I’ve watched too many rom-coms in my life, I assumed that in the friends-with-benefits dynamic, at least one person was secretly in love with the other and was using the agreement as a guise, hoping the relationship would turn into more. Embarrassingly, I also had a bias that it was usually the woman who had these feelings.Hey there, internalized misogyny, how you doin’, girl?

I think this is part of the reason why I never considered trying this kind of relationship myself. I didn’t want to be that hopeless woman in love while some guy friend just saw me as a convenient way to get laid. This seemed like a particularly painful way to get your heart broken because you can’t even blame the other person when it ends. You signed up for it. You just didn’t hold up your end of the deal.

Recently, however, as I dropped the online dating and instituted the three-dates-before-intimacy rule that I mentioned in the previous chapter, this friends-with-benefits option has taken on a different light. A friend of mine, one who’s helping me with this project, mentioned the possibility early on—that we could hook up as friends if we ever wanted to. At first, it seemed like a ludicrous idea. Why would I sleep with someone who wasn’t a possible long-term partner when my very project is about finding a real relationship?

Then we had a movie night…

Eliza stopped typing, her fingers hovering over the keyboard as a smoke signal of guilt moved through her.Poof.Guilt. Should she be writing about this? She wasn’t using Beckham’s name, but he’d know it was him if this book ever saw the light of day.

“Ugh.” The grunt of disgust was loud in the quiet of her office.

She didn’t want tonotwrite about it either. After her movie night with Beckham, she’d realized what a great—sexy, amazing, mind-blowing—option the friends-with-benefits thing could be in someone’s dating life. You could keep active in the dating world, exploring the possibilities, searching for something long-term, but you could take the sex part out of it up front. If you had a friend to satisfy that physical urge already, at least until you were ready to take it to the next level with someone new, you could avoid rushing things. You wouldn’t be tempted to go home with someone too soon just because your hormones were raging.

Like tonight, she was going out with Will. She was looking forward to it, but it was also a huge relief to know that she wouldn’t have to have the should we/shouldn’t we debate with herself at the end of the date. She’d already made that decision. Three dates minimum first. And if she got the urge to do anything before that, she could call Beckham.

Beck.She sighed and leaned back in her chair, staring at her blinking cursor. She needed to think about this harder, whether she was going to write about him. She hit Save and exited the doc.

A knock on her door had her looking up. She’d left it ajar since she wasn’t in session. “Come in,” she called out.

Andi poked her head in, her hair in bouncy curls today. “You busy?”

“Nope, finished for the day.” Eliza closed her laptop. “Just killing time before my date with Will tonight. What’s up?”

Andi slipped inside the door and nearly pranced over to Eliza’s couch. “So hey!”

Eliza laughed. “Wow, someone’s had a lot of coffee today. Hey.”

Andi’s knees were bouncing. “Are you excited about your date?”

Eliza gave her a careful look, afraid Andi might burst into a cloud of caffeine or something. “Suuure.”

“Cool. Guess what?” But she didn’t give Eliza a chance to respond. “The wedding is happening!”

Eliza blinked. “What? Whose?”

“Mine!” Andi declared, a big, goofy grin on her face. She popped up like a jack-in-the-box.

“Oh my God!” Eliza stood and came around the desk to give Andi a hug. “That’s great!”

“Right?” Andi released her and plopped back down on the couch, her curls bouncing. “I mean, it’s not going to be like aweddingwedding. Our original plan was to elope, you know, just go off one weekend to some place cool and do it, but…” She flattened her hand to her chest. “When I thought about doing it with no friends around, it just didn’t feel right. Hill called me out on it. He’d figured out that it was why I was dragging my feet about picking a place.”

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