The Friend With Benefits

In our parents' time things were simpler. You lived near where you grew up, your TV only had one channel and there were only three relationship status: single, in a relationship and married.

But alas! Times are a changing. I live 5000 miles from where I was born, I can barely navigate a cable TV guide due to the number of channels available and there is now a plethora of possible relationship statuses that I can be in.

Each type of relationship comes with it a certain set of actions that you and your partner can engage in. Single friends hang out. Booty calls hook up. Open relationships hook up with others. People in a relationship engage say things like "us" and "our" and celebrate trifle things such as anniversaries and each other's birthdays. Most relationship labels are self-explanatory when it comes to what you can and can not do.

There is one relationship type, however, that is completely undefined: The Friend With Benefits (FWB).

FWB's lie somewhere on the spectrum between booty calls and relationships. A FWB is not a booty call because they know things about you that booty calls might now know. You also generally like your FWB in a friendly way because, well, a FWB is initially a friend (a friend that at some point you were both drunk enough to start hooking up). But a FWB is NOT your girlfriend/boyfriend. It is not ok to start planning romantic getaways with a FWB, you and your FWB do NOT have an anniversary and you do NOT have joint-ownership of anything.

Calibrating you and your FWB's position on the Spectrum of Love (yes I called it the spectrum of love and when you read it in your mind elongate the o in love and make it sound cheesy) is often a difficult task and can threaten the underlying friendship on which the benefits are based. Be honest with your FWB, you have nothing to lose. Talk about what you want from this FWBness. You can probably be more honest with your FWB than you can one day with a true significant other.

Also, I encourage all people to collect FWB's. I have 1000 Facebook friends (yes yes I am super popular). Assuming a 50-50 split between genders that leaves 500 female friends. Subtracting family members and ugly people that leaves me with about a few hundred hot, unrelated to me, female friends. All of these are potential FWB's. If men and women truly can't be just friends, as Sensational described in Just Friends?, then be Friends with Benefits. It's like having your cake and eating it too! Except your cake is sex.