I asked my former lover how to make friends with benefits work

“If it’s not fun, nix it immediately.”

Every time someone tells me they’re entering into a friends-with-benefits situation, the alarm bells go off. It can be fun, but it’s risky business. Usually, at least one person is destined to get their feelings hurt, or they’ll end up falling madly in love in a corny romance novel type of way. Usually, but not always.

I had a friends-with-benefits scenario for two years and when I look back on that time, I’m infinitely grateful for it. I had just moved to a new, nightmarishly cold city where I knew almost no one. We met through my housemates then we went back to his place after some frat party. I made fun of him for reading Infinite Jest and I guess it did the trick. 

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Once every week or two, I’d walk five blocks in the snow to his place. We didn’t hang out outside of his house for the whole first year. I remember one morning, right before I left for the summer, we got breakfast and sat in the park. It was the first time I’d ever seen daylight on his face. 

The next year, we decided to be real-world friends, doing normal things like eating ramen and seeing bands. After my second year of university, I dropped out and left the city. We hugged goodbye on the corner. I haven’t been back for five years, but we still talk on the phone sometimes.

We reminisce about that era, how scrappy and chaotic things were, and laugh about whatever’s happening now. He’s one of the only people from that time in my life I still talk to. Even though I’m still sceptical about the concept of friends with benefits, the experience I had was genuinely nice. To try and figure out how we made it work so well, I gave him a call. 

“I hope you’re ready for the real shit. Let’s go,” says the man in question, who asked to be referred to in this piece as ‘Ron Caliente’. “I think there’s inherently an embarrassing quality of, for lack of a better word, friends with benefits,” he tells me.

“It fails most of the time, so it’s seen as juvenile. I think every time someone says that that’s what they’re in, everyone else is kind of laughing at the idea that they think they could pull it off. It’s a very arrested development, ‘It might work for us’ kind of thing.”

Despite this, he agrees it did work for us, most of the time. I’ll be honest, I definitely had a few dark moments creeping the girls he was dating on Instagram and trying to imagine them together. There were even phases where we took breaks from having sex, although we kept hanging out and having ‘platonic sleepovers’ (I blame the cold). But through it all, I was always comfortable talking to him about how I really felt.

“I think it ebbed and flowed in how well it worked. I don’t think it was consistent,” he says. “As to why it worked, I think we just genuinely liked each other, I think that’s a big part of it. I also think because we had very different life paths moving into the future, I don’t know if there was ever a real future for a relationship there, so we were always running up against that if we ever wanted to be something more intense.”

I always planned on leaving; he was always going to stay. The impossible nature of the relationship prevented us from having to consider what it would be in the long term – there was always a graceful exit not too far off. We agree other factors helped as well: being young and unwilling to settle down, living close to each other, not being particularly jealous people. But the biggest part was that we just got along well.

“Here’s your big pull quote from me: it has to be friends. That part has to be very seriously considered. You have to be actually friends for real as opposed to just two people who really want to fuck a lot,” he tells me. ‘“If it’s not fun, nix it immediately. Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.

“I just think it’s really important if you want this to work, one of you needs to almost die. That will really strengthen the relationship,” he adds.

He’s referring to a time when I saw a gang shooting a few streets over from his house. I called him freaking out and he made me soup and stroked my hair until I calmed down. He’s kind of joking, but not really. That was when I realised it was for real, and we’d be friends for good.

“So what do we have then? Proximity, near-death experiences and leaving the country?” I ask. “I guess we shouldn’t be the bastions of guidance on this subject because it was a bit of a wild ride.”

He laughs. “But in a way, aren’t all relationships a wild ride? Isn’t that what you learn over your lifetime?”

“It’s true, and it was good. It was really good,” I reply.

“It was great,” he says.

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