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Just friends... How does that work? Oh right! No sex. |
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Written by MCT
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Wednesday, 11 October 2006 |
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 SEX! ... Read on, because that is what this is about. It is about gender and sociology, too, but come on — it all comes back to sex.
Actually, this is about the absence of sex and how that void somehow is filled with something no one can quite put their finger on when talking about platonic friendships between women and men. And yes, those friendships are possible. As long as there is no sex.
“For me, she’s a sister,” says Amadou Thiam, a former part-time Chicagoan who now splits time between Los Angeles, Brussels and Dakar, the capital of his native Senegal. “In my country, friendship relation leads to family relation. If you know somebody for 30 years ... you go through so many things in life together, and sometimes you get closer to those people than your own blood family.”
The sister in question is Ione Graves, an art enthusiast who became friends with Thiam’s brother Missine — an art dealer like Amadou — while she was living in Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1996 Amadou, who had been doing business in Chicago for more than two decades by then, had a realization: He was fascinated by Lake Michigan and the elegant Outer Drive that followed its contours. Why couldn’t he live there?
“The next thing I know,” he says, “I’ve got an apartment on Sheridan and Lake Shore.”
Amadou’s brother suggested a dinner party with his old friend Graves, a native Chicagoan, who was back living in her hometown. The brothers invited her to dinner, and a friendship was born. That was 10 years ago.
“I felt like I had known (Amadou) for a long, long time,” says Graves, who lives in Hyde Park. “We’ve never had a problem communicating. I found him to be really funny and extremely interesting. And a nice person. I could see that right away.”
 Since Amadou sold his Chicago apartment two years ago, he makes it to town only a few times a year. His most recent visit was scheduled for August so when the date neared, Graves sat down at her computer and tapped out an e-mail, asking him when he would arrive.
“I got up, walked out of my office and into the kitchen. The phone rang and it was him. I said, ‘You didn’t get my e-mail this fast, did you?’ And he hadn’t. He was just calling to say when he would be here.”
“We have that telepathy kind of relationship,” Amadou says.
He may be predisposed to being a faithful, platonic friend to women. About 90 percent of his friends are of the opposite sex, he says, although he cannot say why.
“They’ve become also my wife’s friends,” says Amadou, who is 60. “And my wife says, ‘Thank God I’m not jealous because you have so many female friends.’ ”
Graves’ experience has not been the same; she hasn’t had a constant stream of male friendship in her life, although she has had her share.
“But I’ve always felt that having a male friend was like having a brother. There’s a real impermanence about romantic relationships between men and women, but a friendship has the potential to last forever,” says Graves, 58.
The phrases “like a brother” and “like a sister” come up often in these kinds of discussions. Jennifer Clapp, who is from Texas, and Kurt Pennypacker, a Florida native, could hardly be any closer. They met 3 years ago in Chicago, when Pennypacker invited a co-worker out to happy hour and she showed up with her friend Jennifer. Soon they and other friends were hanging out in one big happy group. But Clapp and Pennypacker clicked in a special way.
They had the same sense of humor, and that intangible thing, whatever it is, that draws friends together. When their apartment leases ran out last year, Clapp proposed that they pool their money, find a sweet pad in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, where they both wanted to live, and move in together.
Since doing that they’ve learned the rules — don’t speak to her in the morning unless she speaks to you first, stay out of the kitchen when he’s cooking — and life at home hardly could be better.
A friend of theirs dubbed their apartment the “Clappypacker.”
“We kind of looked up after a year and I was like, ‘I can’t believe I live with you,’” says Clapp, 31, the marketing director for San Miguel Schools. “It’s just so odd.”
But it works. And it has strengthened their friendship. As roommates, Clapp and Pennypacker have more opportunities to rely on each other, to be there for each other when things aren’t going so great. Clapp especially appreciates that her roomie also is willing to not be there at times.
In the literal sense, that might mean moving out for four days, as Pennypacker did to accommodate Clapp’s visiting sister and her family. In the figurative sense, not being there usually means knowing when to zip it.
“She’ll come home from a bad day, and I’ll be like, `Do you need a hug?’ and she’ll be like, `No! Leave me alone!’”
Pennypacker has learned to back away slowly in those situations.
“With guys you can say, `I don’t want to talk right now,’ and they’re not going to push it,” Clapp says. “Girls tend to be like, `Are you sure. ... ?’ Kurt is very aware of my space.”
And speaking of personal space, neither party has ever had any interest in crossing the line to romance, though they have dabbled in dating each other’s friends.
“I can’t really walk around in my underwear at home,” says the 28-year-old Pennypacker, who runs his own advertising agency from their apartment. “That’s about the only drawback I can think of.”
It helps, they both admit, that each of them possesses a bit of the opposite gender’s energy. “Kurt’s like the nicest guy I’ve ever met,” she says.
“I cook and clean, but she also watches baseball,” he says.
Got it.
You’ve seen those old husband-wife comedy acts? The ones where they scream at each other with huge grins on their faces? This is reality for Stacy Grobe and Glenn Chernyak, platonic friends who met as students in the Greek system at the University of Arizona in the fall of 1996.
“Our friends had a dat party and we went together,” says Grobe, who is 28 and a graduate student in sports administration at Northwestern University. “Nothing ever happened. And we’ve been friends since then.”
Chernyak says there were clear indications that night, a month into their friendship, that romance probably was not in the cards — specifically because they both went home with different people. They laughed about it the next morning on the phone, and haven’t been able to shake each other since.
Both rabid Arizona Wildcat basketball fans who meet at Flounder’s bar in Chicago to watch games, they’ve also taken road trips together, sharing the same hotel room and sometimes, admittedly, overindulging at the bar. And still, no spark.
“There’s like an invisible wall, or a force field,” says Chernyak, 31. “I’m an only child and so is she, and it’s almost at the point where it’s like she’s like the sister I never wanted.”
“Oh, thanks,” she says.
“Well, you know what I mean,” he says. “We argue worse than a married couple.”
“We’re like a married couple without the love,” she says.
“Like there are times when I want to throw her through ... the wall.”
“And I want to throw him into oncoming traffic.”
“Other than that,” he says, “it’s a wonderful relationship.”
It’s definitely a fun one. There was a time when they lived in different cities and drifted apart, but since Grobe moved to Chicago five years ago (she grew up in New Jersey and San Diego), their friendship has been renewed, and even strengthened, in the last three years after Grobe ended a two-year relationship with a boyfriend.
Now they also play coed recreational sports together; this fall they’re taking on the diamond as members of the Flounder’s softball team. It’s not all sports, though; they also help each other out with relationship advice.
“I’m pretty much her Dr. Phil,” says Chernyak, an information technology analyst for JP Morgan.
“That’s good sometimes, but sometimes he thinks like a guy, and that’s kind of frustrating.”
“Well, I am a guy,” he says, rolling his eyes.
He e-mails or calls Grobe every day, even though she obviously drives him nuts sometimes and vice versa.
There was even a time earlier this year when they got on each other’s nerves so badly that they didn’t talk for two months.
“We took a little break,” he says.
Something about a road trip to North Carolina in January to watch basketball. Too much time together, not enough space.
“After that trip.” Grobe says, “we definitely know our limitations.”
Time heals all wounds is how the saying goes, and knowing that, they’re planning a trip to Phoenix in December.
“We may stay separately,” Grobe says.
Maybe that is the secret to the female-male friendship — putting a little breathing room in the middle, like any good friends should do, regardless of their gender.
One could also do worse than to heed the advice of Pennypacker, the platonic cohabitator and male presence in the Clappypacker apartment: Keep your pants on. | Only registered users can write comments.
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