Want to do ‘friends with benefits’? Start with an exit strategy.

Look around and you will observe that ‘friends with benefits’ (FWB) is not a common or commonly long-lived relationship model. The ‘why’ wasn’t really clear to me a year ago. A lot of the explanations seemed to be rooted in a monogamy paradigm. Let’s say we assume that there are a very limited number of kinds of relationships — let’s say friends, family, coworkers, a romantic partner — importantly there is just one romantic partner. It kind of makes sense from this perspective why trying to create a hybrid romantic-friend would cause problems, would lock out the romantic partner role, and would be destabilized by romantic attachment without romantic commitments.

But if we step outside of this and play with the idea of a romantic friend in the context of ethical non-monogamy (ENM), relationship anarchy, and designer relationships, I think the concept is worth a second look. Well, I did take a look, for a pretty long time, and understanding why it wasn’t working for me required changing how I think about relationships, how I interface with relationships, and challenging my beliefs about the function they serve for me. And I want to talk about it.

A caveat. I am deep in the painful, long, and slow process of healing attachment trauma, and my perspective isn’t going to resonate for everyone. However I think the skills of listening to the vulnerable parts of ourselves and the people we love are probably universally useful.

Question number 1. What is the difference between a friend and a romantic partner?

For the purposes of being able to meaningfully talk about this, I am going to define a friendship as a relationship that is not expected to consistently support attachment, and a partnership as a relationship that is (whether and how any given partnership succeeds at this is another conversation). I think this is the most useful definition, because I think this is at the core of the instability that can emerge from FWB.

Notably, coming at these two relationship paradigms from an ENM perspective does decouple friend=non-sexual and partner=sexual in my mind, but I also recognize that ‘friend’ and ‘partner’ are two remarkably distinct relationships in my experience. I have beautiful, deep, important, meaningful, and committed friendships. But a core defining aspect of these relationships is that they are more flexible and resilient under periods of disconnection because these are not attachment relationships. When I designate a relationship as a friendship, I am not putting limits on closeness or emotional intimacy, but I am implicitly indicating that it is not an attached relationship, and I think this is common.

Question number 2. Can I just choose to not feel attachment then?

I want to give this question some proper, serious attention, because this is kind of the premise of FWB, and for some people (myself included) it has become internalized as a go-to ideal state to address all kinds of painful and disruptive things that can arise when our attachment system is dysregulated. Normal human emotions like disappointment, fear, and disconnection can map onto experiences that many of us feel shame around, like jealousy or panic. If only I could just care, and also not care? Like, care in ways that work for the relationship, and stop caring in ways that don’t work for the relationship. And if you have long-term, close, intimate friendships to reference, you may land on the same conclusion that I initially landed on, which is that my attachment system (and that irrational inner child) was actually the thing causing the problems, and if I could just keep it mostly dormant, I could get all the things I like about relationships like companionship and closeness and sex, without feeling all the yucky things like ill-timed vulnerability and neediness. And wouldn’t that be great?

So, here is the answer I have come to. I don’t think it is healthy or kind to yourself to try to suppress, ignore, or reshape your emotions without also addressing the relational elements that are causing them — and this is regardless of whether you think your feelings are ‘reasonable.’ Let me say this another way, because I think this is really important. You risk damaging your relationship to yourself, and even potentially introducing trauma, if you use shame, disapproval, and disgust (which is what you are likely to reach for) to try to control and change your emotions as a strategy to avoid changing the relationship where those emotions are arising. And I’m sorry, but in cases where a relationship is causing you pain, no matter how lovely the other person is, ‘change’ is often going to mean ‘end.’

Question number 3. Wait, what is attachment again?

In simplest terms, here is what attachment is to me. It is my internal lived sense of feeling closely connected to someone, and experiencing distress when I feel disconnected. Being attached to our caregivers is a matter of survival when we are infants, and so many of our strategies for responding to the distress of disconnection are formed at that time. A lot of the research and writing about attachment is portrayed as an ‘infant-caregiver’ strategy that we continue to try to map onto our adult relationships. I find this unsatisfying, and I think it led me to conclude that becoming an actual adult who could attend to my own survival might mean transcending all of that, further amplifying my already adversarial relationship with my attachment system.

So I want to add an additional framework for understanding attachment, that is more about us being human, being social and relational, and about our brains not being very suited to understanding impermanence. We are literally, physically wired to connect with other human beings. It is an inescapable part of our fabric and our functioning. It is how we are built. And our brains naturally build little expectation circuits when we feel both connected and vulnerable. It is metabolically expensive to continually confront impermanence, and so as a reasonably good shortcut, our brains build pathways of expectation. I will see you next Tuesday, and the Tuesday after, and the one after that. We will watch TV and cuddle and you will say something that shows me how well you know me. And this will happen forever. And once that little circuit is in place, you can proceed to focus on making money and feeding yourself and not dying without constantly being distracted by the question of ‘but what about the tuesday after that?’

I am not saying that you have to protect that little circuit at all costs, or that you even have the ability to. But the process of grief is a physical process of rewiring. It hurts, and the wiring and rewiring is part of being human. What I am saying is that the wiring is just going to happen if you give it the right conditions. You can gently work with the conditions, and you can gently teach your brain about impermanence and detachment. But to fight the tendency to build these circuits of expectation is to fight what you are and how you are made, and I do not think that ever ends well.

Question number 4. Why does sex often lead to attachment?

There is a lot of variety in how people interface with sex and what it brings up. People might experience it as anything from scratching an itch, to something that surfaces their most vulnerable trauma. However, I do suspect that if you take any two people who are trying to have a non-attached sexual relationship, the chance that sex is going to be emotionally messy for at least one of them is pretty high, and relationships don’t work when they are only working for one person.

But why is sex emotionally messy? And by this, I more specifically mean, why is it harder to control our attachment circuits when we bring sex into the mix? I can put forth a few hypotheses based on my own experience. 1. Sex can feel intensely good, and we are pleasure seeking animals, 2. Sex triggers a lot of bonding neurochemistry that isn’t usually triggered in other circumstances, 3. Sex can leave us undefended and vulnerable in often unpredictable ways, 4. We are more likely to stumble into our trauma when sex is involved.

So there are two themes here that I think are more likely to intensely engage our attention in a way that can wake up our attachment systems, including all of our messy strategies. 1) This feels good and I want more of this, and 2) I am not sure if I am safe.

Question number 5. What does it mean for a relationship to support attachment?

This is different for each person, and comes down to your lived, embodied experience of attachment, but for me it boils down to 1. predictability and 2. responsive and attuned availability. How much of each really depends, and the implementation will always be wildly imperfect, but committing to and being intentional around these two things is VERY different than not being intentional about it. I also want to observe that these are non-trivial things to commit to, and being reasonably consistent over time will probably mean that both people need to be willing to disrupt their lives sometimes. That is why there are limits on how many securely attached relationships a person can support, and it is why in ENM we keep trying to find ways to skirt it.

Question number 6. What am I supposed to do with all of this information?

Here is my thesis. There is nothing wrong with building intimacy under the premise of non-attachment. However, there is a reason why this has a high long-term success rate in non-sexual relationships, and a low success rate in sexual relationships. Sometimes there is no space in your life to support an attached relationship, but you see space for learning, growing, and a grand shared adventure. Here is what I would suggest.

1. Let go of the idea of easy, uncomplicated sex within any kind of a relationship. Even if you stumble onto it occasionally, there is nothing you can do to control, cultivate, or guarantee it.
2. Conceptualize the relationship as a shared project or adventure. Understand that projects and adventures have end points. Understand that even if you know something will end, it will still hurt. Make sure that what you gain is worth the grief that your body will normally, and naturally, and beautifully experience when it loses something it has grown attached to. And hey, if you reach the end of your adventure and everyone is truly healthy and happy and not suffering, then kick off a new one!
3. Create, at the very beginning, a kind exit strategy. An exit strategy recognizes that there is a very natural and beautiful human thing that may happen that will destabilize the relationship, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. There is no such thing as someone caring too much, only someone caring in a way that is incompatible with the relationship. Make sure you are both prepared to kindly and compassionately either return the intimacy of the relationship to a more stable (probably platonic) level, or exit the relationship entirely if that is needed to process the beautiful and natural and normal grief.
4. Consider if maybe you can get all of the growth and adventure and intimacy you are looking for from a platonic friendship. Challenge yourself, and make sure you aren’t trying to shortcut a path to emotional intimacy by using sex as a bridge. Consider cultivating patience, and restraint, and reaping the rewards of a long-lasting intimate friendship.
5. Challenge your ideas about what is possible in ENM, and recognize that intimacy always comes with limitations, and that the right choice will often be to say no to some kinds of relationships, regardless of what is technically possible.

Please take care of yourself and each other.