“Let’s just mix them together indiscriminately and see which combinations do something interesting.” – my strategy for the old chemistry set I found in my grandma’s basement as a kid. (If there were dangerous combinations, they wouldn’t have put them in the same chemistry set, right? My grandpa talked me out of playing with the chemicals, redirecting my attention to the microscope, which provided many hours of lonely geeky fun.)
With only rare exception, I’ve had fairly good luck with Boston friendgroup entanglement. These combinations of friends and groups have been stable and cool and conflictless, even when iteratively kneaded and folded into a dozen-plus meta-posse. There’s seldom been need to sneak around between friend groups that didn’t get along with each other, or pick who’s sitting out of a particular gathering because some pair from the different groups can’t be around each other. This has made me lazy and complacent about the benefits of keeping friendgroups at least a little bit isolated, compartmentalized like a virus lab or Navy ship bulkheads. (The Titanic’s bulkheads were supposed to be this way, but, um, weren’t… resulting in Leonardo DiCraprio’s popularity among other things.) Anyway, mingling has now happened in a way that threatens to affect this track record.
I should probably stop being all indirect and just spill the situation, now that whatever was going to happen…has now happened, and everyone it would actually affect already knows about it. A longterm friend group and major component of most any posse formation, , consists of 4 housemates, three of whom I’ve known for about three years now. We’re all friends and like to hang out semi-frequently. Two of these have been dating each other for about as long, up until a couple days ago, at which point the girl broke up with the guy and started dating my housemate, who as you may know and guess, respectively, is a good friend and former college roommate, and has already been incorporated into the meta-posse. As you can guess, the new ex is (quite justifiably) upset by these developments, especially the part where any problems that existed between them, he just found out about for the first time a couple days ago, during the dumping process, which is to say, far too late to do anything about them (unfortunately, this seems kind of par for the course in these things). So, on my end things look pretty screwed up. Any posse combination including xbf and xgf is a no-go, as is any mixing of xbf and bf. And as the person responsible for importing this new suitor and causing them to meet, I’m probably not too popular over there right now either :( Besides that, all the various permutations of [friend||enemy]-of-thy-[friend||enemy] almost certainly apply as occurs in any friendcest situation. (You’re still friends with x after x did y to z?)
In the other, nonlocal friendcest situation mentioned, I was chatting online with my cuz and she mentioned K*… I figured I’d just get the elephant-in-the-room out of the way, i.e. let her know K* already told me they were seeing each other, then change the topic. Anyway, she’s like, “wha..?”…and had no idea what I was talking about. Apparently, “hanging out” (her side) became “fuck buddies” (his side) when run through the Typical Male Specimen exaggerotron–either that, or these two have some talking to do about what exactly they are, or (are, are not) becoming.
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