The Rules of Attraction
It is someone you know. You get a warm glow and want to kiss them. Your head is telling you that it’s just the affection you’re feeling. But is there another wave underneath, waiting to be unleashed, that might just get out of control?
Anne Sexton, 11 Feb 2010
Humphrey shook his head in mock disapproval. “You’ve got to stop messing with that boy, Anne.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because he’s young and you’ll just confuse him.”
That he was young couldn’t be denied, but at 21, Tom was definitely an adult, so I was not taking advantage of a teenager. Besides which, I wasn’t about to pull an early-onset Iris Robinson – I had no intention of dragging him home. That was never an option.
Nor was he confused. After all, he’d kissed me.
It was my birthday. We were having a great time. Much laughter had been laughed and spotting a stray sprig of mistletoe left over from the Christmas clean up, Tom suggested I give him a kiss. So I did; and very nice it was too. We both knew what it meant; the only person that was confused was Humphrey.
“But isn’t he gay?”
Well, yes, Tom is gay. Not bisexual-and-confused; not in denial; not closeted – he’s gay, no two ways about it. But that wasn’t a problem. Although it was a proper kiss, it wasn’t sexual – it was more of a nice, warm, fuzzy thing.
For me, you see, there has always been a nebulous grey area between affection and attraction because sometimes they feel an awful lot similar.
When I was younger, I frequently found it impossible to tell the difference. The first person I ever fell in love with was a school friend. Weekends apart were a wrench, Monday mornings a joy, every hour spent together was filled with laughter and music. Unfortunately my friend happened to be a girl. I liked boys, I knew that, but I wanted to kiss her too.
My feelings towards Christine were not particularly sexual – or at least not as far as I remember – yet I craved physical contact with her. I was not yet emotionally savvy enough to realise that some friendships take on many of the hallmarks of an infatuation: obsessive thinking, jealousy, attraction and the desire for physical closeness with the ‘beloved’.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was perfectly acceptable for close female friends to act in ways we would consider more appropriate to romantic relationships today. Of course, some of these same-sex friendships were sexual and romantic; others were not; and some, like my friendship with Christine, were passing infatuations. Either way, these friendships were more physically demonstrative than most equivalent relationships are today.
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