[Brandon]

Originally Posted by ~Wallflower~

I dunno, I've experienced this from both sides though. Like I am friends with a lot of the guys I've had sex with or dated or what ever, and i know there is nothing there.

Your opinion on the matter is only part of the equation. A man can confront you about your friends you have a romantic history with and you could say "there's nothing going on between him and I" or something along those lines. In a perfect world, that'd be a good enough answer, but it's a little bit more complicated than that. Of course you're going to know whether you see them as friends or not; the ultimate person that you can trust 100% is yourself because you know your own thoughts. You know your own intentions. You know YOUR side of the story. But what about the other side? That's the side that men are worried about when it comes to women and interacting with friends that were previous sex partners or whatever.

A man doesn't turn a previous sex partner into a friend completely. You may call him a "friend," you may forget about the fact that you and him have had sex, but that's not something that a man just forgets and doesn't think about. Even as a friend, he's probably going to look at you and think "man...this chick can really suck cock" or "her pussy was real nice." You can walk in front of him, he'll look at your ass, and he'll know that at some point...he was tappin' it. He may even think about you sexually -- the only difference is that it's not so much imagination that goes on inside his brain but recollections of previous memories. He knows what your ass looks like, he knows what your pussy likes like...that's the difference between friends and ex-partners that became friends. One will think about you sexually at one point or another, but another one's thoughts are more accurate than the other guy because he's personally seen your naked. And your previous partners know that if they got desperate, they could look to you because you've had sex at one point or another. It's in your history. It's set in stone. You've done it before, and you've had reason to do it before. Maybe the dude's attractive, maybe "one thing lead to another," but you probably had sexual desire, so the probability of recreating that sexual desire is a little bit higher than if they met some random woman and tried to pursue her. Because you've had sex with them, they put that fact in their pocket...just in case. A man doesn't forget about his sex partners, and it's for different reasons. I know some women feel the same way, and I know not all men think like that...but having sex with a woman is an incredible feat. Even if we remain friends, that doesn't exclude the fact that we're gonna talk about you to our friends behind your back, that doesn't exclude the fact that we're gonna still think about you sexually, that really doesn't change a whole lot. We remain friends, but I'll never look at you the same way. You're the friend that I fucked, the friend that gives amazing blowjobs, the friend that has a mole directly above her clitoris, etc etc. Once you have sex and/or date someone, the relationship has been forever changed. You may be able to look at a dude you've had sex with before and not think about the size of his dick, how good he was at making you orgasm, or anything like that...but I'd imagine that it's rare. And that's partially why I don't like my girlfriend being friends with dudes or chicks that she's done sexual shit with because it's happened before. Telling yourself that it won't happen again is not very realistic; sure, it's highly unlikely that you'd have sex with the dude again, but the probability of it happening is higher than normal because it's happened before. So regardless of whether you believe that "it's not like that anymore" is almost irrelevant. It's the fact that it happened that makes it a caution flag for people. Like I mentioned earlier, people don't want to get hurt. We're very intelligent creatures and we think about a lot of things unconsciously. We weigh a lot of factors into dating a man/woman based on a lot of things, and this is just one of them...the fact that you've got friends who you have fucked or had a relationship with.

Think of it like this: pretend for a second you work as a cashier at a grocery store. Every week you work, you steal 1 penny. So that's like 3-4 pennies a month. Is that really a big deal? 36 pennies a year? But what if your boss catches you after stealing a dollar's worth of company money? You'd get fired, even though your defense was the fact that it's only "a fuckin dollar." But it's not just you, it's the whole equation. Every little thing adds up. People have the same mentality that it's "just a penny," and the company ends up losing over 500 dollars a week just from cashiers who either miscount change or take some of their own money. All these percentages and numbers get added up. Though you probably won't have sex with your friend again doesn't change the fact that there's still a small chance, and that's a chance that not a lot of men are willing to take.

Originally Posted by ~Wallflower~

Yes, I can understand not trusting another guy to try something on your girlfriend and putting her in that position but at the same time you have to trust that she'll turn him down and unless you are going to tell me that all men are rapists then I know that you can be jealous/insecure about another guy trying to take your girl... But you've got to trust that she'll have friends who are men. And turn them down if they get too interested. Personally this is always something contentious for me. I understand being jealous/wary... But I have always had guys who are friends and it's always been fine. If you want to assume that the reason men are friends with men (vice versa) is because there is no potential for sexual attraction then people like me shouldn't be friends with anyone because I have an equal likelihood of getting "to close" to a women...

You have to consider the fact that there are many women out there who enjoy being pursued by other men even though they have a boyfriend. My girlfriend is one of those women who may flirt a little bit to get the guy's attention so that he pursues her. Once he pursues him, then she'll bring up the fact that she's dating me. To me, I find that very manipulative. I trust my girlfriend that when the time comes, she will tell them the truth about her being taken. However, it's not her that I'm really concerned about -- it's the men I'm concerned about. I'd be pretty fucking upset that a woman would flirt with me and then tell me that she's taken. But if you upset the wrong crowd, you put yourself in a bad situation. When you flirt with dudes, you run the possibility of a man pursing you. We all know that no man pursues women the same way; some will do it romantically while some men may feel so confident that they'll just slap a woman's ass when she's making passes at him, or maybe even grab her breasts. So if a taken women flirts with a man, but the man touches her ass or grabs her tits, then who should the boyfriend be mad at? Should he be mad at the man who made a pass at his girlfriend, or should he be mad at his girlfriend for flirting with the dude in the first place? Of course, no woman is really going to anticipate how a man is going to react when she casually flirts with the dude. I know my girlfriend would make the right decision when faced with something like that. I'd expect her filing for sexual harassment, or if it's someone she knows to tell him not to do that anymore. I don't want to get into that situation to begin with. If you don't want to get a speeding ticket, you obey the speed laws. You can't just speed down one road and go the speed limit down another road and use that as an excuse when you get pulled over. "But Officer, I don't speed down that road." When you allow someone to pursue you, you open yourself up to potential risks. When you are sitting in the car with someone and you allow them to run a stop sign but you get into a car crash, you're still a little bit responsible because you could've said "no" and they probably would've stopped at a stop sign. I'm not going to conclude that all men are rapists because I know that's definitely false. I'm a man and I'm not a rapist, I know that for a fact. But that doesn't exclude the fact that there are men out there who will go that route. It's like that expression "I'm not racist. I hate everyone equally." Trust is earned, and while I'm going to trust my girlfriend, I'm not going to trust people I don't know even if they're people my girlfriend has known longer than I have. It's really not so simple to say that it's all because I don't trust my girlfriend which is why I'm arguing about bi-sexuals being more to handle because they've typically got more people that I have to learn to trust.

When I say that men and women can't be friends, I mean it in a biological sense. If we were all friends, we wouldn't last very long as a species. We were built on procreaction. Am I gonna look at every woman as a potential partner? No. There are a lot of things involved in what it takes to choose a partner. There's pheromones and all that shit when you're dealing with chemistry...you know, symmetry and all that shit. But if I became real good friends with a woman and I was single for a long period of time, guess who I would look to in getting a relationship? Probably her. I know her. However, she might not feel the same way about me. I would say that it's very rare for a friendship between men and women to be strictly friends without any sexual feelings towards each other at any point during the friendship. You've seen it many times before where friends fall in love with other friends, and I'm not going to exclude homosexual relationships either. If you biologically are attracted to members of both sexes, that doesn't mean every person is considered a partner...it's just that there are a lot of factors that go into choosing a potential mate, and it's observationally rare to strictly remain friends and/or have any desire outside of friendship.