And the Plot Thickens

For background, read my previous post.

She chuckled a little bit when I suggested that I was irresistable to women. This caused my synapses to start firing. She's laughing because that's a ridiculous statement...or maybe it makes her nervous because I AM irresistable to her, and I have just made things more awkward.

"Well, I just don't know if there is such a thing as 'just friends' between a man and a woman," says Kate. "I think that eventually in any relationship like that you will eventually have to face the idea that one or both parties will be attracted to each other. So I thought I had better just say right up front that I don't want to be pursued."

"This is pretty weird, Kate. No one has ever talked to me like this before.”
Says I.

“I have never done this before either, it’s just that think we could be good friends, and I don’t want to leave anything to get in the way of that.”

“I see, so you’re saying, ‘If we just do things the way we always do things, we get the same result’, and this time you want a different result. You want to set things up in such a way that there can be honest and open communication between two friends, without things getting in the way that typically get in the way?”

and at this point I made the mistake of thinking I knew what she was talking about.

“I think what I mean is what I said. I want to be your friend, but I can see how a girl asking you for coffee could be misunderstood, and so I want to be transparent here.” She’s not smiling anymore, and so once again I try to lighten the mood.

“Well, this could go a few ways. We could be friends for a little while, then realize that neither one of us could live without the other, get married, and your boyfriend would be crushed. OR we could be great friends for our whole entire lives, without romance ever entering the picture. OR we could try friends out, hate it, and it will all amount to nothing” I say in a somewhat light-hearted way.

“Or we could not even try friends out, and just go our separate ways right now,” she adds. “Which one of those do you think is the right way?”

At this point in the conversation I realized that I had been seriously underestimating the importance of the subject to Kate. It is possible that she has never been able to have male friends, and didn’t know if she could, so I was potentially a big gamble for her.

“Kate, I think you are a fantastic person, and I don’t want to presume to know every potentiality for where a friendship between you and I could lead. Can you accept the fact that there are variables that cannot be controlled?”

“I don’t know. Do you want to take some time to think about it, and then get together again later on and talk about it some more?” she asks.

“Sure. How about Thursday, after my soccer game?”

…more to follow on the continuing saga of Jacob’s friendship with Kate.