Dear Breakup Girl,

Okay, Breakup Girl, this is my first letter asking advice EVER to anyone about all of this, so… well, I hope you have time to read a long one. If not, toss me.

I’m a 17 year old guy. I’m too skinny, I’ve got acne, but I’m a great friend with an irresistible sense of humor (or so I’ve been told). Oh, and I’ve had a stellar love life, absolutely wonderful! NOT. My last relationship crashed and burned. On the SIX MONTH ANNIVERSARY, to the day, because things weren’t going anywhere and we were getting frustrated with each other. And the three girlfriends I had before that ended when (in chronological order):

1) She lied to me about loving someone else, thus being unable to continue going out with me. (Fortunately, we had only been going out for, oh, 4 hours, just long enough for her to realize I had never had a girlfriend before and had no idea she was coming on to me. This one later turned psycho-slutty, having sex with anything that breathed, including ME, offering phone and oral sex with me as late as a year after. She also tried to break my best friend and his girlfriend up… sick-o.)

2) She went out with me for six days, kissed me, then refused to talk to me — forever. No reason at all, except one I heard that went through three people that went, “She gets bored with guys quickly.” Ne’er heard word from her since.

3) She left. I fell for a girl on the second to last day of a summer camp. She lives about 120 miles away part-time (and over 400 the other part) because of her split parents. Saddest thing about this one was that it was the best time out of all four girlfriends I’ve had… I haven’t heard from her since, and my letters don’t come back with “Address unknown” or anything on them.

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We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: straight men and women can be just friends. We know this, because they can even be Just Friends, the boy-girl production company behind this super-enterprise. (And because we are of the camp who liked Scully and Mulder best without the LIKElike.) But perhaps no one has said it so eloquently, or newsworthily, than Juliet Lapidos over at Slate (h/t @DahliaLithwick, @DJDistracted), BFF of Jeff, who believes that today, straight male-female platonicness is at once normal and revolutionary.  She writes:

We were sure that we would never become romantic partners, that our relationship would always be placidly sexless. This has so far borne out: Excluding the summer when we first met and shared an awkward, pubescent kiss on Independence Day—and another, even more awkward moment on a trampoline shortly thereafter—there’s been no romance. Jeff and I have been friends for more than 14 years, without interruption. In our mid-twenties, we lived together for more than three years, during which period we’d watch movies late into the night and then go our separate ways, much like when we were kids. I find all this, at the personal level, unremarkable and unsurprising; the skepticism of outsiders strikes me as funny and narrow-minded. Yet from a historical perspective, my blasé attitude is all wrong: We are remarkable, in a way, and our relationship is not only surprising but radical.

Yes, radical. Consider the social history here, the dorm-room demographics: (more…)