Dating your friends, platonically

Also: 'Twin Flames,' Matt Rife, sexist dating advice, the return of Jezebel, and more in the weekend roundup.

Photo: Tanya Pro

This week I went out to a fancy pre-holiday dinner with some friends.

These friends just happen to be the mothers of my kid’s closest friends. We all dressed up. I put on heels. Heels! We ate scallops and rib-eye and a pear tart. There were wine pairings. One of these friends paid for the whole thing, courtesy of a gift certificate she had gotten from a client.

All of our partners were at home on kid duty. It’s a common dynamic these days: going out and doing special stuff—date-like stuff—with my “mom friends.” Babysitters are expensive and tough to arrange. For those of us with partners, or ex-partners who are co-parenting, there can be less friction with doing a mutual childcare “swap” for a night out. You get Tuesday night off, I get Thursday night.

As the married parent of a young child, it can feel easier to “date” your friends than your partner. Of course, this says plenty about the flimsy nature of the nuclear family model, but it also makes me think about how I’ve “platonically dated friends” across my adult life. I touched on this in my memoir:

For most of my twenties, I had slept with men and platonically dated women. We… provided each other with emotional support. We shared our hard truths. We went on vacations together. We celebrated Galentine’s Day. We went out to dinner, taking turns grabbing the bill, and joked about cohabitating and raising kids together if things didn’t work out with these men.

Back then, “platonic dating” was a consequence of hookup culture and not really ever going on dates. Romantic commitment felt hard to attain, but it wasn’t so for platonic commitment, which was all the more committed because of our sense of commiseration around the travails of love and sex.

Now, in this married-and-parenting phase of life, there is something darkly funny about it still feeling easier to “date” your friends.

To the links…

“Men are yelling about men not being men anymore more than ever.”

A woman in Texas told a school board that a Scholastic book caused her “porn addiction.” As an 11-year-old, she read the book, which featured a cartoon rendering of a kiss, and claims that it led her to look “for other books that gave me pleasure.” Books: a gateway to hedonism. Now, absurdly, she argues that the district should ban Scholastic in schools.