Reality Check: Friends with benefits

By Elizabeth Krupka A&E Editor

It’s a common winter scenario: you’re snuggled up watching a movie with a significant other.

Potentially getting a little something something (if you know what I mean) before, during or even after.

This describes the seemingly perfect world of friends with benefits.

Typically, people who fall into the friends with benefits category were either friends before and don’t want to ruin the friendship, they are both attracted to each other but don’t want to date or they dated and broke up.

The cycle of a friend with benefits relationship goes a little something like this: talk a little, hang out occasionally and get down to business often.

This usually repeats as often as both people agree to it.

This type of friendship is something that happens more often than not (like that is hard to believe.)

However, this type of “friendship” also ends badly, more often than not.

It isn’t impossible to have the benefits of a relationship without the emotional attachment from either party, but it usually doesn’t happen that way.

To hang out the way a couple does without the emotional support of an actual relationship is hard to balance.

It takes someone who can unattach themselves from their emotional connections to the person they are “benefitting” from.

One party usually gets more attached to the other and multiple heated arguments about how that wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

Then the question of if the relationship was worth all of the pent up emotions arises.

However, the same hurt feelings happen in dating relationships as well, making a friends with benefits relationship seemingly identical to a serious relationship.

Friends with benefits has both it’s pros and cons, however, if you do choose to embark on this road.

Remember to try and keep feelings out of it, because with the outspoken feelings everything gets messy.

Then all you have to do is get down to business.

efk722@cabrini edu