What would we women do without the guys on the fringes?The men who love us unconditionally even knowing that we will probably never go out with them. The men who see us for who we really are while we are busy chasing the bad boys; the players; the guys who are going to take advantage and then forget about us.
But then those men on the fringes... they're the real ones. They aren't poster boys for Chippendales or the firefighter calendar, but they are there for us and we lean on them.
The Fringe guys. They prop us up when we are falling apart. They remember our birthdays and the day that our pet passed away. They remember our favorite color and they want to brighten our day almost every day.
They love us and when we make excuses for why we won't date them they believe our excuses. They listen to our conscience-easing excuses, and they hope that they can believe the maybe of it. We say maybe and they hear yes when we mean no. And all of that keeps it going round and round, over again.
We women tend to take advantage of the fringe guys. Those guys who just aren't what we want but they want us, and we don't want to be without somebody who wants us. So, we take it. We take what they have to give even though it's not what we want and we make due. We manage to make excuses for our unavailability to them every time, and every time they believe us, and they forgive us.
I know that I recognized the reality of the fringe guys so many decades ago, when I was a young woman of 20 or so. I knew that my conscience wouldn't allow me to keep letting them do things for me without being honest about my intentions with them.
And what I discovered is that I found it to be just as hard to tell them the clear truth as it was for them to hear it.
Hard to tell them the truth and know that we will lose their adoration; the reflection in their eyes will stop being ourselves. Hard to know that truthful and brutal honesty will crush that adoration that we craved, and they gave.
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