Waka Pass Diaries (Friend With Benefits)

August 11

There’s this friend of mine who has a Friend-With-Benefits relationship with me. The sex is really good. But that has been all we have. Really good sex. Plus he lived in the East and our hookups only happened whenever I traveled.

Then I started seeing somebody early this year, and posted a picture of us on my WhatsApp status, and this friend (let’s call him Emmy) blew into my chat to vent. Saying stuff about how I’d gone and found someone, how he thought I liked him, how I didn’t even consider his feelings before going out there to get a boyfriend. Dude was laying a lot of stuff on me, stuff I was frankly very surprised to hear. I had no clue he was interested in me like that. Not like I’d have given a relationship with him any serious thought, because he’s in the “I will marry a wife” gang. And I’m in that stage of my love life where I can only date someone who doesn’t have a wife as his future goal. I can’t coman invest in a relationship that’ll ultimately expire for the purpose of a woman stepping in.

And so I told him this. I said I didn’t know he wanted us to be a thing and I wouldn’t have been eager to start anything with him, had I known.

He asked why.

I said, “Because you intend to marry a woman.”

He said yes, he does want to get married, but what if he finds the right man to be his boyfriend, that did I ever consider that he might change his mind and settle with a guy instead.

I didn’t buy what he was selling, but I asked him, “Are you saying I might be the right guy you’d settle with?” I was teasing him. And he laughed and brushed my question aside.

Our chat ended there, but every time he saw a WhatsApp update of my boyfriend and I, he’d come back to vent his “you just couldn’t give me a chance” spleen.

Anyway, we broke up, me and this guy I was dating. And I posted something cryptic about my pain on WhatsApp. Emmy saw it and breezed in. Wanted to know what the problem was. I wasn’t in the mood to talk about it, and I said as much. He said OK. That he’d be back later.

Later was about 3 weeks or so, when I’d reasonably healed. And when he asked, I could say, “I’m no longer in a relationship” without much pain. He expressed some consolation and we chatted some more.

Then he relocated to Lagos, and we met for some serious long-time-no-see sex. We occasionally met, to hang out and hook up. And during one of those times, I remembered what we chatted about months ago, and I brought it up again.

“So I’m single now and we’re hooking up. You won’t say something now. It’s when I get another boyfriend that you’ll come and start vexing.”

He looked at me and asked, “You want us to date?” in this surprised tone, like it was an inconceivable idea.

I said, “Well, why not?”

And this guy hit me with a sucker punch that left me breathless with first shock, then fury. He said, “Well, I’m not sure I want us to date. You don’t seem like boyfriend material. You always seem to have too many guys around you.”

We were in bed together, after-sex glow wrapped around us. But as those words hit me, the glow inside me first turned cold with shock, then hot with rage. I sat up on the bed and looked at him. It was a miracle that the words I said next came out calmly, considering how tumultuously my emotions were raging inside me. “Exactly what does that mean?” I asked.

This presumption of my sex life and how it makes me someone incapable of sticking with one guy is something I’ve heard often, usually from random hookups who expected more but didn’t get it. I usually laugh off their insults as the ranting of guys who don’t know me at all.

But this guy, he’s my friend. Aside the sex, we’re actually friends. And he had the nerve to categorize me as a soulless slut. I wanted to hear his reason, and typically, he had none. He began stammering something about how hard it is to think that someone “in my position” would want to be with one guy.

“Someone in my position?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What position is that please?”

He stammered this and stammered that. And then he dealt me the ultimate blow. “Don’t be angry, dear. It’s just… I mean, look, you and that your boyfriend didn’t even last. I’m sure you broke up with him because you can’t be with one man.”

This fucker had not only misrepresented my character, but had put his own spin on my breakup. I just jejely got up and asked him to leave. He did as asked, leaving my place with this attitude of the injured party.

We didn’t talk for the longest time. And when he finally buzzed me, he wanted to slide back into our easy camaraderie. But I shut it down. Either he apologized for how he insulted me, or he could forget about any form of interaction with me. He didn’t apologize then. He apologized later when he came back again to gist with me and met the same cold response from me. Dude must’ve realized I wasn’t kidding.

After that, we gradually returned to being friends, and then to hooking up.

Then the afternoon came, a couple of days ago, when I posted on my WhatsApp status the picture of the new man in my life, and he breezed into my chat with one word of outrage: “Seriously?!!!”

I replied with “What does ‘seriously’ mean?”

He is yet to respond. I’m waiting for him to respond. So we can talk about all the ways I reject the Yoruba demon stunt he appears to want to pull in my life.

Written by Pink Panther