Can We Just Be Friends First?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how fast we label things.

Two people start talking, there’s some chemistry, a few good conversations happen, and suddenly everyone involved — including the two people — has decided this is either A Thing or Not A Thing. There’s no in-between anymore. No “let’s just see who this person actually is before we decide what box they go in.” We skip the getting-to-know-you part and go straight to defining the relationship, sometimes before either person has said a word out loud about what they actually want.

I ran into this recently with someone from my church. We’d been talking, and I genuinely liked getting to know him — not in a “we’re basically dating” way, just in a “this is an interesting person and I’d like to keep talking to him” way. But somewhere in there, he decided this was heading toward romance. He never asked me. He went and talked to the pastors and elders about it instead, got their input, and then came back and told me he didn’t want to pursue a relationship with me.

Here’s the thing — I would have agreed with him. If he’d just asked what I wanted, I would have told him: I wanted a friendship. I wasn’t trying to fast-track anything. But he never asked, so instead of a conversation, I got a decision that had already been made about me, by other people, without me.

I don’t think he did anything malicious. I think he did what a lot of us do — he assumed the direction based on the vibe, skipped the actual question, and then acted on an answer nobody had given him yet.

But it got me reflecting on what I actually want going forward, and I think it’s this: I want to build friendships with the potential to become something more, without either of us deciding what “this” is before we even know each other. I’m not interested in situationships, and I’m not interested in performing a relationship before there’s a real foundation under it. I want to know if someone can make me laugh on a bad day, how they treat people who can’t do anything for them, what their faith actually looks like day to day — not just on a Sunday — before anybody starts asking anyone else’s opinion about where this is going.

I think part of growing up, and part of this season of my life specifically, has been learning that I don’t have to accept the label someone else assigns to a situation I’m in. I get a say. If someone assumes I’m looking for a relationship, I’m allowed to correct that. And if someone assumes I’m not, I’m allowed to correct that too. Either way, the correction starts with someone actually asking me.

So that’s where I’m at. Not chasing a title. Not avoiding one either. Just trying to let people be people long enough to find out if they’re worth doing life with — and trusting that if it’s supposed to turn into something, it will, on its own timeline, without either of us forcing a label onto it before it’s earned.