Movie?

I'm trying to think of a movie in which two men and a woman are close friends, but there is no romantic connection between any two individuals. There may be erotic/sexual awareness, but nothing which is acted out in a real way.

The closest I'm able to come up with is the Harry Potter movies, but they are starting to show suggestions that Hermione and Ron will end up coupled.

I like the relationships in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but the Kid and Etta are lovers.

Any ideas?

The Queen of Wands Returns

For the last month or more, I have been getting the sense that one of the things that needed to die in my life was my gaming group -- or at least my participation in the gaming. I wasn't entirely sure why, I only had the feeling that that part of my life had run its course.

But like most deaths, it was not something I wanted to contemplate. My gaming group has been a source of a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction over the years. It went into a serious decline about five years ago, exploded and then re-constellated two years ago, and I continued to play with two other people. One of the reasons I didn't want to withdraw from the game was that I didn't want to be the one who ended it for all three of us -- since although it is possible to game with two people, you usually want at least three. And I didn't want to face perhaps losing touch with those friends, since this has always been our primary form of interaction.

Well, Saturday night's session did not go well. Everyone behaved themselves, but it did not go well. And it wasn't much fun. Which has pretty much been our pattern for the past 6-9 months.

We finished the session, had dinner, conversed, then E asked for feedback -- which is part of our custom. J and I gave honest feedback -- which E partially accepted and partially resisted -- and then J told us that he wasn't having fun anymore, and he didn't want to keep playing. He did want to continue getting together with us, but we needed to find something else to do.

I felt both grief and relief, but the grief was muted somewhat by the awareness that what I would miss most were things which had been mostly absent from our games for a long time. J was right: it is time to do something else together for a while, and if we do game again we will need to get a few other people to provide balance, new energy and new ideas.

So one more thing has died -- and I suspect that there is still more to come.

Talking with Friends 1 - A Hypothetical

After the "we're ending the gaming" exchange, the three of us went on to talk about what we were going to do in the future. That conversation continued into some discussion about passions, where and how they are lost and whether they are worth reclaiming again. I believe they are. One of my friends does not.

J asked me where and when I had lost my passion. I told him that it was a combination of getting my heart broken twice in a relatively brief period of time (and breaking the heart of at least one other person), and my forcing my creativity to conform to both the explicit and the assumed preferences of my actual and prospective audiences. There was a bit more conversation, then he asked me, "If you were guaranteed that you would get your passion back if you became involved with an abusive man, would you do it?"

My first response: Hell, no!

Then I sat back and really thought about it. "Guaranteed"?
I am diminished in all kinds of ways by the loss of my passion.
I have survived an abusive relationship.
Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the scars. (Emotional scars.)
And I knew that J's question wasn't idle. He knows me well enough to have made a not-unreasonable hypothesis. That kind of intensity would very likely kick-start my fires again.

And I found it extremely interesting that I did re-think my first, automatic reaction, that I would even consider accepting such a bargain. I assumed that, having been through such an ordeal before, I would be able to walk away from another after I had found what I was looking for.

But this evening, many hours after the initial conversation, I am considering the question again -- this time by remembering what it was actually like to be in an abusive relationship: the grief, the loss of self, the isolation, the horrible sense of helplessness. The absolute lowest point in my life occurred during that time, and I ended up lying on the floor in a fetal position screaming into a pillow when I realized that I was incapable of leaving him of my own free will.

The truth, I think, lies somewhere that J perhaps did not consider, but which is related to my experience. After several years of pain, I was finally able to heal the wounds of that relationship by working with The Descent of Inanna, for Inanna was also brought low as a result of her own choice to continue down into the underworld, to pit her strength and her pride against what lay in wait for her. She was killed and transformed, and brought back to the surface due to the action of her friends and allies. In mythic terms, that's what happened to me.

The universe does not give out neat "If. . . then. . ." contracts. Even if it did, I don't think I would be willing to accept this one -- perhaps not even be able to surrender my sovereignty as I did before. I hope that I will never again allow anyone to treat me as R did.

But I begin to wonder about a ritual, about controlled intensity in the service of higher purpose, not simply immediate gratification (as good as that is sometimes). I wonder about initiation into the next phase of my life. I wonder about sacred theater, about a descent taken under the guidance of skilled ritualists.

I don't think I'm ready to take such a step right now, but I wonder. . . .

Talk with Friends 2 - Boxes & Keys

This afternoon I went to the home of former gaming comrade R (not to be confused with the "R" from the previous entry), who is a skilled LMP. He was good with massage even before his training, and he's only gotten better over the years. And since he's worked on my body for more than a decade, he knows it very well. I should go to him for treatments more often -- especially during times like these.

As he gave me a two hour treatment (my body was in horrible knots) we talked about what we've both been doing, and some of my current transitional struggles. R frequently ends up sounding like a fortune cookie when he wants to give advice, but he can also come up with unexpected gems of wisdom.

This afternoon he made an observation about me removing the veils of assumption and expectation from my authentic self, so others could see it. I agreed with him, then observed that I'm trying to do this with my inner veils as well, the ones which obscure parts of myself from the rest of myself. Then I mentioned my feeling of having a locked box inside. "Ah," he said, "don't forget: the box doesn't have just one key. And when you use different keys, you find different things inside."

I decided that that's something I want to remember.

Friends 3 - A Realization

My massages from R are both intimate and entirely non-erotic.

He touches, in a way that is both extremely pleasant and utterly professional, parts of my body I would never let him touch if we were engaging as individuals rather than as practitioner and client. It's a tribute to his skill and ethics that this is possible at all, since I have never desired actual intimacy with him. Even during the most pleasant, purr/sigh-inducing parts of the massage, I never feel erotically or sexually turned on.

Today, during the very last few minutes, he gave me a scalp massage, then worked lightly on my facial muscles. Perhaps because I had been reflecting earlier in the session about the non-erotic nature of the interaction, I was paying atypical attention to the feeling of his hands and fingers on my face -- which is an erotically charged zone for me. I still didn't feel an erotic response to him, but I suddenly remembered what it was like to be touched by a lover. I felt R's fingers moving over my skin, and found myself wanting -- in a quiet way -- to be touched once again by a man who was in love with me, and I with him.