How to Keep Your Opposite Sex Friend While Dating

Liz_Nash is our most prolific Sparkler, and she's got a reputation for giving really great advice! Enjoy! —SparkNotes Editors

Getting a boy/girlfriend is remarkably similar to climbing Mount Everest while blindfolded: scary, stupid (but who can resist?!), and extraordinarily insane.

Finding your significant other isn’t easy—you just might have to deal with crazy friends, scandalous rumors and perhaps even a vampire-werewolf war. And yet, this is all a snap compared with one of those awkward tasks of dating: managing to keep friends of the opposite sex while you’re going out with someone.

You might have that BFF you’ve known for like, ten billion years, but your brand-spanking-new significant other (hereby referred to as SO) doesn’t approve. The reason: jealousy. Your SO doesn’t want to share you with anyone, which is understandable, but annoying, and sometimes unreasonable.

It can be really awkward telling your ten-billion-year-old friend that you can’t hang out anymore because your SO doesn’t approve. Thus, I decided to hunt down some answers to how you can keep that friend. Unfortunately, I had absolutely no idea where to start.

You know how on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” they have that Phone-a-Friend lifeline? I decided to use that option and go straight to the source: a friend who’d had experience with this problem. The following conversation followed:

FRIEND: …Hello?
ME: Hey, what’s up? I have a question about this article—
FRIEND: Liz, it’s midnight. Shut up and let me sleep.
-dial tone-

Luckily, I have other friends who don’t object to midnight phone calls. (It’s summer. Isn’t going to bed before 3 a.m. illegal?) At some time or another they’ve had to deal with this problem, so they offered me the following advice:

• Talk to your SO. Tell her that you still want to hang out with your friend, but emphasize that she (your SO) is still “number one”

• When you’re with your SO, don’t talk to him about your friend

• Conversely, when you’re with your friend, don’t talk about your SO. No one wants to hear about how Bobby can score in basketball from the opposite side of the court.

• Try and get your SO and your friend to be buddies. There’s nothing like bonding over pizza and Guitar Hero.

• If there's any doubt about your friend's feelings for you, explain to your her that you’re not interested in her THAT WAY. The worst case scenario is having an SO while also having a friend that’s interested in you. In fact, it’s the equivalent of the END OF THE WORLD.

• Make sure to spend time with both of them. You don’t want either to be crying alone in a deep dark corner.

• If your SO doesn’t approve of your friend, should s/he really be your SO? **cue insightful, deep background music**

• Keeping both a SO and a friend of the opposite sex is difficult, but if you can pull it off, you'll be legendary. Or, at least, as legendary as this ram.

So, Sparklers, have you ever walked that awkward line? How did you do it?