Why Lovers Can't Be Friends Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Why Lovers Can't Be Friends - Essay Example Conlon continues to suggest that friendship and love (romantic love) are two different things. According to him, friends "share a view of the world and focus their efforts on that vision." In this case, friends take pleasure and delight in the vision of the world that they share and both are benefited in their partnership. However, lovers are only "absorbed in each other and delight from their experience of each other." In this case, the only common denominator between lovers is pleasure derived from each other. Once this experience is removed, they fall apart. The article of Conlon seems to be 'an attempt to reorient our thinking about romantic relationships." Instead of believing that romantic love is the ideal relationship that most people look forward to having experienced, Conlon proves that "people need to be made more aware that relationships can take many forms and that no one form may automatically trump the others when it comes to which arrangement is good or best for someone to enter into." Rita Watson, as she writes about relationships in Some Ex-Lovers Can't Be Friends attests that she has no doubt that based on her experience and observation, some lovers cannot be friends. ... She says that "relationships that develop between people who are friends first before becoming lovers seem to have a much higher success rate, last longer, and be happier." However, for strangers who become lovers it appears to be more difficult for them to become friends as they are becoming lovers. In other words, becoming a lover and becoming a friend are two separate concepts and experiences. Watson continues that if the love relationship continues for a longer time, there can be a possibility of friendship. However, the usual occurrence is this love relationship is often short-lived. Based on her observation, Watson says that "it is a rare couple that can survive the ups-and-downs of a love relationship for any length of time without the strong foundation that friendship helps provide" (Watson, ). The usual love experience follows a certain pattern: when love is fresh, we want to spend every moment together but the feeling gets familiar and problems arise. Many relationships will then end at this stage. Oftentimes, we want the best for our partners but the danger comes when we tend to change our partners into the persons we want them to be instead of accepting them for who they truly are. In friendships, we do not change our friends and we usually accept them for who they are. In this case, there is a big difference between lovers and friends. I think it would be fitting to discuss the different types of friends to further illustrate the topic at hand. In False Friends, D. R. Cooley (Journal of Business Ethics, 2002) classifies friends into two general types: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic means