Friends With Girl/Boyfriends

I recently went to see a concert here. It was at a nice, small venue, called the Walnut Room. Very intimate setting. It reminded me of the Metro in Chicago. It was a great place to see my first live show back in the US. It’s set up in a very interesting way. There is a bar with a patio out front. The live venue is in a back room, behind the bar. It gives it an almost underground feel, like you’re a member of some secret society just because you even know where it is.

It was quite the coincidence that I even found out about it. I was surfing the net looking for live shows in the area, and the name of the artist, and the fact that she was playing the next day, caught my attention. Her name is Meiko, an obviously Japanese name, that is normally pronounced May-koh. For some reason, she has changed the pronunciation to Mee-koh, but has kept the spelling the same. Apparently, she is one-fourth Japanese, which explains the name. According to Wikipedia, she and her sister took on Japanese names when they were young to connect with their Japanese grandmother on their mother’s side, and only realized after quite some time that they were mispronouncing their names (her sister calls herself Keiko, which she pronounces Kee-koh). I spent the entire concert wondering if she even knows what her name means in Japanese. It’s hard to say with any accuracy without seeing the actual Japanese characters, but the most common characters for women with this name are:

The first character means bud or sprout, the second means cloth or clothing, and the third means child, so together, they can mean bud cloth child or child of the budding cloth or simply bud. The nuance behind the name is likely that the child is like a flower bud that has yet to bloom into a beautiful flower or the child is like a piece of fabric covered with bud designs, which would likely be considered a beautiful piece. Anyway, after she had my attention, I had a look around and found some of her songs on the web. I listened to a few and, being quite entertained, I decided to check out the show.

The opening act was a pleasant surprise. It was a band named Cory Chisel and the Wandering Sons. They were excellent, definitely worth a listen if you get a chance. They had a pretty wide array of songs, ranging from upbeat and funny to heartbroken and crying on the floor. A few of the songs also had a spiritual undertone, making reference to some of the minor prophets. It was nice to shake Mr. Chisel’s hand and give him a verbal pat on the back after the show.

Meiko was also great. She reminded me a lot of folky, female singers that I have enjoyed in the past, like Jewel, Sarah Masen, and Jessica Riddle, so it was somewhat of a trip down Amnesia Lane only better. Arguably Meiko’s most popular, but definitely favorite, song is one called “Boys With Girlfriends”.

It’s a song about a good friend of hers who basically ended their friendship because his girlfriend was jealous. I’m sure I could scour the internet and figure out who this guy is, but suffice it to say that he is still involved with her music, either in the band or on the tour, because she kept making references to him all night. She even played a couple of new songs, one was called “Good Looking Loser” and the other was called “Real Real Sweet”. “Good Looking Loser” came off as a bit of a cut on the guy who she used to be friends with, calling him a good looking loser and saying that she, Meiko, was the one who got away. The other new song was a vengeful dirge focused at her ex-friend’s girlfriend. The theme of the song is basically that every time he wasn’t physically with his girlfriend, he was “with” Meiko and he was “real real sweet”. Essentially, the song plays on the girlfriend’s jealousy and aims to confirm that all her jealous intuitions were right. Before Meiko played it, she prefaced it by saying that it was all untrue and just a way to get back at the girlfriend for ruining their friendship. Meiko spent a good part of her energy at the show on this lost friendship. It got me thinking about friendships with members of the opposite sex and how romantic relationships with people outside the friendship affect the friendships themselves.

From my experience when you are involved in a romantic relationship, any friendships you have with members of the opposite sex outside that romantic relationship put a real strain on the romantic relationship. The strain is caused by jealousy which is rooted in doubt, doubt that the person with the friend is fully devoted to the romantic relationship. When the person in the romantic relationship with the friend is confronted by the strain that s/he is causing, s/he has two choices: 1.) don’t change anything and let the strain take its course, likely ending the romantic relationship, or 2.) end any and all friendships with the opposite sex that are causing the strain and give the romantic relationship a real chance to thrive. Option 1 is the right choice if your friendships mean more to you than the person you’re romantically involved with. However, if you really care about the person you’re romantically involved with and you think that s/he might be the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, option 2 is the choice that makes sense. If you want to really give the romantic relationship a chance, you have to do what you can to relieve any stress on the relationship. Relationships are about compromising, meeting in the middle. It’s not always about what you want, but what “we” want.

Of course, standing on the outside as the friend, it can be very difficult to understand and deal with. It’s natural to feel like you’ve been betrayed or the girl/boyfriend has brainwashed your friend into ending your friendship, but the truth is that we, as friends, are angry and jealous that our friend has chosen them over us. This is the point when we usually complain to other friends about how this friend is “throwing away our friendship for someone that s/he hasn’t known for very long”, “that person just isn’t right for them”, and “her/his girl/boyfriend shouldn’t be jealous”. We try to gather support for our side of the argument, but what we fail realize at first, and sometimes second or third, is that romance sometimes requires taking risks. Of course our friends don’t know if this person is the one they will spend the rest of their lives with, and the relationships don’t always work out, but if they don’t take the risk, they will never know. It’s difficult to get to a point where we understand and accept it. Sometimes we have to experience it from the romantic side before we truly get it. It may not be how it should be, but from experience, my own and others, I can say that many times this is how it is. The only thing we can really do is to recognize it and support our friends in their decisions, even if we disagree with them. The world isn’t perfect and neither are the people in it, so while we can dream about an ideal society, we still have to live in the real world each day.